The Core Competency Movement in Marriage and Family Therapy: Key Considerations From Other Disciplines

There is a growing movement to define competency within the field of marriage and family therapy (MFT), particularly with respect to the training of practitioners and the evaluation of clinical practice. Efforts to define competency, however, transcend the practice of MFT and much can be learned from the experiences of other disciplines. Professions such as education, law, and medicine have made strides toward addressing the complex issue of competency standards in their respective fields. This article describes some ways in which the issue of competency has been approached in other professions, as well as some common dilemmas posed by adopting a competency-based orientation, to shed light on the process of defining competency in MFT. Moreover, this article identifies some of the more useful conceptualizations, modes of pedagogy, and evaluative practices found in other professions.     

Two Dads: Gay Male Parenting and its Politicisation — A Cooperative Inquiry Action Research Study

Australian gay men have only recently become parents through surrogacy arrangements. They have had to overcome a discriminatory legal, social, political, cultural and financial environment. A cooperative inquiry action research group was formed, with seven two‐father families conceived via surrogacy, to explore their journey to parenthood and their consequent politicisation as gay fathers. This article reveals how that experience of the cooperative inquiry process strengthened their resolve to be intentionally ‘out’ in their communities to overcome discriminatory and conservative social attitudes. They embraced the political reality of their parenting and were stimulated to create improved support structures for themselves and future parents. This transformed the legal, social, political and cultural environment for their families.     

Discernment Counseling for “Mixed‐Agenda” Couples

This article describes discernment counseling, an approach to working with couples where one partner is leaning toward divorce and the other wants to preserve the relationship and work on it in couples therapy. These “mixed‐agenda” couples are common in clinical practice but have been neglected in the literature. The goal of discernment counseling is clarity and confidence regarding the next steps for the relationship, based on a deeper understanding of each partner's contributions. Sessions emphasize individual conversations with each partner. An analysis of 100 consecutive cases found that about half of the couples chose to start couples therapy in order to reconcile, with most of the rest choosing the divorce path. Longer term follow‐up information is also presented.     

Alternative sensitivity analyses for regression estimates of treatment effects to unobserved confounding in binary and survival data

Statistical Methods & Applications - Estimates of treatment effects in non-experimental studies are subject to bias owing to unobserved confounding. It is desirable to assess the sensitivity of...     

Crown width models for woody plant species growing in urban areas of the U.S.

Urban Ecosystems - Crown widths of woody plant species growing in urban areas are of considerable importance as an overall indicator of health and also serve as an important factor for assessing...     

MCEN: a method of simultaneous variable selection and clustering for high-dimensional multinomial regression

Statistics and Computing - Multinomial regression is often used to investigate the association between potential independent variables and multi-class nominal responses such as multiple disease...     

Does the Association between Religiosity and Substance Use Vary between Adolescence and Early Adulthood?

The present study examines whether the association between substance use and two dimensions of religiosity—institutional and personal—changes as individuals transition from adolescence to early adulthood. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult (Add) Health, logistic regression models with interaction terms were run to test the hypothesis that the association between an individual's religiosity and his or her level of substance use is stronger during early adulthood compared to adolescence. This hypothesis is based on the observation that the shared family environment largely explains the association between religiosity and substance use during adolescence, while individual‐level characteristics largely explain this association during early adulthood. Overall, my findings support the research hypothesis, but only for the association between institutional religiosity and stigmatized types of substance use (smoking and marijuana use). This study highlights the fact that studies exploring the association between religiosity and substance use should consider potential variation between life stages.