Disruptions,adjustments and hopes: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on child well-being in five Majority World Countries

Drawing on integrated data from focus groups and diary entries, we explored the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on child well-being for children from five Majority World Countries. We focus on the disruptions the pandemic caused, the adjustments made in response to these, and children's vision of a post-pandemic world. Underlying children's experiences of loss, boredom and concerns about educational progress, was an awareness of systemic inequalities that disadvantaged them or others in their community. Findings have implications on capturing children's voices through introspective and dialogical approaches that transcend cultures and for the development of preventive and responsive interventions during crises.     

Developing a Research Agenda on Resident-to-Resident Aggression: Recommendations From a Consensus Conference

This article provides an overview of the development of a research agenda on resident-to-resident aggression (RRA) in long-term care facilities by an expert panel of researchers and practitioners. A 1-day consensus-building workshop using a modified Delphi approach was held to gain consensus on nomenclature and an operational definition for RRA, to identify RRA research priorities, and to develop a roadmap for future research on these priorities. Among the six identified terms in the literature, RRA was selected. The top five priorities were: (a) developing/assessing RRA environmental interventions; (b) identification of the environmental factors triggering RRA; (c) incidence/prevalence of RRA; (d) developing/assessing staff RRA education interventions; and (e) identification of RRA perpetrator and victim characteristics. Given the significant harm RRA poses for long-term care residents, this meeting is an important milestone, as it is the first organized effort to mobilize knowledge on this under-studied topic at the research, clinical, and policy levels.     

Tracing Stigma in Long-Term Care Insurance in Israel: Stakeholders’ Views of Policy Implementation

A rapidly expanding number of baby boomers provide care to aging parents. This study examines associations between caregiver status and outcomes related to awareness and anticipation of future long-term care (LTC) needs using 2007 Connecticut Long-Term Care Needs Assessment survey data. Baby boomers who were adult child caregivers (n = 353) versus baby boomers who were not (n = 1242) were more likely to anticipate some future LTC needs and to have considered certain financing strategies. Although baby boomer adult child caregivers more readily anticipate some future LTC needs, they are not taking specific actions. It is important to address the need for public education directed toward those who are currently (or have recently completed) caring for aging parents.     

Prejudices,social competencies and political orientations in relation to schools’ hidden curriculum

In the framework of a one-and-a-half year long research and development project implemented by the Kurt Lewin Foundation, we studied the relationships between organizational culture and the hidden curriculum of schools, as well as how students’ knowledge, opinions, and attitudes are connected to active citizenship, democratic values, social and political issues, and questions related to minorities. We were interested to discover whether we could find any connections between school life, teaching competencies, teachers’ knowledge and students’ extreme right sentiments, and political attitudes. According to our hypothesis, students in a more democratic school should hold more democratic views, and should be more open towards minorities, demonstrating more support for human rights and the rule of law. Our research – focusing on graduating student cohorts, studying in secondary schools located in Eastern Hungary – only partly confirmed our hypothesis: the schools involved in the project influenced students’ knowledge, opinions, and attitudes regarding issues within schools. However, with respect to most questions, there was a limited relationship between school environment and student attitudes regarding social-political issues outside the schools. Our research also explored the underlying reasons behind the results and – connected to that – possible ways to ameliorate attitudes, from the school management level to educational policy-making.

A Kurt Lewin Alapítvány másféléves kutatási-fejlesztési programja során megvizsgáltuk, hogy milyen kapcsolat van az iskolák szervezeti kultúrája, rejtett tanterve és a diákok aktív állampolgársággal, demokratikus értékekkel, szociális és politikai kérdésekkel, valamint kisebbségekkel kapcsolatos tudása, vélekedése és attit?dje között. Arra voltunk kíváncsiak, hogy található-e kapcsolat az iskolai élet, a tanítás és a tanárok ismeretei, kompetenciái és attit?dje, valamint a diákok széls?jobboldalhoz kapcsolódó érzelmei és politikai attit?dje között. Hipotézisünk szerint a demokratikusabb iskolák diákjai maguk is inkább demokratikusak, nyitottabbak a kisebbségek felé, jobban támogatják az emberi jogokat és a jogállami kereteket. Kutatásunk, melyben kelet-magyarországi középiskolák végz?s diákjai vettek rész, csak részben igazolta feltevésünket: a programba bevont iskolák a diákok iskolán belüli életére vonatkozóan bírnak befolyásoló hatással a diákok tudására, véleményére és attit?djeire. Mindazonáltal a legtöbb kérdés esetében az iskola falain kívüli élet társadalmi-politikai ügyeit illet?en nincsenek jelent?s hatással. Kutatásunk annak is utána járt, hogy milyen magyarázatok találhatók az eredményekre és - ehhez kapcsolódóan - milyen fejlesztési lehet?ségek állnak rendelkezésre az iskolaigazgatási szintt?l egészen az oktatáspolitikai döntéshozásig. Jelen cikkünkben a diákok adott társadalmi-politikai kérdéseket illet? attit?djeire vonatkozó eredményeket és a releváns fejlesztési javaslatokat ismertetjük.     

Practitioners' views on elder mistreatment research priorities: recommendations from a Research-to-Practice Consensus conference

This article presents recommendations from expert practitioners and researchers regarding future directions for research on elder abuse prevention. Using the Research-to-Practice Consensus Workshop model, participants critiqued academic research on the prevention of elder mistreatment and identified practice-based suggestions for a research agenda on this topic. The practitioners' critique resulted in 10 key recommendations for future research that include the following priority areas: defining elder abuse, providing researchers with access to victims and abusers, determining the best approaches in treating abusers, exploiting existing data sets, identifying risk factors, understanding the impact of cultural factors, improving program evaluation, establishing how cognitive impairment affects legal investigations, promoting studies of financial and medical forensics, and improving professional reporting and training. It is hoped that these recommendations will help guide future research in such a way as to make it more applicable to community practice.     

Estrangement Between Mothers and Adult Children: The Role of Norms and Values

Relationships between mothers and their children are expected to be lifelong and rewarding for both members of the dyad. Because of the salience of these ties, they are likely to be disrupted only under conditions of extreme relational tension and dissatisfaction. In this work, the authors drew on theoretical arguments regarding societal norm violations and value similarity to examine the processes that lead to estrangement between mothers and adult children. To address this issue, they used quantitative and qualitative data on 2,013 mother–adult child dyads nested within 561 later life families, including 64 in which mothers reported being estranged from at least 1 of their children. Value dissimilarity was found to be a strong predictor of estrangement, whereas violation of serious societal norms was not. Qualitative data revealed that value dissimilarity created severe relational tension between mothers and adult children leading to estrangement.     

My Pride and Joy? Predicting Favoritism and Disfavoritism in Mother–Adult Child Relations

In this article, we compare predictors of mothers' differentiation among their adult children regarding emotional closeness, pride, conflict, and disappointment. We distinguish between predictors of relational (closeness, conflict) and evaluative (pride, disappointment) dimensions of favoritism and disfavoritism. Multilevel modeling using data collected from 381 older mothers regarding their relationships with 1,421 adult children indicated that adult children's similarity of values played the most prominent role in predicting mothers' favoritism and disfavoritism, followed by children's gender. Children's deviant behaviors in adulthood predicted both pride and disappointment but neither relational dimension. Contrary to expectations, the quantitative analysis indicated that children's normative adult achievements were poor predictors of both relational and evaluative dimensions of mothers' differentiation. Qualitative data shed additional light on mothers' evaluations by revealing that disappointment was shaped by children's achievements relative to their mothers' values and expectations, rather than by the achievement of specific societal, educational, career, and marital milestones.     

Political Participation and Cumulative Disadvantage: The Impact of Economic and Social Hardship on Young Citizens

In this article, we seek to provide the most comprehensive exploration to date of the effects of economic and social disadvantage on young citizens' voter turnout. We look at four overlapping domains of hardship—those rooted in (a) the family context, (b) the community context, (c) the school context, and (d) major events and life transitions. Our conceptual model of cumulative advantage/disadvantage identifies the different ways in which disadvantages can have cumulative effects on social outcomes generally and on civic participation in particular. Our framework also suggests how patterns of advantage and disadvantage may be mediated by social institutions. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey, we show that disadvantages rooted in the family have major impact on all groups of young citizens and that family disadvantage interacts with school disadvantage for whites. We also show that the effects of early parenthood, being arrested, and dropping out of school have differential effects depending on race. We also show that community colleges function as civic leveling institutions—especially for African American youth.