Foster care: The protection and training of carers' children

One of the risk factors in foster placement breakdown is the presence of the carers' own children. A project is described through which carers' children express their feelings and conflicts and present a demand for a review of foster care, to be seen as care by families, not only parents. Many children in care have a powerful psychological impact on their carers, and the impact on other children in the household is underestimated and poorly understood. There is a confusion of role between carers' children and children who are fostered—on the one hand, the former are peers, and on the other, considerable demands of patience and understanding are made on them. This understanding, and perhaps also fear of allegations, may make them prematurely adult and distort aspects of their own development. The need for further research into the direct experience of foster care is highlighted and a training model of preparation for carers and their children is described, based on direct work with adolescents.     

BALANCED CHANGE-OVER DESIGNS FOR AUTOCORRELATED OBSERVATIONS

Some aspects of design of change-over experiments with autocorrelated observations are investigated. Williams' designs (1949, 1950) are seen to be balanced for autocorrelated observations.     

The effects of nonverbal synchrony on message comprehension and persuasiveness

Previous research has not considered the effects of nonverbal synchronization by a speaker on message processing and acceptance by a listener. In this experiment, 178 subjects watched one of three versions of a message—high synchrony, minimal synchrony or dissynchrony—presented by one of two speakers. Receivers of the high synchrony message, which employed kinesic cues synchronized to the vocal/verbal stream, showed higher recall of the message and were more persuaded by it than receivers of the dissynchronous message, which had kinesic cues out of sync with the vocal/verbal stream. Results on three other dependent measures—credibility, distraction and counterarguing—were mixed but were generally consistent with the credibility-yielding and distraction-yielding formulations outlined.     

Wind farms in rural areas: How far do community benefits from wind farms represent a local economic development opportunity?

Although the large-scale deployment of renewable technologies can bring significant, localised economic and environmental changes, there has been remarkably little empirical investigation of the rural development implications. This paper seeks to redress this through an analysis of the economic development opportunities surrounding wind energy development in rural Wales. The paper concludes that the economic development outcomes to rural areas from wind generation projects to date have been questionable. Increasing the flow of conventional economic benefits to rural economies in terms of incomes and jobs is shown to be difficult because of the nature of the local supply side in remote areas. Partially as a consequence of this, developers of wind farms have come to routinely provide diverse forms of community benefits to ‘affected communities’, but these have yet to evolve into significant tools of economic development. In any case, the flows of revenues from community benefits are dwarfed, in quantitative terms, by the revenue streams that might be channelled to rural areas through a broader community ownership of wind energy projects. However, although a few local successes have been achieved, the scope for realising the returns from community ownership remains low in the Welsh case, with a series of impediments considered. We close the paper by suggesting means through which economic outputs might be improved.     

Parents' roles and question‐asking during pretend and real activities

All activities—real and pretend—provide children opportunities to learn new facts and skills, and parents are often facilitators. Yet little is known about whether and how parents' roles and interactions differ during pretend versus real activities. Here, we examine whether parents self‐report adopting different roles during pretend and real activities and whether we observe changes in their behavior, in particular in their question‐asking; either could impact the potential learning opportunities available to children. Thirty‐two parents engaged their 4‐year ‐olds in one pretend and one real activity (cleaning and snacking, counterbalanced). They self‐reported their roles, and speech was transcribed and coded. Parents regarded their role as a partner in fun during pretend and as a teacher or monitor during real activities. Across pretend and real contexts, they mostly asked information‐seeking questions, followed by rhetorical and pedagogical questions. They asked significantly more questions during pretend than real activities, particularly rhetorical questions. During real activities, parents' roles were not related to the number or types of questions they asked. However, during pretend, their roles were related to the number of rhetorical questions they asked: Monitors asked significantly fewer than teachers. Possible complementary benefits of each activity based on patterns of roles and questions are discussed.     

Drinking places: Young people and cultures of alcohol consumption in rural environments

This paper focuses on the contemporary British moral panic about young people and the consumption of alcohol in public space. Most of this public debate has focused on binge drinking in urban areas as a social problem. Here, we consider instead the role of alcohol in rural communities, and in particular alcohol consumption in domestic and informal spaces, as well as the formal drinking landscape of pubs and bars. Drawing on empirical work (including a survey, interviews and participant observation) in rural Cumbria, UK we explore the specific socio-spatial nature of local attitudes to alcohol consumption and its regulation. In doing so, we reflect on the nature of rural lifestyles, community spaces and intergenerational relations. The paper concludes by highlighting some of the implications for health promotion professionals of the generally positive attitude towards young people's drinking in the rural area where the research was conducted. It also draws attention to the need for academics to pay closer attention to the ways that moral panics about binge drinking are implicitly producing a monolithic image of alcohol consumption in urban areas that fails to acknowledge the socio-spatially differentiated nature of practices of alcohol consumption and regulation.     

Space‐oriented Children's Policy: Creating Child‐friendly Communities to Improve Children's Well‐being1

This paper reviews different perspectives of the changing nature of childhood, comparing these to state responses that seek to improve children's well‐being. Unlike previous generations of children, children today spend much of their time under cover and under the watchful eyes of adults. It is likely that this change has had a negative impact on children's well‐being. The paper explores possible styles of state intervention, arguing that a broader approach is needed in the UK than is currently being considered.     

A Hybrid Methodology for Modeling Risk of Adverse Events in Complex Health‐Care Settings

In spite of increased attention to quality and efforts to provide safe medical care, adverse events (AEs) are still frequent in clinical practice. Reports from various sources indicate that a substantial number of hospitalized patients suffer treatment‐caused injuries while in the hospital. While risk cannot be entirely eliminated from health‐care activities, an important goal is to develop effective and durable mitigation strategies to render the system “safer.” In order to do this, though, we must develop models that comprehensively and realistically characterize the risk. In the health‐care domain, this can be extremely challenging due to the wide variability in the way that health‐care processes and interventions are executed and also due to the dynamic nature of risk in this particular domain. In this study, we have developed a generic methodology for evaluating dynamic changes in AE risk in acute care hospitals as a function of organizational and nonorganizational factors, using a combination of modeling formalisms. First, a system dynamics (SD) framework is used to demonstrate how organizational‐level and policy‐level contributions to risk evolve over time, and how policies and decisions may affect the general system‐level contribution to AE risk. It also captures the feedback of organizational factors and decisions over time and the nonlinearities in these feedback effects. SD is a popular approach to understanding the behavior of complex social and economic systems. It is a simulation‐based, differential equation modeling tool that is widely used in situations where the formal model is complex and an analytical solution is very difficult to obtain. Second, a Bayesian belief network (BBN) framework is used to represent patient‐level factors and also physician‐level decisions and factors in the management of an individual patient, which contribute to the risk of hospital‐acquired AE. BBNs are networks of probabilities that can capture probabilistic relations between variables and contain historical information about their relationship, and are powerful tools for modeling causes and effects in many domains. The model is intended to support hospital decisions with regard to staffing, length of stay, and investments in safety, which evolve dynamically over time. The methodology has been applied in modeling the two types of common AEs: pressure ulcers and vascular‐catheter‐associated infection, and the models have been validated with eight years of clinical data and use of expert opinion.