Helping Hands: Race,Neighborhood Context,and Reluctance in Providing Job‐Finding Assistance

In order to explain persistent racial inequality, researchers have posited that black Americans receive fewer job benefits from their social networks because of their reluctance to provide assistance to others who are looking for work. We test this idea on a national scale using geo‐coded data from the General Social Survey. Our results show that, on average, blacks offer more frequent job‐finding assistance to their friends than do whites. However, additional analyses reveal that race‐based job‐finding assistance is context dependent, as blacks living in areas characterized by concentrated black poverty have lower odds of helping others search for jobs than members of other races and in other community contexts.     

Risky Sexual Behaviors and Pregnancy Outcomes in Young Adulthood Following Substantiated Childhood Maltreatment: Findings From a Prospective Birth Cohort Study

Childhood maltreatment is associated with a range of adverse mental and physical health outcomes, including increased rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) later in life. However, the impact on risky sexual behaviors and pregnancy outcomes has not been adequately studied. This is particularly true for physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect. We examined associations between prospectively substantiated childhood maltreatment and reports of risky sexual behaviors by men and women, as well as selected pregnancy outcomes in women. We followed up 3,081 (45.7% female) participants from the Mater-University of Queensland Study of Pregnancy, a prospective Australian birth cohort study. Using logistic regression, we examined the association between substantiated childhood maltreatment from birth to 14 years, and self-reported risky sexual behaviors and youth pregnancy outcomes at the 21-year follow-up. In adjusted analyses, children who had experienced multiple childhood maltreatment exhibited more risky sexual behaviors than their nonmaltreated counterparts. In specific models, those exposed to each form of childhood maltreatment, independent of co-occurring forms of childhood maltreatment, had an increased likelihood of risky sexual behaviors, particularly an early sexual debut and, for women, youth pregnancy. Neglect was also associated with multiple sexual partners, and emotional abuse with higher rates of miscarriage. There was no difference between men and women in how different forms of childhood maltreatment predicted risky sexual behaviors in young adulthood. All forms of substantiated childhood maltreatment, including multiple substantiations, were associated with risky sexual behavior in both sexes as well as higher rates of youth pregnancy in women. Moreover, emotional abuse persistently predicted miscarriages in young adult women. Understanding the association between childhood maltreatment and risky sexual behaviors and youth pregnancy outcomes may help suggest preventive strategies.     

Maintaining the Gains: What Worked in the Year after Brief Family Therapy

Brief family therapy, including single session therapy, is widely used to provide a timely and responsive service for children with emotional and behavioural problems. However, there is surprisingly little information about how these children and families fare in the longer term. The brief family therapy program described here was directed toward children with problems of moderate severity. Child Behaviour Checklists (CBCL) were completed by parents before, three months after, and twelve months after therapy; 110 parents also participated in semi‐structured telephone interviews twelve months after therapy. Parents' CBCL ratings showed a significant decrease in children's problems after therapy, which were maintained over the subsequent year, although some children continued to experience difficulties. Parents generally found brief therapy a helpful experience. Ways to strengthen the preventive possibilities of brief therapy work will be identified at both a practical and conceptual level.     

Trade and the Gains from Diversity: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Consequences of Brexit

In this brief article I explain why the expectation amongst economists that Brexit means Britain will experience significant economic losses, thanks to the reversal of the gains from specialisation, is incorrect. The background assumptions regarding comparative advantage are false and cannot inform real-world situations. However, this is not the same as to suggest Britain as a post-Brexit country will follow successful trade policies.     

Radical/Critical Social Work with Young Offenders: Challenges and Possibilities

In the UK, particularly in England, youth crime is perceived as a serious social problem, which is always near the top of the political agenda. Since the early 1990s, ‘populist punitiveness’ (Bottoms, 1995), amounting to varying degrees of punishment and control, has been key for addressing the problem. This culminated in New Labour's flagship Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and thereafter increasing concern with anti-social behaviour. The Conservative-led coalition is continuing in this vein. It is a ‘get tough’ approach in which the role of social work has been sidelined. In this article, I argue that such an approach is counterproductive as evidenced by the riots of August 2011 in London and other major cities. Rather than notions of punishment and control being to the fore, attention should be paid to the social and economic conditions that shape young people's lives and behaviour. For social workers, this involves relationship building with young offenders and their families and this is where a radical/critical work practice comes in. It is an emancipatory practice, which resists the neoliberal present and has some vision of a more socially just and equal future world.     

Dis course is about pictures

This essay tells a tale of modern tourism, in which the tourist is seen as both alienated and culturally energized. The essay both addresses and uses photographs to explore the ironies of the tourist experience.     

Conference report: Sixth annual meeting of the international visual sociology association visual studies workshop,July 15, 16, 17, 1988

How does the visual construction process of news influence the resulting cultural images? In this study of Time magazine's creation of a 1990 documentary, “The Palestinians, A Long, Bloody Road to Nationhood,” I first look at possible meanings in the printed photographs, and then explore how Time's institutional processes of story conceptualization, photo assignment, editing, and layout each create parameters for meaning. The discussion shows how Time editors ultimately construct their product using visual affect as an assumed first level of meaning.     

The Formation and Manipulation of Collective Identity: A Framework for Analysis

This paper is concerned with how people involved in ‘local’ protest might come to see themselves as part of wider social groupings and even global forces of resistance. An ethnographic study of the No M11 Link Road Campaign in London examines participants' definitions of their collective identity boundaries at different stages of involvement. Cross-sectional material from the beginning and later in the campaign shows that there was a transformation in collective identity boundaries towards a more inclusive definition of ‘community’. Analysis of participants' accounts before and after involvement in the eviction of a tree suggests the role of conflict with the police in producing an oppositional definition of the collective identity, facilitating links to other groups in resistance to illegitimate authority. Finally, biographical material indicates the implications of transformed identity boundaries for co-action with wider social groups. It is argued that the same intra- and inter-group processes that determine how identity boundaries extend to include a broader community might account for how people come to see themselves as part of a global social movement.