The Effects of Children, Dual Earner Status, Sex Role Traditionalism, and Marital Structure on Marital Happiness Over Time

In this study, the link between marital happiness and the advent of children is demonstrated, accounting for dual earner status, sex role traditionalism, and marital structure. A subset of 1,275 respondents from a longitudinal data set (Marital Instability Over the Life Course: A Three Wave Panel Study, 1980–1988) whom remained married through the 3 waves was used to compare the level of marital happiness of respondents who added children between waves to those who did not. Although the addition of children negatively affected marital structure and thus indirectly lowered marital happiness, results showed children also had positive counterbalancing direct effects. Dual-earner status, income, and sex role nontraditionalism were shown to mitigate the negative effects of children on marital happiness.     

Real‐world scene perception in infants: What factors guide attention allocation?

The foci of visual attention were modeled as a function of perceptual salience, adult fixation locations, and attentional control mechanisms (measured in separate tasks) in infants (N = 45, 3‐ to 15‐month‐olds) as they viewed static real‐world scenes. After controlling for the center bias, the results showed that low‐level perceptual salience predicts where infants look. In addition, high‐level factors also played a role: Infants fixated parts of the scenes frequently fixated by adults and this effect was stronger for older than younger infants. In line with this finding, infant fixation durations were longer on regions more frequently fixated by adults, implying longer time taken to process the available information. Fixation durations decreased with age, and this decline interacted with orienting skills such that fixation durations decreased faster with age for infants with high orienting skills, relative to infants with low orienting skills. There was a further interaction between fixation durations and selective attention abilities: Infants with low selective attention skills showed a decrease in fixation durations with age, whereas infants with higher selective attention skills showed a slight increase in fixation durations with age. These findings imply that infants' visual processing of static real‐world stimuli develops in accord with attentional control.     

Kairos and practice wisdom in social work practice

Practice wisdom is a form of practical moral reasoning when social workers face the complexity and uncertainty encountered in practice. Following a literature review on practice wisdom in social work, its essential features are discussed, identifying a neglected element in the literature—the element of time. The element of time is found to be implicitly considered in models of social work practice but not in relation to practice wisdom. If the right action has to be taken in the right place, and at the right time, the concept of practice wisdom would be much impoverished if the element of time is not considered in its discussion. Hence, the concepts of kairos—qualitative time, and chronos—quantitative time, are discussed. The relevance and usefulness of kairos in social work practice are pointed out. Social workers need to work with ‘time within time’, be conscious of clients’ sense of time, know what to do as well as what not to do at the appropriate time. Finally, the inextricable link between time and space and the possible emergence of novelty and ingenuity are examined to bring out the creative dimension of practice wisdom.