Responding to remediation and gatekeeping challenges in supervision

Thirty faculty in randomly selected Commission on Accreditation for Marriage and Family Therapy Education (COAMFTE) programs representing four geographical regions of the United States were asked to respond to a survey that included seven brief vignettes depicting gatekeeping and remediation challenges supervisors may face when working with therapists-in-training. Research participants were asked to select from among a range of 17 response options and were also asked to provide a rationale for the selection of their responses. The response rate for the mailed survey was 34%. Telephone interviews were conducted with three respondents who had provided especially detailed responses to the open-ended portions of the mailed survey and who also volunteered to be questioned regarding how supervision decisions are made. Results support the conclusion that COAMFTE faculty take their gatekeeping function seriously as they balance commitments to multiple stakeholders. When presented with hypothetical "bare-bones" vignettes, the supervisors in our study consistently recommended talking with the student in order to more fully understand the context of the student's performance problem before deciding how to proceed. Supervisors recommended a variety of remediation efforts, but reserved the most severe consequences, such as probation, dismissal, and filing an ethics complaint, for the vignette involving dishonesty and lack of personal integrity.     

Putting youth violent victimization into context: sex, race/ethnicity, and community differences among a multisite sample of youths

The increased risk of violent victimization for adolescents relative to other age groups has recently become a major public health concern. The current study uses data from a multisite study of eighth grade youths attending public schools in 11 cities to determine the extent and nature of youth general and serious violent victimization among both sexes and five racial/ethnic groups in 11 diverse communities. This study explores differences in sex, race/ethnicity, and community independently and explores interactions between sex and community and race/ethnicity and community. Our findings suggest important differences in victimization prevalence and individual victimization rates by sex and community of residence. Racial differences were found to be closely tied to community. Policy implications resulting from our findings are discussed.     

Kafkaesque Bureaucracies as Natural Breaching Experiments: Interactional Failures and the Search for Institutional Agency

In accord with scholars who have suggested extending the symbolic interactionist perspective to investigate interactions with macrolevel structures, we argue that symbolic interactionism provides valuable tools to understand how bureaucratic breakdowns are interpreted by individuals. In this article, we use the experience of interacting with a Kafkaesque bureaucracy as a natural breaching experiment in order to outline the subjective effects of large‐scale institutional failure. In particular, we look at homeowners' interpretations of a flawed program initiated by the Obama administration to stem the tide of foreclosures. We conclude that persistent interaction failures with the bank divisions charged with modifying mortgages led frustrated and confused homeowners to question the nature of the bureaucratic interaction. This produced a search for a blame‐worthy agency and revealed the ways that agency was conceptualized in this complex and obscure institutional setting.     

Ranked sparsity: a cogent regularization framework for selecting and estimating feature interactions and polynomials

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - We explore and illustrate the concept of ranked sparsity, a phenomenon that often occurs naturally in modeling applications when an expected disparity exists...