Establishing Positive Youth Development Approaches in Group Home Settings: Training Implementation and Evaluation

This article reports on a training program for group home supervisors that was designed to utilize positive youth development principles in work with youth transitioning from care to independent living. Over a period of 5 months, eight one-day training sessions took place across one state in the U.S. (Massachusetts) with a total of 186 group care staff in attendance. The evaluation consisted of three components: observation of participant feedback during training, training day post-test, and follow-up with participants 2–3 months after training. Implications of the data, particularly barriers to implementation of training programs, are discussed.     

'Sod off and find us a boffin': journalists and the social science conference

Social scientists perform a multi-functional role as researcher, teacher and expert. The academic conference provides an opportunity for all these roles to be engaged and as such is a political and social site where meaning is debated and new research born. The conference is also attractive to journalists as news fodder. This article considers the relationship between journalists and social scientific organizations in the context of a professional conference and seeks to explain the tensions that exist. It concludes that the two cultures of journalist and academic are in conflict where they converge.     

Constructing ethnicity in interaction

In the present study, I continue ongoing efforts to incorporate social constructionist viewpoints into sociolinguistics by demonstrating how two interlocutors use linguistic resources to project and shape ethnic (and other facets of) identity in unfolding talk. The interaction is a sociolinguistic interview from a large‐scale sociolinguistic study of a rural tri‐ethnic community in the southeastern U.S. I examine a range of features and types of features and in addition use both quantitative and qualitative methods. Further, I examine the linguistic usages of both the researcher (the interviewer) and the research subject. The analysis confirms that identity is dynamic and multifaceted and is very much a product of ongoing talk, although pre‐existing linguistic and social structures also come into play. In addition, the analysis demonstrates that identity is dialogic as well as dynamic and that researchers play a large role in shaping the linguistic usages of those they study.     

The Impact of Democracy on Well-being

Can governance impact directly on well-being? In this paper we examine subjective well-being using data for a cross section of countries from the World Values data set. We find that regional democratic satisfaction impacts on both individual happiness and life satisfaction. However, the impact is less evident for women, rich people and for those in rich countries. The fact that the governance variable analysis is based on regional differences in democratic satisfaction reminds us that governance and indeed happiness often differs within countries as well as between them. The use of regional satisfaction in this manner helps overcome endogeneity problems which would be present if we were to use individual democratic satisfaction. Other significant determinants of happiness include settlement size, marital status, income, unemployment and being part of a linguistic minority/majority grouping.     

"Not a Cigarette Paper Between Us": Integrated Inspection of Children's Services in England

Children's services in England are undergoing their most radical transformation since 1948 following the passage of the Children Act 2004. A key part of these changes is the legal requirement to have an Integrated Inspection Framework to assess the extent to which the new Children's Services Authorities have succeeded in meeting five key outcomes—being healthy, staying safe, enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution and achieving economic well‐being. To this end, up to ten national inspectorates have to coordinate their activities to a hitherto unparalleled extent. This article describes the nature and scale of the new remit and identifies a number of unresolved issues that could impede progress. It is argued that the policy has the hallmarks and accompanying limitations of a top–down exercise in policy formulation and implementation.     

Cultural Worldviews of Foster Parents

The stress of living with cardiac disease can affect a couple's marriage, transforming its character. This article examines the psychosocial impact of cardiovascular disease, delineating the ways in which the illness experience changes the marital relationship. In-depth, semistructured interviews were conducted with 23 spouses of patients (mean age 56) diagnosed with cardiovascular disease. Interviews were transcribed and subjected to content analysis. Two overarching dimensions emerged, depicting positive and negative effects on the marriage. Ongoing care for cardiac patients should include a focus on spousal caregivers, supporting both members of the couple as they jointly face challenges engendered by the illness.     

Dangerous Waters and Brave Space: A Critical Feminist Inquiry of Campus LGBTQ Centers

Grounded in critical feminisms, this study examines lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) centers at public universities in the context of the regulating discourse of homonormative whiteness. Homonormative whiteness refers to dominant norms that constitute the queer body as White and male, positioning static ideas of whiteness and masculinity as normative. Interviews, including the use of mental maps, were conducted with 12 primary leaders at six campus LGBTQ centers. Findings signal three primary functions of LGBTQ centers: safety, legitimacy, and advocacy. Each function is situated in relation to the degree to which these centers spatially or discursively reproduce, resist, and/or transform homonormative whiteness. Taken together, these findings suggest a dynamic and context-specific understanding of the ways and reasons LGBTQ center leaders will act or otherwise shape the space and discourse of the center in ways that collude with or transform systems of power and dominance. Implications for research and practice, as well as specific recommendations for critically conscious organizational practice, are offered.     

Rights Spaces: An Exploration of Feminist Approaches to Refugee Law

The exigent needs of refugee women necessitate feminist attempts to use legal mechanisms, however imperfect, to their benefit. However, the temptation to overestimate the importance of feminist gains in this realm must be avoided due to current constraints within the international refugee regime. Most forcibly displaced persons never reach the borders of western countries to claim asylum. Moreover, western 'refugee-receiving' countries are effectively closing their borders to migration claimed on strictly humanitarian grounds. Therefore, while feminists have successfully claimed a place for refugee women within protective rights mechanisms, they have been granted only a small portion of what is already extremely finite territory. Given this troubling state of affairs, I suggest that although proven avenues within refugee law must not be abandoned, the time is right for the sustained exploration of new and creative modes of engagement within refugee rights discourse. In this vein, the second half of the paper draws extensively upon the work of feminist legal theorist Jennifer Nedelsky to suggestively consider some possible alternatives for feminist theory and praxis.     

Defining a threshold of harm from gambling for population health surveillance research

The measurement of harm in the context of non-problem gambling has received little attention from researchers in the field. Using the combined data from six provincial gambling surveys conducted in Canada between 2001 and 2005 (N = 12,285), we compared how different thresholds of defining gambling-related harm impacts prevalence, the relationship with indicators of gambling intensity and the characteristics of non-pathological gamblers who report experiencing below threshold symptoms of problem gambling. Survey items defining harm were drawn from the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) of the Canadian Problem Gambling Index. Three definitions of harm – reporting one or more problem gambling symptoms, reporting two or more problem gambling symptoms and having a PGSI score ≥ 3 – demonstrated a strong relationship with indicators of gambling intensity, and reliably differentiated low-threshold and zero symptom problem gamblers in terms of gambling characteristics and other risk factors.