The Effect of Severe Child Sexual Abuse and Disclosure on Mental Health during Adulthood

This study examined the relationship among severe child sexual abuse, disclosure, and mental health symptoms during adulthood. The sample consisted of 172 adults who were sexually abused in childhood. The multivariate model showed that respondents in their 30s and 40s who were abused by more than one abuser, who were injured by their abusers, who were abused by a biological relative, who told someone about the abuse when it occurred, and who did not discuss their abuse in depth within one year of the abuse had a greater number of mental health symptoms. Abuse severity and disclosure history should be assessed by professionals to identify clients who are at higher risk of mental health symptoms and to focus therapy.     

Reducing Prejudice Within Community-Based Organizations

ABSTRACT

Efforts to help community-based organizations (CBOs) develop interventions that reduce prejudice within the workplace and during service provision can be informed by social psychological prejudice reduction techniques, which tend to be successful in controlled laboratory settings but have limitations that inhibit utility in applied settings. Alternatively, the use of diversity training to reduce prejudice has increased within the for-profit sector, but is rarely applied to CBOs. This article discusses the overlap between the basic and applied literatures, and how community practitioners can use the information gained from both to support CBOs who encounter challenges with diversity.     

Cooperatives and Community Development: A Perspective on the Use of Cooperatives in Development

Community developers have long understood the importance of local participation in the events and processes that shape communities. Effective, democratic, and people-and-place-centered development strategies have the potential to achieve such participation. This article suggests that cooperatives can be an effective participatory strategy to bootstrap low-income people into the socio-economic mainstream. Woolcock and Narayan's (2000) social capital and poverty transition model is adapted to demonstrate the development potential of cooperative businesses. We hope to stimulate discussion among community development scholars and practitioners, policymakers, and the public on the potential of cooperative business as a community development strategy, particularly in resource limited communities.     

Stopping Child Bullying: Educators' Diverse Approaches for School Improvement

This original case-study research investigates educational professionals' answers to survey questions regarding how to eradicate child bullying. Twenty school professionals from two different schools—one school at the elementary level and the other school at the high school level—detailed their own particular bullying problems they see while serving in their own unique leadership capacity role and learning organization and what proactive initiatives they have modeled or participated in either individually or collectively to stop school bullying. Educational professionals were asked to detail any school-based policies already set in place or any procedural guidelines that will soon become implemented regarding stopping child bullying. Of the study results from participants, findings demonstrate that more critically intensive focus should be placed on school bullying by district wide anti-bully programs and being more frequently assessed. The survey is included at the end of this article (see Appendix).     

Understanding the antecedents of aggressive behavior in Persian Gulf War veterans within individual,interpersonal, and community contexts

ABSTRACT

The present study applies the social-ecological framework to examine multiple level correlates of aggressive behavior of veterans of the first Gulf War in 1991. Data were collected from the VA‘s Persian Gulf Family Support Programs (PGFSP), and the sample includes 1,519 veterans who participated in the PGFSP. At the individual level, the study finds that younger and female veterans and those with higher self-esteem were less likely to report displaying aggressive behavior. At the interpersonal level, veterans who displayed misconduct in the home are more likely to display aggressive behavior. At the community level, veterans who were in the Air Force was less likely, while those in the Marines were more likely to be aggressive. Implications for practice are discussed.     

The social science of biographical life‐writing: some methodological and ethical issues

The enterprise of biography inhabits a liminal world at the intersections of fact and fiction, (social) science and art, objective narrative and personal life story. While social scientists write, use and are the subjects of, biographies, there is relatively little discussion in the methodological literature as to the nature of biography as a form of life‐writing. This paper discusses some of the issues of method and of ethics and reflexivity encountered during the research and writing of a biography of the prominent social scientist Barbara Wootton (1897–1988). It considers questions of consent and responsibility, the ‘triangulation’ of data derived from different sources (e.g. interviews, archives, autobiographical accounts; letters, published work and references to, and about, it), the relationship between biographer and biographee, the legitimacy of links between the private and the public, and issues of ‘bias’ and interpretation in the production of biographical narrative.     

Desiring Relation: Mothers' and Children's Agency,Subjectivity, and Time—Commentary on Daphne de Marneffe's Maternal Desire

Daphne de Marneffe (2004 de Marneffe , D. ( 2004 ). Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life . New York : Little Brown and Company . [Google Scholar]) has enriched our theoretical understanding of maternal desire as fundamentally a desire to relate to or “be with” (p. xi) one's child. This view can enable consideration of children's subjectivity and agency through thinking about the intersections of mothers' and children's desires and subjectivities. Contemplating the meanings of maternal desire necessitates attending to multiple practices of mothering in a range of relational contexts. Finally, there is value in considering maternal presence and time in conjunction with children's sense of time and the present in order to imagine a relational time that both mothers and children construct.     

The Educational Expectations of South African Youth

Abstract

Educational expectations, in particular the relationship between race/ethnicity and educational expectations, have been understudied in less developed countries. We use data from the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS) to examine the educational expectations of black (African), coloured (mixed race), and white (European ancestry) youth in Cape Town, South Africa. The educational expectations of all three racial groups are high, although coloured youth are less likely than black and white youth to expect to complete postsecondary or postgraduate schooling. Supporting research on educational expectations in the United States and other more developed countries, our findings indicate that socioeconomic status and academic performance matter for educational expectations in South Africa, although their importance varies by racial group. In contrast to U.S. studies that have found effects of family composition for whites only, we found virtually no effects of family composition on the educational expectations of whites or nonwhites. Our findings suggest possible similarities and differences across social contexts in the processes shaping the educational expectations of youth from disadvantaged groups.