A sea change on the island continent: frameworks for risk assessment,prevention and intervention in child health in Australia

This article overviews prevention and early intervention approaches focusing specifically on their relevance to the health of children and young people in Australia. Australian public health has a sound track record although concealed within the aggregate profile are a number of sub-populations with poorer health indicators. Recognition of this has increased efforts to improve the health of children and young people especially in exploring the impact of social environments within the communities where children are raised. This paper examines emerging research in this area drawing out key lessons and learning from Australian experience in the field of early intervention and prevention in community settings.     

Parents and patients: Members of an interdisciplinary team on an adolescent inpatient unit

In a six-year study on a locked psychiatric hospital unit for adolescents, first patients and then their families became integrated into the interdisciplinary treatment team. The results were universally beneficial. After initial resistance and some fine tuning of their skills, the staff became strong supporters of the program. Parents, no longer one down, developed a close working relationship with the therapists and milieu staff. Treatment planning and implementation was enriched by the interaction and dissension was minimized. Most important of all, the adolescents improved more rapidly and hospital stays were significantly shortened.     

Interfamily economic exchange: A function of culture or economics?

This study explores differences in inter-household exchange of goods and services in Anglo- and Mexican-American families controlling for income level and for ethnicity. The extent of such exchange, its perceived importance to the family's quality of life, satisfaction with the exchange, and the relation of persons in the exchange process are examined. Significant differences are found more often between higher income Anglo- and Mexican-Americans than between low-income families, both in the family providing goods and services for others and in the receipt of them. Higher income Mexican-American families are more likely than their Anglo- counterparts to exchange with relatives. Ethnic effects are more prevalent in higher income households than in low-income households. Economic effects are more predominant than ethnic effects.This study contributes to interregional Agricultural Experiment Station Research Project NC-128, Quality of Life as Influenced by Area of Residence. Cooperating states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Texas.Flora L. Williams' current research interests include income adequacy, financial problems, and indicators of change in economic well-being. She is an Associate Professor, Consumer Sciences and Retailing, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907.     

A model for short-term group therapy on a children's inpatient unit

The paper describes the group therapy model which has evolved over the past two years on the Child Psychiatry Inpatient Unit of North Carolina Memorial Hospital. It begins with a brief review of the literature concerning group therapy with latency-aged children. The setting and patient population are described. Vignettes from group sessions are used to illustrate techniques which have evolved to deal with this particular setting and population. These include a leadership style characterized by much clarification, modeling, and limit setting; extensive focus on beginning and terminating; clearly defined behavioral limits; the use of time out; and use of play materials requiring little skill or attention as anxiety binders as well as projective media; and observation and supervisory discussions open to all members of the treatment team. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potentials and limitations of group therapy in such a setting. The thesis is that this model is effective in diagnosing developmental levels, in developing interpersonal skills, in substituting verbalization for action, and in mastering separation anxieties, though the setting limits the extent to which controlled regression, transference, and group pressures can develop and be used to produce change.     

Internalized Other Interviewing in Relational Therapy: Three Discursive Approaches to Understanding its Use and Outcomes

For over 20 years, family therapist Karl Tomm has been engaging families and couples with a therapeutic intervention he calls Internalized Other Interviewing (IOI). The IOI (cf. Emmerson‐Whyte, 2010; Hurley, 2006) entails interviewing clients, from the personal experiences of partners and family members as an internalized other. The IOI is based on the idea that through dialogues over time, one can internalize a sense of one's conversational partner responsiveness in reliably anticipated ways. Anyone who has thought in a conversation with a family member or partner, “Oh there s/he goes again,” or anticipates next words before they leave the other's mouth, has a sense of what we are calling an internalized other. For Tomm, the internalized anticipations partners and family members may have offers entry points into new dialogues with therapeutic potential—particularly, when their actual dialogues get stuck in dispreferred patterns.     

Latino Faces,Corporate Ties: Latino Advocacy Organizations and Their Board Membership

Although they have increased exponentially since the 1960s, social scientists know little about ethnic advocacy organizations. These nonprofits are important bridges between underresourced communities and mainstream funding organizations and their directors are established ethnic leaders. Sociologists study interlocking directorates—or shared board membership—to understand how organizations fit together within broader social networks. Network concepts, particularly the theory of institutional isomorphism, suggest that organizations are likely to be similar to the extent they are connected and operate within a common organizational field. We apply this logic to Latino advocacy organizations to examine the underlying source of cohesion across this ethnic field. We ask whether the organizations are tied by interlocking directorates of ethnic elites who sit on their boards of directors or if board members' common affiliation with other elite institutions creates the structural conditions that facilitate potential ideological or behavioral similarity. A social network analysis of five prominent Latino advocacy organizations reveals support for both hypotheses: Latino board members are both embedded in ethnic‐based networks and entrenched within elite organizational webs. This suggests that ethnic elites who sit on the boards of Latino advocacy organizations are also corporate elites, selected for the social capital they bring to these nonprofits.     

Chika Watanabe: Becoming One: Religion,Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

The Rules of (Dis)engagement: Black Youth and Their Strategies for Navigating Police Contact

Prior work on youth–police relations examines young people's general perceptions of the police, their differential treatment by police officers, and officers' discretion in dealing with youth. Yet researchers have largely neglected the question of how young people attempt to shape these encounters. I address this critical gap, while also incorporating the experiences of “on track” youth and young women—two groups that are not exempt from police contact but traditionally ignored in the youth–police literature. Drawing on semistructured group and individual interviews with 19 black young people in New York City, I investigate the strategies they employ or subscribe to in navigating police contact. Three types of strategies emerged from my analysis: avoidance, management, and symbolic resistance. Avoidance strategies are marked by young people's attempts to preemptively steer clear of officers on the street. Management strategies are employed by young people during police encounters to limit risk or harm, while symbolic resistance is a subtle tactic used by some youth to preserve their dignity in these interactions. This study also considers the gender differences in respondents' approaches and offers new insights into how they assess their police interactions in an era of highly publicized incidents of police brutality.     

Playground Accessibility and Neighbourhood Social Interaction Among Parents

While the positive association between social interaction and access to green space is well accepted, little research has sought to understand the role of children??s playgrounds in facilitating social interaction within a community. Playgrounds are spaces designed to facilitate play and the interaction of children, but may also be important places of interaction between parents. In this paper we examine how access to playground spaces is related to social interaction between parents. We use two measures of accessibility (1) walking distance to the closest playground and (2) playground service area, a measure of the number of potential users of a playground based on population density. We use generalized estimating equations, an extension of generalized linear models, to control for the confounding effects of socio-economic status (income, education), neighbourhood dynamics (neighbourhood location, years in neighbourhood) and free time (daily outdoor activity, marital status, number of children) on the independent relationship between social interaction and access to playground spaces. Our results suggest that while accessibility to playgrounds is associated with social interaction among parents, the direction of the effect is opposite to existing literature on green space and social interaction; parents with low accessibility to playgrounds are more likely to interact socially with their neighbours than parents with high accessibility. Our results suggest a pattern of spatial behaviour in which the burden of poor access to some resources may actually encourage greater neighbourhood engagement. Future research studying the relationship between health and green space may benefit from studying the specific role of playground spaces.