Comprehensive Family Services and customer satisfaction outcomes

Comprehensive Family Services (CFS) is a strengths-based and partnership-oriented approach to casework implemented through multiple initiatives. This study examines the relationship between the practice of CFS and satisfaction of clients, foster parents, and community partners. CFS indicators are paired with statewide customer satisfaction survey results. CFS practices are associated with significantly higher customer satisfaction that improved over time for all groups. Although causality cannot be determined, the relationship is consistent, robust, and meaningful.     

Rule learning transfer across linguistic and visual modalities in 7-month-old infants

Rule learning (RL) refers to infants’ ability to extract high-order, repetition-based rules from a sequence of elements and to generalize them to new items. RL has been demonstrated in both the auditory and the visual modality, but no studies have investigated infants’ transfer of learning across these two modalities, a process that is fundamental for the development of many complex cognitive skills. Using a visual habituation procedure within a cross-modal RL task, we tested 7-month-old infants’ transfer of learning both from speech to vision (auditory-visual—AV—condition) and from vision to speech (visual-auditory—VA—condition). Results showed a transfer of learning in the AV condition, but only for those infants who were able to efficiently extract the rule during the learning (habituation) phase. In contrast, in the VA condition infants provided no evidence of RL. Overall, this study indicates that 7-month-old infants can transfers high-order rules across modalities with an advantage for transferring from speech to vision, and that this ability is constrained by infants’ individual differences in the way they process the to-be-learned rules.     

Infants' Visual Recognition of Pincer Grip Emerges Between 9 and 12 Months of Age

The development of the ability to recognize the whole human body shape has long been investigated in infants, while less is known about their ability to recognize the shape of single body parts, and in particular their biomechanical constraints. This study aimed to explore whether 9‐ and 12‐month‐old infants have knowledge of a hand‐grasping movement (i.e., pincer grip), being able to recognize violations of the hand's anatomical constraints during the observation of that movement. Using a preferential looking paradigm, we showed that 12‐month‐olds discriminate between biomechanically possible and impossible pincer grips, preferring the former over the latter (Experiment 1). This capacity begins to emerge by 9 months of age, modulated by infants' own sensorimotor experience with pincer grip (Experiment 2). Our findings indicate that the ability to visually discriminate between pincer grasps differing in their biomechanical properties develops between 9 and 12 months of age, and that experience with self‐produced hand movements might help infants in building a representation of the hand that encompasses knowledge of the physical constraints of this body part.     

Understanding Professional Projects in Welfare Service Work: Revival of Old Professionalism?

The professional terms for occupations that provide welfare services are changing, and here the introduction of new public management in the Nordic countries since the 1990s is indicative of wider developments. The article explores professional projects in welfare service work from both conceptual and empirical perspectives. The aim is to produce a gender‐sensitive analysis of the professional projects at the lower levels of the occupational hierarchies in health care. The first part reviews the literature conceptualizing the societal and institutional embeddedness of professional projects. The institutional matrix of welfare states emerges as a key context in shaping the welfare service work performed by women‐dominated professional groups. The second part examines the case of Finland and suggests that recent reforms have created new inequalities in the system of professions, in which occupational groups in welfare service work are becoming marginalized. This signals a move away from ‘democratic professionalism’ towards a revival of ‘old professionalism’.     

New sources on Soviet perpetrators of mass repression: a research note

At the end of the Great Terror, Stalin reversed course and reined in the NKVD. Hundreds of NKVD interrogators and other officials were arrested and charged with “violations of socialist legality.” Punishments ranged from imprisonment in the Gulag to execution. This repression of the NKVD was the result of a combination of scapegoating and “clan” politics. The arrests and accompanying trials of these NKVD officers created an enormous paper trail of sources, strictly classified in the FSB archives in Moscow. Recently, however, the security police archives in Ukraine opened its doors to researchers. The result is access to a range of sources which allow researchers, for the first time, to explore in detail the topic of Soviet perpetrators, in this case, the Soviet security police during and in the aftermath of the Great Terror.     

Immigrants’ educational disadvantage: an examination across ten countries and three surveys

Studies on immigrants’ disadvantage focus predominantly on labour market perspectives. Immigrants’ poor education is a subject much less examined especially in a cross-national context. This paper examines differences in educational achievement between immigrants and natives across ten OECD countries. In English-speaking countries, immigrants fare best, while in Continental European countries they fare worse compared to natives. Whilst language skills seem to explain immigrants’ disadvantage in English-speaking countries, socioeconomic background and school segregation are further important determinants of immigrants’ gap in Continental Europe. Results presented are predominantly robust across three sources of achievement data: PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS.      

Patterns of Sexual Experience Among Urban Latino and African American Ninth Grade Students

This analysis assessed patterns of sexual experience, the order in which behaviors were initiated, and associated factors, among Latino and African American ninth grade students (average age 15.2) who self-administered audio-computer-assisted surveys on netbooks in classes at 10 Los Angeles–area public high schools. Lifetime experiences with vaginal and oral sex were most common (19% and 16%, respectively); fewer reported anal sex (6%). Of the 23% reporting any sex, 91% fell into four categories: 36% reporting both oral and vaginal sex; 23% vaginal only; 18% all three; and 13% oral only. Most sexually experienced students (88%) initiated with vaginal or oral sex (46% vaginal, 33% oral, 9% both same day). No dominant pathway of sexual onset emerged for those reporting all three types of sex. We found no evidence that oral or anal sex substituted for or delayed vaginal sex. Males, those with a current partner, and those reporting multiple partners were more likely than others to report all three sexual behaviors versus vaginal only (odds ratios [ORs] 2.0, 1.5, 3.0; p = .02, .06, < .01, respectively). Although vaginal intercourse dominated their early sexual behavior, one-fifth of sexually experienced students reported anal intercourse, highlighting the need for specific prevention messages surrounding this higher-risk behavior.     

The Political Construction of Elder Care Markets: Comparing Denmark,Finland and Italy

In Europe over the last two decades, marketization has become an important policy option in elder care. Comparative studies predominantly adopt an institutional perspective and analyze the politics and policies of marketization. This analysis takes a step back and examines the fundamental ideas underpinning the policies of marketization, using the ‘What's the problem?’ approach by Carol Bacchi. The central question is how the market was discursively framed as the solution to the perceived problems of three different systems of elder care, and how such processes are similar or different across the three countries. The analysis includes two extreme types of elder care systems, the Nordic public systems in Denmark and Finland, and the Southern European family‐based model in Italy. Empirically, the analysis offers interesting insights into processes of constructing and legitimating markets at the level of discourse; this occurs by defining specific problem representations, underlying assumptions and silences. In all three countries, marketization is presented as a solution which builds on rather than challenges dominant ideas of care. Conceptually, in addition to its institutions, it is crucial to understand the ideas behind the marketization of elder care. Ideas emerge as a key leverage for making policies and practices of marketization acceptable and which decision makers and other influential political/societal actors use in policy and public debates. The importance of ideas is further underlined by the fact that they do not necessarily relate to the institutions of elder care systems in a linear way.