What's up? What young teens and parents want from youth programs

Young teens and their parents clearly state that the "if you build it, they will come" approach, even if it is well built, is only part of the solution for engaging young people in learning opportunities. Interviews with youth and parents explore what they are doing and what they say they want in their nonschool hours. Opportunities that are flexible, less structured, and more leisure-based emerge as priorities. Although relatively content with the options currently available to them, when pressed, youth and families want more connections between people and age groups as well as more of the free-spirited, organic activities likely to emerge in neighborhoods and communities.     

Civic Engagement and Economic Opportunity Among Low-Income Individuals: An Asset-Based Approach

This study uses an asset-based approach to examine the ways social and human capital accessed through civic engagement may serve as a pathway toward economic opportunity for low-income individuals. Using a qualitative approach, this study draws on interviews with 31 low-income individuals who are civically engaged in a range of activities, including community organizing, giving money, informal engagement, religious participation, and volunteering. Findings contribute to the literature suggesting that study participants were often able to mobilize and deploy the social and human capital assets accumulated through different types of civic engagement into employment and education opportunities. However, embedded within social and human capital assets are also examples of the ways structural factors influenced whether study participants could transfer social and human capital assets acquired through civic engagement into economic opportunities.     

A Three-factor Model of Teasing: The Influence of Friendship, Gender, and Topic on Expected Emotional Reactions to Teasing during Early Adolescence

This research examined the effects of three factors (friendship, gender, and topic of teasing) on adolescents’ predicted emotional reactions to hypothetical teasing episodes regarding appearance and academic competence. The 8th graders (n =131) in Study 1 made predictions regarding the negative emotions and humor experienced when teasing occurred in a same‐sex dyad of either friends or classmates. The 6th and 8th graders (n=211) in Study 2 responded to hypothetical teasing interactions between same‐sex or cross‐sex dyads of friends or classmates. The results revealed that teasing by friends was interpreted with a more benevolent frame than that accorded to classmates. Overall, girls expected greater negative affect to result from the teasing than did the boys, especially when teasing was regarding weight. Although 8th graders reported more frequent teasing at school among same‐sex peers, there were few grade differences in the predicted emotional reactions. For all students, teasing about weight was predicted to generate the most negative affect and least humor. The results support the relevance of the three factors for understanding the interpretation of teasing.     

Casa de esperanza

Many nonprofit organizations struggle with the challenges of staying true to their mission in light of increasing reliance on public revenue streams. Casa de Esperanza, a mid‐size nonprofit in St. Paul, Minnesota, faces these tensions. Although it was founded to support Latinas who experience domestic violence, public funding streams mandated a different approach. This case explores the trade‐offs the organizational leaders must consider at a critical juncture in their development. Copyright © 2004 Jodi Sandfort.     

Social Workers’ Observations of the Needs of the Total Military Community

Researchers surveyed licensed social workers from 5 Mid-Atlantic states to explore their perspectives on the current state of mental health and service delivery for military service workers, families, and contractors. Social workers identified needs in the following areas: mental health, physical health and wellness, social and environmental, interpersonal and family, and military-specific needs. The majority of needs were most critical during the postdeployment stage. Education related to the observed needs was reported; social workers were most interested in learning about military culture and how to coordinate resources within the community to support the total military community. Suggestions for social work education and future research are discussed.     

Behavioral finance and retirement plan contributions: how participants behave, and prescriptive solutions

Behavioral research has made important, relevant contributions to retirement saving and investing. This work has cast a new light on participant behavior and its underpinnings: By and large, individuals are inert--with good intentions, poor follow-through, and bounded rationality. Loss aversion and decision-making biases often lead to unfortunate outcomes, including a poorly funded retirement. Further, behavioral economists have demonstrated that education and communication programs alone may not be effective in changing behavior. Instead, with their behavioral insights, they have offered new retirement plan design alternatives and empirically tested their efficacy in overcoming identified suboptimal behavior. These efforts are helping to pave a path of least resistance that should lead to greater retirement security. The Pension Protection Act of 2006 appears to support these alternatives by providing incentives to plan sponsors that implement automatic features such as automatic enrollment and deferral rate escalation. It also allows plan sponsors to choose more aggressive investment defaults. Perhaps implicit in this support is some advice to sponsors to accept participant behavior and to think more about changing their own by embracing automatic plan features.     

Experiences of internal and hybrid employee assistance program managers: Factors associated with successful,at-risk,and eliminated programs

Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) originated as workplace-focused programs delivered largely by peer employees. Over the past 25 years, the once standard internal EAP has largely been replaced by internal/external hybrid programs or outsourced EAP vendors. Many long-standing internal programs have been downsized or eliminated, along with their internal program manager positions. This qualitative study examined the organizational, leadership, and programmatic characteristics associated with the internal and internal/hybrid EAPs from the perspectives of EAP managers working in programs that have thrived and those that have depreciated. Twenty-four current and former internal or internal/hybrid EAP managers were interviewed using a semistructured interview schedule. Qualitative methods were used to identify patterns and themes within the data to describe the experience of internal and internal/hybrid EAP managers and the critical success and risk factors associated with their positions and programs. Five final themes, with 15 subthemes emerged from the data, suggesting that both individual and organizational characteristics of EAP internal and hybrid programs are important to the program’s sustainability. These findings offer insights regarding best practices and critical success factors to EAP professionals, EAP purchasers, and the EAP industry.     

Using implicit encouragement to increase narrative productivity in children: Preliminary evidence and legal implications

Abstract

Statements made by children in a range of legal settings can irrevocably impact their family structure, relationships, and living environment. Because these statements can fundamentally alter children’s futures, efforts have been made to identify methods to enhance children’s reports by increasing comprehensiveness, completeness, and accuracy. Interviewer support has broadly been considered a method of interest, but variations in what constitutes “support” have highlighted the need for greater specificity in documenting how different facets of supportive behaviors relate to children’s reporting tendencies. In this review, we describe work focused on the effects of interviewer support, on children’s memory completeness and accuracy. We then describe to a subset of interviewer behaviors that encourage elaboration in dyadic interactions: back-channeling and vocatives. We present preliminary evidence suggesting that these utterances, referred to as implicit encouragement, can increase the amount of detail provided without compromising accuracy. Implications for custody evaluations are discussed.     

Mindfulness,meditation, and breathing exercises: reduced anxiety for clients and self-care for social work interns

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to identify and describe a teaching tool that supports social work student success in the classroom and in field placement. The project introduced mindfulness, meditation, and breathing techniques to 2nd-year master of social work (MSW) students in a group classroom setting and engaged students as they applied those techniques in their internship settings with clients. Students were introduced to mindfulness, meditation, and breathing techniques through lecture, experimental exercises, video clips, and case studies and used the group setting to learn to use those tools to add trauma-informed mindfulness interventions to the clinical techniques they concurrently practiced in field placement. Students learned methods to incorporate those interventions into their psychotherapy/counseling sessions with clients and discovered that mindfulness-specific interventions also helped regulate their own autonomic nervous systems, contributing to decreased anxiety. Thus, mindfulness skills taught in social work programs have significant multidimensional benefits; engaging a group classroom setting to learn to utilize mindfulness, meditation and breathing techniques can reduce stress and anxiety for clients and promote adaptive self-care skills for MSW students.