Chronic avoidance helps explain the relationship between severity of childhood sexual abuse and psychological distress in adulthood

Recent studies have found that chronic avoidance of unpleasant internal experiences (e.g., thoughts, emotions, memories) is a maladaptive means of affect regulation often adopted by women with a history of sexual victimization in childhood. The primary aim of this study was to replicate and extend previous findings suggesting that higher levels of experiential avoidance may account for the relationship between childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and psychological distress in adulthood. It was hypothesized that, in a sample of undergraduate females (n = 151), the relationship between severity of CSA (e.g., frequency, nature of victimization) and trauma-related psychological distress would be mediated by avoidance. Results supported this hypothesis. Findings are consistent with previous studies, and further suggest that the general tendency to avoid or escape from unpleasant internal experiences may be a specific factor that exacerbates psychological distress among women with a history of sexual victimization in childhood.     

First Episode Psychosis: A Magical Realist Guide Through Liminal Terrain

This paper presents a narrative of a client, ‘Eva’, who experienced what is termed by psychiatry a first episode psychosis. As a family and relationship counsellor practicing narrative therapy with its backdrop of post‐structuralism and curiosity of exploring new entry points for narratives of identity, I tentatively sought new ways to engage with Eva's story. My endeavour in meeting with ‘First Episode Psychosis’ is described through adopting a listening position from a reading of magical realist literature. This extends Michael White's political exploration of ethnographer Arnold van Gennep's liminal spaces (in the rites of passage metaphor) to understand units of experience, units of meaning, and the fluidity of identity in psychosis, which is contextualised as a response to events in the client's story.     

DEMOCRATIZING EDUCATION

This paper offers a strategy for teaching street children aged 13–18 to be professional youth workers via a six‐month post‐secondary college‐level program. There would be no literacy or academic prerequisites for entry to the program. During their involvement, the children would be given free room and board in the college student residential facilities; the cost being covered by international development organizations such as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). The model incorporates incentives provided to employers to hire these youth workers. A small contingent of the street children educated as youth workers would be retained as permanent, salaried members of the college faculty. This innovative pedagogy is thus a vehicle for social integration for these marginalized children, pulling them back from the fringes of society. In this model, the possibility for development of basic literacy skills is expected to arise efficaciously and naturally once the children are placed in a secure environment where their basic needs are met.     

Longitudinal test of a multiple domain model of adolescent condom use

A comprehensive multiple domain model (MDM) to understand condom use in adolescents was proposed and tested using structural equation modeling of data at three time points. The proposed model integrates social psychological theory, demographic and personality factors, social environment, and situational/contextual variables. Adolescents who were sexually active at time 2 (6 months after baseline) and time 3 (1 year after time 2) and completed surveys at all three time points were included in the analyses (N = 511). An iterative process of model testing resulted in a structural equation model that provided a good fit to the data (CFI = .92, RMSEA = .04). Models comparing gender and race as moderators also were calculated and supported the generalizability of the model. Results provide support for an MDM that goes beyond traditional social psychological models for a broader understanding of condom use in adolescents. Implications for further theory testing and safer sexual interventions are discussed.     

Posterior likelihood ratios for evaluation of forensic trace evidence given a two-level model on the data

In forensic science, in order to determine whether sets of traces are from the same source or not, it is widely advocated to evaluate evidential value of similarity of the traces by likelihood ratios (LRs). If traces are expressed by measurements following a two-level model with random effects and known variances, closed LR formulas are available given normality, or kernel density distributions, on the effects. For the known variances estimators are used though, which leads to uncertainty on the resulting LRs which is hard to quantify. The above is analyzed in an approach in which both effects and variances are random, following standard prior distributions on univariate data, leading to posterior LRs. For non-informative and conjugate priors, closed LR formulas are obtained that are interesting in structure and generalize a known result given fixed variance. A semi-conjugate prior on the model seems usable in many applications. It is described how to obtain credible intervals using Monte Carlo Markov Chain and regular simulation, and an example is described for comparison of XTC tablets based on MDMA content. In this way, uncertainty on LR estimation is expressed more clearly which makes the evidential value more transparent in a judicial context.     

Cristina Balboa: The Paradox of Scale: How NGOs Build,Maintain, and Lose Authority in Environmental Governance

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -