Talking Prose All These Years: Agent‐Based Modeling as Process‐Oriented Analysis

This article considers the implications of an approach to computer simulation called agent‐based modeling for process‐oriented analysis. It argues that many theoretical and methodological debates found in the latter field can be effectively advanced by the former. The argument is presented and then extended using a ubiquitous agent‐based model proposed to improve understanding of ethnic residential segregation. The argument has three strands. The first is that theoretical and methodological debates are unlikely to progress unless they can be “cashed out” empirically. The second is that agent‐based modeling (and its distinctive methodology) has capabilities to do this that existing research methods lack and, in fact, that agent‐based models are a natural way to represent “social process” as apparently conceived by process‐oriented analysis. The third is that possibilities exist for productive synthesis between agent‐based modeling and process‐oriented analysis with the former clarifying, instantiating, and perhaps even testing notions of process developed by the latter.     

Parenting and the Harry Potter stories: a social care perspective

This paper analyses the capacities of the parents in the Harry Potter stories, written by J. K. Rowling, from a social care perspective. It argues that there is a synergy between what the social sciences have discovered about ‘good enough parenting’ and the insights that can be gathered from entering the imaginative world of literature. This is illustrated by a discussion of the qualities of the parents and parent substitutes in the four books published between 1997 and 2000. It concludes that fictional experiences of childhood create empathy in the reader and enable us to confront the need for imagination as parents and practitioners, while the social sciences keep knowledge grounded and evidenced. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tolerating Force: A Contextual Analysis of the Meaning of Tolerance

This study employs college student survey data to examine the specific social conditions that influence tolerance of the use of force against children. The findings reveal that a certain ambivalence exists regarding parental force to control the behavior of children. Although the respondents are tolerant of parental force used to counteract disrespectful provocations by children, they are less tolerant of force used to counteract age-related misbehaviors. Implications of these findings are discussed in light of current and future social and family policy.     

Campus attitudes toward alcohol and drugs in a deep southern university.

In our zeal to deal with alcohol and drug abuse, we may have a distorted picture of what the majority of college students actually think about alcohol and drug use. Students in this study done at a public university located in the Deep South report being generally intolerant of substance abuse.     

Every Dot has a Meaning

Family therapy in Australia has recently begun a conversation with the indigenous people of this country. Part of this dialogue has involved family therapists listening to the stories of violence and oppression perpetrated against the Aboriginal people under the name of “protection”. This article is part of the ongoing exchange between family therapists and Kooris documenting the suffering of “the stolen generation”. Here two young people removed from their families as small children and raised in the same Aboriginal children's home, speak personally through their art, of an agonising search for family and cultural identity.     

Household debt and financial assets: evidence from Germany, Great Britain and the USA

Summary.  We explore the determinants of debt, financial assets and net worth at the household level by using survey data for Germany, Great Britain and the USA. To identify which households are potentially vulnerable to adverse changes in the economic environment, we also explore the determinants of a range of measures of financial pressure: the probability that a household has negative net worth; the debt-to-income ratio; mortgage income gearing; the saving-to-income ratio. Our empirical findings suggest that the poorest and the youngest households are the most vulnerable to adverse changes in their financial circumstances.