The ANZJFT: Snapshots From the History of an Evolving Journal

This article presents a series of ‘snapshots’ of the history of the journal now known as the ANZJFT (Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy). While a full, detailed history of the journal from its inception is beyond the scope of this paper, the authors offer glimpses of the journal at key points in its 25‐year history, and from these, readers can reconstruct some of the changes that have occurred, and the continuities in values and attitudes that the ANZJFT has attempted to preserve, throughout its existence. The authors comment, from their own recent experience, on particular dilemmas, which they have faced, and use their own data to update a bibliometric survey of the journal originally carried out by Davis and Lipson (1996).     

Police violence and judicial bias in the age of mass democracy: Glasgow, 1933–1935

Using the example of an impoverished, so-called ‘slum’ district in Glasgow, this article argues that poorer, working-class people were subjected to aggressive and frequently violent policing along with systematic hostility from the judiciary and the press in Britain during the 1930s. In Glasgow, attempts to challenge police methods and police officers’ courtroom testimonies met with a highly punitive response from the city’s legal establishment. Despite enjoying the rights of citizenship, working-class people found it difficult to find politicians to take up their complaints about police incivility and brutality, embodied in the conduct of a police constable known locally as ‘Hitler’. Those few politicians willing to do so, whether in Glasgow Corporation or in the House of Commons, found themselves marginalized as mainstream politicians of all parties refused to accept that the British police were capable of inflicting ‘terror’ on civilians. Press sympathy extended only to those working-class women jailed for perjury and separated from their children in the wake of trials of ‘rioters’ at Glasgow Sheriff Court. Human-interest coverage of the plight of their families gave working-class people a voice as victims of misfortune. They were not permitted to speak as victims of miscarriages of justice.     

A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting Reproducibility,Best Practices,and Theory‐Building

The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline‐specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and promoting replicability in infancy research: large‐scale, multi‐laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less‐biased estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be used for later study planning, and a series of best‐practices blueprints for future infancy research.     

Constructive and Destructive Marital Conflict,Parenting, and Children's School and Social Adjustment

This study addresses the links between destructive and constructive marital conflict and mothers' and fathers' parenting to understand associations with children's social and school adjustment. Multi‐method, longitudinal assessments of 235 mothers, fathers, and children (129 girls) were collected across kindergarten, first, and second grades (ages 5–7 at time 1; ages 7–9 at time 3). Whereas constructive marital conflict was related to both mothers' and fathers' warm parenting, destructive marital conflict was only linked to fathers' use of inconsistent discipline. In turn, both mothers' and fathers' use of psychological control was related to children's school adjustment, and mothers' warmth was related to children's social adjustment. Reciprocal links between constructs were also explored, supporting associations between destructive marital conflict and mothers' and fathers' inconsistent discipline. The merit of examining marital conflict and parenting as multidimensional constructs is discussed in relation to understanding the processes and pathways within families that affect children's functioning.     

Ethnic jokes and social change: The case of the Welsh

Ethnic minorities and immigrants in most societies tend to become the subject of jokes told by the dominant majority. The Welsh, England's nearest neighbouring people, an aboriginal remnant of the autochthonous inhabitants of Britain have been the subject of English jokes for well over 400 years. When under the Tudors, a dynasty with a Welsh name and a tinge of Welsh descent, Wales was merged with England both legally and politically by the Act of Union of 1536, the Welsh became England's oldest and most prominent ethnic minority and significant numbers of them migrated from their peripheral homeland to the more central areas of England.’ At this point jokes about the Welsh began to proliferate¹ based on a well‐defined comic stereotype, though one that was to change significantly over time. This article traces the history and assesses the character of these jokes     

‘So Much We Still Don't Know’: An Interview with Averil Earnshaw

I was independently told about Averil Earnshaw by three different people in the same six month period. Each of them had heard, or heard of, Averil's presentations on the theme of time-linked intergenerational repetitions, and knew of my own interest in repeating patterns in families. Averil very willingly granted me the interview that follows, and in the course of talking with her, I began to realise that Averil's was yet another story of someone who had formulated an original hypothesis based on repeated clinical observation, and had the courage to present it to gatherings of her peers, only to encounter skepticism, lack of interest, or charges of ‘idiosyncrasy’. Despite Averil's best efforts to show that her hypothesis was consistent with the direction of Freud's own thinking, the psychoanalytic movement had greeted it lukewarmly, and it seemed to me that perhaps it might be of more interest to readers of this Journal, since the older and more psychoanalytically-influenced generation of family therapists (e.g. Bowen, 1978; Skynner, 1976) recognised the general principle of repeating patterns across generations, although not the very particular temporal law that Averil has suggested. The Earnshaw hypothesis is simply enough stated: the emotional and intellectual crises of adults’ lives (including onset of mental and physical illnesses, creative break-throughs and creative blocks) are time-linked to major events in the lives of their same-sex parents at the same age. Often, though not always, says Averil, one experiences a crisis when one is the same age as one's same-sex parent was at the time of the birth of one's next sibling, or even when one is the same age as one's parent was at one's own birth. Averil's short bookTime Will Tell (1995) illustrates this hypothesis with some fifty brief case studies based on biographical data from the lives of famous individuals, as well as with a number of cases from her clinical practice, and examples from her own life. Averil herself recognises that her hypothesis needs to be rigorously tested on a wider sample, but to date, those who have criticised it as ‘merely anecdotal’ have not been willing to undertake such a study.