Using Distance Learning to Increase Literacy Among TANF Participants

Technology and Education for Career Heights (Project TECH) was designed to help Temporary Assistance to Needy Families participants enhance their literacy through distance learning as a means to promote job retention and career advancement. The evaluative research presented in this report was intended to gather information from the participants of Project TECH about their experience with distance learning training curriculum. The report describes Project TECH and what happens when participants who are low-income workers are given a computer, basic training software, Internet access, and training coupled with instruction form a instructor who met with them face to face weekly and provided daily online coaching and instruction. It highlights participants' experience with online instruction and the use of computers in their homes, and it concludes with lessons learned from the project. The information is useful for those wanting to design and develop a distance learning program to increase adult literacy for families that needs to comply with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families work requirements and other demands.     

Muslim Women's Challenges to Islamic Law The Case of Malaysia

The reform of Islam by women and especially the lessons this activism might contain for feminist praxis is a highly topical and important issue. This article outlines some of the lessons to be drawn from studying this area with a specific focus on the activism of some groups of Malaysian Muslim women aimed at the reform of Islam. Two different strategies for reform are explained and traced in their attempts to reform religious interpretation and the Islamic legal system, the Syar'iah. The aim of the article is to provoke dialogue over the relationship of Islam to women's rights, while highlighting the agency of Muslim women within an Islamic framework. Another aim is to contribute to the debate over what constitutes feminism and the need to subject the debate continuously to cross-cultural and international perspectives.     

Poverty and the American Family: A Decade in Review

Because of dramatic levels of economic volatility and massive changes in welfare policies, scholars in this decade worried anew about whether our official poverty measure, adopted in the 1960s, is adequate. Poverty's causes continued to be debated, with demographic factors often pitted against policy and maternal employment changes. Some scholars focused on events that trigger spirals into poverty or poverty exits. The literature on consequences of poverty featured new techniques for identifying underlying processes and mechanisms. Researchers also explored “neighborhood effects” and focused on poverty deconcentration efforts. Finally, scholars produced a voluminous literature on the efforts to reform welfare and their subsequent effects.     

Putting place on the menu: The negotiation of locality in UK food tourism,from production to consumption

This paper uses a case study of tourism in the Lake District and Exmoor to explore the relationship between ‘local food’ and sustainable rural tourism in the UK. Drawing on qualitative interviews with tourists, food producers and café, pub and restaurant owners, I use an approach based upon the commodity chain to trace the shifts in the discursive and material understandings of the ‘local’ that take place throughout the tourist food chain. These shifts are shown to occur in response to the need to negotiate the tensions between the ideals and the practicalities of food production and consumption which occur as a result of the relationships that exist throughout the food chain. Such conclusions are shown to be important for our understanding of the links between ‘local food’ and sustainable rural tourism because they indicate that we must attend to the values, as well as the practicalities, that drive the contemporary food sector at all stages of the food chain, from production to consumption.     

Capital as the lens that Bourdieu Pierres through: Public relations,social theory,and rhetoric

In this paper, I explore the limitations of Bourdieu’s “capital” with the help of Burke’s four master tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Both Bourdieu and Burke were concerned with theoretical reductionism. I claim that Bourdieu could not help but be reductive insofar as his metaphor of capital became the totalizing lens through which he understood society. First, I review Bourdieu’s forms of capital, noting how capital serves as the sine qua non of his theory of practice. Second, I situate Bourdieu within the PR literature. Third, I read Bourdieu’s “capital” through Burke’s (1941) four master tropes. Reading Bourdieu through Burke enables PR scholars to better understand the limitations in Bourdieu’s terminology, which leads to debunking, materialist reductionism, and relativism. I conclude with implications for future research adopting Bourdieusian and Burkean approaches to public relations.     

Best practices for online Canadian prenatal health promotion: A public health approach

Background

Prenatal health promotion provides information regarding pregnancy risks, protective behaviours and clinical and community resources. Typically, women obtain prenatal health information from health care providers, prenatal classes, peers/family, media and increasingly, Internet sites and mobile apps. Barriers to prenatal health promotion and related services include language, rural/remote location, citizenship and disability. Online public health platforms represent the capacity to reach underserved women and can be customised to address the needs of a heterogeneous population of pregnant women.

Parents of Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: A Meta-Synthesis,Part II

In 2011 6.4 million children in the United States ages four to 17 years had a diagnosis of ADHD. Quantitative studies have indicated that parenting stress for parents of children diagnosed with ADHD is high. The purpose of the current meta-synthesis was to conduct a comprehensive review of both the published and unpublished qualitative studies involving the experience of parents raising children diagnosed with ADHD. Searches in online scholarly databases yielded an initial 1217 hits, which were narrowed down to eighty studies that met the criteria. A “meta-ethnography” framework was used for the synthesis. Results of the first part of the analysis were reported in Corcoran et al. (2016) and had to do with the personal impact on parents. The themes in Part II have to do with the processes parents go through in accepting the diagnosis of ADHD and in deciding whether their children should take medication. Parents struggled to make sense of their child’s problems and came to terms with the diagnosis in a series of stages. Regarding medication use, parental attitudes varied greatly, with both costs and benefits noted. Though there was considerable ambivalence towards medication use, some parents reported relief after their child began using medication. Implications from this study are that providers should recognize the processes involved in making decisions about an ADHD diagnosis and the use of medication. Social workers should allow sensitive exploration of parents’ attributions and understanding of their children’s behavior and level of acceptance of the diagnosis. Keeping an ethical and critical stance toward the use of medication, social workers should also have full exploration with parents around the potential benefits and risks associated with the treatment of their children’s ADHD, taking into account parents’ preferences.     

Infant Preference for Natural Texture Statistics is Modulated by Contrast Polarity

Adult observers are sensitive to statistical regularities present in natural images. Developmentally, research has shown that children do not show sensitivity to these natural regularities until approximately 8–10 years of age. This finding is surprising given that even infants gradually encode a range of high‐level statistical regularities of their visual environment in the first year of life, We suggest that infants may in fact exhibit sensitivity to natural image statistics under circumstances where images of complex, natural textures, such as a photograph of rocks, are used as experimental stimuli and natural appearance is substantially manipulated. We tested this hypothesis by examining how infants' visual preference for real versus computer‐generated synthetic textures was modulated by contrast negation, which produces an image similar to a photographic negative. We observed that older infants' (9‐months of age) preferential looking behavior in this task was affected by contrast polarity, suggesting that the infant visual system is sensitive to deviations from natural texture appearance, including (1) discrepancies in appearance that differentiate natural and synthetic textures from one another and (2) the disruption of contrast polarity following negation. We discuss our results in the context of adult texture processing and the “perceptual narrowing” of visual recognition during the first year of life.     

Speaking Out: Youth Led Research as a Methodology Used with Homeless Youth

Participatory action research is well documented with marginalized groups, but less is known about participatory action research with homeless youth. The use of youth led research as a methodology was examined among a population of homeless youth. Peer researchers (n = 10) reported on their experience utilizing youth led research methodology. Results indicate that youth led research is a promising methodology for use among homeless youth. Participants reported that the approach positively impacted the quality and quantity of data that could be collected from participants. Further, peer researchers reported individual benefits of feeling that participating in the project mattered, that people listened to them and that they had a voice.     

Friends and family: regulation and relationships on the locked ward

This ethnographic project explored the lives of women with learning disabilities on three locked wards. Aspects of these women’s lives were regulated by the service; in particular, relationships with family outside the unit, and peer relationships inside the unit. The women in this study valued these relationships, but they were treated with ambivalence by the service. Success in future community integration and accessing community resources can be dependent on the nature and quality of relationships with others, and therefore services should acknowledge that service-users need to forge relationships of their own choosing.