Potential effects of antidepressant agents on the growth and development of children and adolescents

The regulatory bodies of both the United States and United Kingdom have issued cautionary statements about prescribing antidepressant medications to treat major depressive disorder (MDD) in children younger than age 18. Despite these cautions, antidepressant agents, particularly SSRIs and serotonin activators, are regularly used to treat MDD in this age group, and increasingly so in very young children. This article considers the possible effects of antidepressant agents on the growth and development of children younger than age 18 and provides recommendations for the use and careful monitoring of these medications, including screening for physiological effects, selfinjurious behavior, and suicidal ideation. Guidelines for use of antidepressant agents with these populations include incorporating medications into comprehensive, holistic treatment, assessing for onset of severe akathesia as a marker of increased risk for self-harm, and advocating for more clinical trials of these medications in different childhood age groupings.     

Measuring pathological gambling in children: The case of fruit machines in the U.K.

The alleged incidence of addiction to fruit machine gambling among children in the U.K. has highlighted the need for a measure to define and count pathological gambling in children. The DSM-IV criteria, which are being refined to diagnose pathological gambling in adults, was adapted for use with pre-adult gamblers. The resulting DSM-IV-J criteria were tested using a questionnaire survey on a sample of 467 schoolchildren aged between 11 and 16 years. Those children who were defined as probable pathological gamblers by the DSM-IV-J index were significantly more likely to be involved in behaviours hitherto associated with dependency, than were the control group. DSM-IV-J appears to be a major advance in the discrimination of pathological gambling in children.The author would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for funding this work through a Research Studentship Grant. The author would also like to thank Henry Lesieur Ph.D. and Mark Dickerson Ph.D. for their helpful comments in the design stage of this research.     

From Policy to Practice: The Implementation and Negotiation of Technologies in Everyday Child Welfare

A central element of the Every Child Matters reforms in England are measures which aim at improving information sharing. Amongst these are the children’s database and the Common Assessment Framework, both representing technological solutions to long‐standing concerns about information sharing in child welfare. This article reports some findings from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)‐funded study which examined their introduction and use in everyday professional practice. Substantial differences in policy implementation, access to and use of the technologies, draw attention to the importance of the localised and situated contexts into which these technologies are being introduced, raising serious questions about their future development as national standard systems.     

The family and the business

The aim of this paper was to explore the attitudes of owner-managers to the conflicting pressures of family and business. Five hundred and thirty-four owner-managers responded to a questionnaire that asked about their attitudes to a range of issues including, for example, succession and equity, children′s involvement in the business, and the extent to which family should expect income from the business. There was common agreement on some issues such as the fact that children should be allowed to choose whether to join the business, and that family and business affairs should be kept separate. Beyond this, there were disagreements with three clear groups, or clusters, of attitudes emerging. We called these the Family-Business Jugglers, Family Rules, and Family Out groups.     

Negotiating Informed Consent with Children in School‐Based Research: A Critical Review

The methods literature on research with children recognises the challenges of negotiating informed consent with this group. Special ‘child‐friendly’ techniques are advocated to overcome these challenges. We argue that, upon closer inspection, research with children foregrounds more fundamental problems with informed consent that are not easily resolved. Drawing from three ethical texts commonly consulted in our own research fields, we highlight problems of information, understanding, authority, capacity and voluntarity. We conclude that informed consent is more problematic than is generally admitted, and that researchers would benefit from more openly acknowledging its limitations.     

Empathy to action: Child and adolescent out‐group attitudes and prosocial behaviors in a setting of intergroup conflict

The paper explored how to promote constructive intergroup relations among children and young people in a context of protracted conflict. Across two studies, the Empathy–Attitudes–Action model was examined in middle childhood and adolescence. More specifically, we tested the relations among dispositional empathy, out‐group attitudes, and prosocial behaviors for youth born after the peace agreement in Northern Ireland. In one correlational (Study 1: N = 132; 6–11 years old: M = 8.42 years, SD = 1.23) and one longitudinal design (Study 2: N = 466; 14–15 years old), bootstrapped mediation analyses revealed that empathy was associated with more positive attitudes toward the conflict‐related out‐group, which in turn, was related to higher out‐group prosocial behaviors, both self‐report and concrete actions. Given that out‐group prosocial acts in a setting of intergroup conflict may serve as the antecedents for peacebuilding among children and adolescents, this study has intervention implications.     

CAF in the country: implementing the Common Assessment Framework in a rural area

This paper discusses aspects of the implementation of the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) in the UK, introduced under the Change for Children Programme and designed to facilitate early intervention and improve multi-agency working. The study area was rural in character and findings are compared with evaluation of early CAF implementation which focused primarily on urban areas. The study provided lessons for practice, many of which resonate particularly with rural problems identified in the international literature. There may be advantages in rural areas in ease of involvement of families in processes, in early awareness of practitioners of difficulties in families and in depth of relationships with families. These in turn may support early intervention. Disadvantages centre around resource issues, those of skills and confidence and lack of contact with and therefore distrust of other agencies.     

Tools of the Serials Trade

Abstract

Many university libraries are facing budget flat-lines or reductions. While finding ways to reduce or reallocate a libraries budget is not new, the planning processes within this article merit consideration, especially for small and medium-sized libraries. Librarians must build and maintain strong relationships with constituencies and be forthright in sharing information so that joint decisions can be made. Developing a strategic plan to address the budget shortfalls and having an effective communication plan are keys to the successful outcome of any budget reduction or reallocation process. This article details the strategies and implementation of one university library.