Starting to assess anti-racist practice in the DipSW

This paper reports on a small study financed by CCETSW's Welsh Committee and commissioned by its Anti-Racism Sub-Committee. It concerns an attempt to help practice teachers in a sample of all-white or predominantly white placements to assess students' awareness of anti-racist practice in accordance with DipSW requirements through the use of assignments provided by the programme. The study evaluates this process through the responses of students and practice teachers and concludes that, with appropriate support, this approach can make a useful contribution to learning, assessment and consciousness raising.     

Depressed and Well Mothers' Emotion Interpretation Accuracy and the Quality of Mother—Infant Interaction

The inadequate parenting associated with mothers' depression may be related to mothers' problems in interpreting infants' emotional expressions. The relations between depressed and well mothers' accuracy at interpreting babies' facial expressions and the quality of the mothers' interactions with their infants were examined. In partial support of our hypotheses, depressed mothers' level of depressive symptoms was associated with less accuracy, especially regarding positive emotions. Contrary to expectations, depressed mothers did not differ from well mothers in terms of their emotion accuracy. Furthermore, depressed mothers' accuracy at interpreting infants' emotions was not significantly related to the quality of their interaction with their infants; in contrast, well mothers' accuracy for infants' negative emotions was associated with better interaction quality. These findings provide new information about depressed mothers' emotional interpretations and their parenting. The different pattern of findings for depressed and well mothers suggests that other mediating factors are important, which are discussed.     

Needs and resources in practice learning: Findings from the Welsh placement survey

A comprehensive survey of practice teaching in Wales, financed by CCETSW, was able to gather information about the need for practice teaching as perceived by course centres and the provision made by agencies. This shows deficiencies in the supply of certain kinds of placements, wide variations in agency provision, and a very uneven pattern of placement support, ranging from a relatively coherent management-led strategy in some agencies to an unsystematic and ‘ad hoc’ approach in others. Some of the problems are seen to arise from the way placement provision is planned and managed, and alternative approaches are identified.     

Caliper pair-matching on a continuous variable in case-control studies

The use of matched pairs has been criticized as being less efficient than estimators based on random samples. This paper compares the mean square error of an analysis of covariance estimator based on random samples with two estimators based on caliper matched pairs. The first of these is a simple mean difference estimator and the second a regression estimator suggested by Rubin (1973b). Under conditions which commonly occur in epidemiologic case-control studies, both of the matched pair estimators can have smaller mean square errors than analysis o f covariance estimator. When there is a weak relationship between the matching and response variate, the mean difference estimator has a lower mean square error than the regression estimator.