Measuring Infant‐Mother Attachment: Is the Strange Situation Enough?

The purpose of this study was to examine the validity of a new procedure for assessing infant-mother attachment. Sixty children (34 in child care) and their mothers were seen in the Strange Situation (SS) at 17 months and in a new attachment assessment, the California Attachment Procedure (CAP), which does not involve mother-child separations, at 18 months. Overall, children were more likely to be classified as secure in the CAP (83% vs. 67%), but this was particularly true for children with experience in routine nonmaternal care. Of the children in nonmaternal care who were insecure in the SS, 91% were secure in the CAP, whereas of the maternal-care children who were insecure in the SS, only 44% were secure in the CAP. Attachment security in the CAP was more highly correlated with observed maternal sensitivity than was attachment security in the SS, particularly for children in nonmaternal care.     

Simple inference in multinomial and ordered logit

This paper provides some simple methods of interpreting the coefficients in multinomial logit and ordered logit models. These methods are summarized in Propositions concerning the magnitudes, signs, and patterns of partial derivatives of the outcome probabilities with respect to the exogenousvariables. The paper also provides an empirical example illustrating the use of these Propositions.     

Adolescent Socialization in Rural Appalachia: The Perspectives of Teens,Parents, and Significant Adults

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the social networks of Appalachian adolescents to understand socialization strategies and goals. A total of 46 interviews were conducted with five families (mothers, fathers, and adolescents) and 11 socialization agents the families identified as exerting significant influence in the lives of the adolescents. Interviews were transcribed and then analyzed using principles of grounded theory. Five themes developed from the interviews: the importance of community to the socialization process, adult involvement and support, adolescent monitoring, teaching respect and responsibility, and adolescent autonomy. Results suggest the need for in-depth investigation of adolescent development within a variety of cultural and social contexts to more fully understand these processes.     

Interacting Socially With Human Hands at 24 Months of Age

This experiment explored whether or not 2‐year‐olds would engage in synchronic imitation with human hands. Sixty‐four 24‐month‐old infants participated. In a test of synchronic imitation, infants were given a toy while a model simultaneously performed novel actions on an identical toy. Infants were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 model conditions: a familiar person, an unfamiliar person, disembodied human hands, and disembodied robotic pincers. Infants were as likely to synchronically imitate disembodied hands as a person. Imitation of the pincers was significantly lower. This pattern suggests that 2‐year‐olds will engage socially with human hands in the absence of the rest of the body.     

Clinical social work and the family court: A new role in child sexual abuse cases

Clinical social workers encounter difficult treatment issues when working with children where there is a suspicion of child sexual abuse, or where there has been an indicated child protective services case but no family court action. This article outlines a new role for the clinical social worker to play in relationship to the family court system. The author argues that the involvement of the clinician in an assessment process developed to aid the court can aid in the protection of children and set the stage for effective intervention and treatment.Director, Center for Training and Research in Child Abuse and Family Violence.     

The cult of Champ Man: the culture and pleasures of Championship Manager/Football Manager gamers

This paper considers the popularity and social significance of the gaming series Championship Manager/Football Manager. Sport-related games continue to be one of the most popular forms of digital gaming, and the series has proved to be one of the most successful of all time. Drawing on 32 interviews with game players and developers of this series, this paper argues that this series has proved particularly popular due to its 'intertextual' links to the sport of football, which allows this game to be drawn on as a resource in conversations and social networks. In particular, this paper argues that aspects of gaming, such as performativity and control, extend and cross-cut with wider social formations. Hence, the author argues that it is crucial that considerations of digital games seek to locate these within wider social and cultural patterns.     

Characterizing Environmental Harm: Developments in an Approach to Strategic Risk Assessment and Risk Management

Environmental policymakers and regulators are often in the position of having to prioritize their actions across a diverse range of environmental pressures to secure environmental protection and improvements. Information on environmental issues to inform this type of strategic analysis can be disparate; it may be too voluminous or even absent. Data on a range of issues are rarely presented in a common format that allows easy analysis and comparison. Nevertheless, judgments are required on the significance of various environmental pressures and on the inherent uncertainties to inform strategic assessments such as “state of the environment” reports. How can decisionmakers go about this type of strategic and comparative risk analysis? In an attempt to provide practical tools for the analysis of environmental risks at a strategic level, the Environment Agency of England and Wales has conducted a program of developmental research on strategic risk assessment since 1996. The tools developed under this program use the concept of “environmental harm” as a common metric, viewed from technical, social, and economic perspectives, to analyze impacts from a range of environmental pressures. Critical to an informed debate on the relative importance of these perspectives is an understanding and analysis of the various characteristics of harm (spatial and temporal extent, reversibility, latency, etc.) and of the social response to actual or potential environmental harm from a range of hazards. Recent developments in our approach, described herein, allow a presentation of the analysis in a structured fashion so as to better inform risk‐management decisions.     

Services for troubled adolescents: exploring user variation

This paper outlines some of the main findings from an exploratory study of a sample of 257 adolescents living in children's homes, foster homes and residential special schools ‘for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties’ (‘EBD’). It focuses on the characteristics of service users, particularly contrasting the looked after and EBD groups. Though there are some similarities, there are also important differences between the populations in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, reasons for separation, legal status, family background and education. An attempt was made systematically to compare groups by creating a subsample of ‘difficult’ adolescents, based on involvement in anti‐social behaviour. Unexpectedly, this revealed that half of the teenagers were not ‘difficult’. Factors associated with being identified as ‘difficult’ were explored.