Vlogging on YouTube: the online,political engagement of young Canadians advocating for social change

Youth are often perceived as passive and disengaged from civic and political life. However, many researchers have countered such discourses of youth passivity and isolation, highlighting young people's active and interactive political engagement through less traditional outlets, especially online. In this article, we are influenced by a poststructural orientation to agency to identify themes across the social change-oriented YouTube channels of eighteen young Canadians. The themes we have identified counter a dominant focus on youth civic disengagement, political apathy, and isolation, instead highlighting the diverse political issues young Canadian vloggers address, the strategies they use, their multiple subjectivities, the interaction and support of their online community, and the relevance of inequality. We show how YouTube has become an important venue for the production and dissemination of youth perspectives.     

From concept to data: sleuthing social change-oriented youth voices on YouTube

The idea of youth voice has become commonplace in youth studies and advocacy, although its meaning is more often assumed than explicitly defined and critically analyzed. This article engages with the concept of youth voice through a discussion of how we designed and implemented a pilot study on social change-oriented videos produced and circulated by Canadian teens on YouTube. We discuss the challenges and issues we encountered while attempting to constitute our research sample of youth-produced videos. In our sleuthing process, we grappled with the limitations of online search engines for our research purposes, and as a result developed a purposeful, tactical and adaptive approach. Throughout this process, we found that technical and practical issues evoked ethical concerns regarding youth voice as well, which thus required constant decision-making. As we report on how we dealt with these issues, we contribute to ongoing discussions and debates on youth voice occurring at the intersection of critical youth studies, social media, and online research ethics.     

Socioeconomic hardship,uncertainty about the future,and adolescent mental wellbeing over a year during the COVID-19 pandemic

Socioeconomic vulnerabilities put adolescents at risk for mental wellbeing issues, also in times of a pandemic. In the present longitudinal online survey study, we explored changes in mental wellbeing (i.e., mood and life satisfaction) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, we examined how socioeconomic hardship in online home schooling predicted adolescents’ mental wellbeing 1 year later. Third, we tested whether this relation was mediated by feelings of uncertainty about the future. Fourth, we tested whether this relation was moderated (in terms of a protective factor) by self-efficacy. In total, 177 Dutch-speaking adolescents aged 10–18 years (M_age = 15.64, SD_age = 1.72, 79% females) participated in all three 6-month separated waves (T1 = May 2020, T2 = November 2020, and T3 = May 2021). Mood results demonstrated that feelings of vigor decreased between T1 and T2, and feelings of tension and depression increased between T1, T2, and T3. Socioeconomic hardship in online home schooling in the early phase of the pandemic was negatively associated with both baseline mental wellbeing and 1 year later. Socioeconomic hardship at T1 predicted higher feelings of future uncertainty at T2, and higher levels of future uncertainty were associated with lower feelings of vigor, and higher feelings of tension and depression at T3. However, we found no evidence for mediation or moderation effects. In conclusion, the present findings illustrate the complexity of disentangling the adverse effects of socioeconomic hardship on adolescent mental wellbeing.     

Hostile interpretation as a transdiagnostic factor for cooccurring anxiety in boys with aggressive behavior problems

Many children with aggressive behavior problems also suffer from anxiety. This cooccurrence may perhaps be explained by transdiagnostic factors. Identifying these factors seems crucial, as they may be important targets to treat these cooccurring problems effectively. This two-study paper investigates whether hostile interpretation of others’ intentions is a transdiagnostic factor for cooccurring aggression and anxiety problems, examining two samples of boys in middle childhood. We assessed boys’ aggression and anxiety using teacher-report in Study 1 (N = 84, M_age = 10.10), and parent-report in Study 2 (N = 115, M_age = 10.55). In both studies, we assessed hostile interpretation using vignettes describing ambiguous provocations by peers. Both studies revealed a strong association between aggression and anxiety problems, underscoring the necessity to examine factors that can explain this cooccurrence. However, in neither study was this association reduced when we added hostile interpretation to the model, suggesting that hostile interpretation did not function as a transdiagnostic factor in our samples. One possible explanation for these findings is that hostile interpretation predicts both aggression and anxiety problems, but in different children. We, therefore, encourage scholars to conduct more research to explain the high comorbidity of aggression and anxiety problems in children. Future research should also examine hostile interpretation as predictor or transdiagnostic factor for aggression and anxiety problems in more diverse population, including girls and other age groups.     

Personalized information and willingness to pay for non-financial risk prevention: An experiment

Journal of Risk and Uncertainty - When receiving personalized rather than population-based information, agents improve their knowledge about their probability of experiencing adverse events (e.g....     

Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark: Bringing Capitalism back into the ‘New’ History of Capitalism

A growing number of historians are self‐identifying as historians of capitalism, a new subfield within the discipline, and have produced research on interesting new questions that transcend the subfields of economic, business, social, cultural, and political history. Ironically, what is missing from the “new” history of capitalism is any serious engagement with the new subfield's central character—capitalism, which instead is simply assumed despite being a contested concept. The implications are not trivial and include making unfalsifiable claims, unwittingly implying that capitalism is totalizing, and reproducing rather than exposing ahistorical understandings of the concept.     

Nonparametric prediction of spatial multivariate data

This paper investigates a nonparametric spatial predictor of a stationary multidimensional spatial process observed over a rectangular domain. The proposed predictor depends on two kernels in order to control both the distance between observations and that between spatial locations. The uniform almost complete consistency and the asymptotic normality of the kernel predictor are obtained when the sample considered is an alpha-mixing sequence. Numerical studies were carried out in order to illustrate the behaviour of our methodology both for simulated data and for an environmental data set.     

ANZJFT Symposium: What are the Core Learnings of Family Therapy?

Five experienced Australian and New Zealand family therapists and trainers seek to answer the question: ‘What key concepts and core learnings should be part of any family therapy training course?’ They debate the usefulness of making ‘shopping lists’ of core concepts, the importance of considering trainers' and trainees' contexts in the formation of their values and perspectives, and the distinctive role of Family of Origin work in training, clarifying central themes. Three experienced trainers respond to the issues raised.     

A Philosophic Stance,Ethics and Therapy An Interview with Harlene Anderson

Harlene Anderson is director of the Houston Galveston Institute. With her late colleague Harry Goolishian she challenged family therapy theory, proposing that as therapists we consider theoretical metaphors based on language and social constructionism, and in effect has moved family therapy in a new direction. The physical and conversational context of interview was the Lofoten Islands, 300 km inside the Arctic circle, Far Northern Norway on the night after Mid Summer's Night, 24th June 1993. Tom Andersen was the host for several days to a gathering called Constructed Realities; Therapy Theory and Research. The aim of the gathering was to explore the concept of Knowledge in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, teaching and social work. The focus was to provide a bridge between the ‘practical’ and the ‘theoretical’ discourses around knowledge and the creation of the knowledge. There were eight main issues around which the conversations revolved — 1) Knowledge: One or Many? 2) Multiple Realities and the Therapeutic Process 3) Human Understanding 4) Language and the Construction of Self 5) Research Alternatives 6) Qualitative Research in Clinical Work 7) Feminist Issues in Theory and Research 8) Power, Ethics and Practice. Harlene Andersen has written extensively on many of these subjects taking a constructivist position and was central to the numerous conversations. She was also one of the prime movers in putting together such a challenging and multi-disciplinary conversation. In conjunction with Harry Goolishian, Harlene Andersen has proposed that what we call ‘problems' are created in language and are dissolved in language. Her interests are in the multiple realities that come to an intersection in a therapeutic conversation and how a therapist can engage with a client to open the possibility for the client to create and find some changes in his/her life. She takes the position that in order for a therapist to be helpful to his/her client, conversational space needs to be created that makes room for the exploration of the client's beliefs and realities. An essential element in this process of creating conversational space is the therapist taking a position of not knowing, of uncertainty, of exploring and making room for the client to talk about what is important for him/her to talk about and not for the therapist to lead from a position of knowing what is best for the client. Harlene Andersen is regarded as a leading theorist and clinician in the therapeutic community who is exploring the broad concept of therapy as a collaborative process at many levels. She is one of the major presenters at the forthcoming New Voices in Human Systems conference hosted by Lynn Hoffman in Northampton, Massachusetts in October 1994.     

Housing,Demographic Change and the Private Rental Sector

Housing policy and provision in Australia are primarily oriented towards meeting the needs of the traditional nuclear family household. Households who cannot afford to buy their own home and are not eligible for public housing have no alternative but to rent in the private sector. Many of these households are single headed, groups, unemployed or on low-incomes. However, even in the private rental sector family households are favoured by landlords and estate agents and gain access to the better standard accommodation. Flexible and innovative policies in the public sector are urgently needed to meet the housing needs of the growing number of non-nuclear family households.