Decision‐making under uncertainty in child protection: Creating a just and learning culture

The argument is made for having a positive error culture in child protection to improve decision‐making and risk management. This requires organizations to accept that mistakes are likely and to treat them as opportunities for learning and improving. In contrast, in many organizations, a punitive reaction to errors leads to workers hiding them and developing a defensive approach to their practice with children and families. The safety management literature has shown how human error is generally not simply due to a “bad apple” but made more or less likely by the work context that helps or hinders good performance. Improving safety requires learning about the weaknesses in the organization that contribute to poor performance. To create a learning culture, people need to feel that when they talk about mistakes or weak practice, there will be a constructive response from their organization. One aspect of reducing the blame culture is to develop a shared understanding of how practice will be judged and how those appraising practice will avoid the hindsight bias. To facilitate a positive error culture, a set of risk principles are presented that offer a set of criteria by which practice should be appraised.     

Middle School Children's Perceptions on Welfare and Poverty: An Exploratory, Qualitative Study

This study was undertaken to determine how middle school children assess the effects of welfare reform on their daily lives. The study consisted of thirty interviews with children and their mothers recruited from a middle school in a large, metropolitan area. From the children's perspective, multiple jobs and evening/night hours interfered with the child-parent relationship. Other consequences included grades going down and not getting to school on time. All the children stated that mothers should work, but most children felt mothers should only work when their children are in school. Welfare and poverty were issues about which children were teased at school.     

中国文化下的禀性匹配模型

东西方文化维度的不同决定了组织中激励的方式各有差异。研究具有中国文化特质的“关系”与“面子”,理解“自我概念”“角色完成”“领导者的责任”“长期目标”“和谐关系”“满足感与平等感”等具体概念的东西方差异,建立修改后的综合分析模型,该模型表明虽然禀性匹配对于西方文化背景下的工作激励过程很重要,但在中国的领导者与员工之间,“关系”和“面子”更为重要。     

Mission Rivalry: Use and Preservation Conflicts in National Parks Policy

The purpose of this study is to explore the conflict between use and preservation in national parks policy as seen through the mission statement of the National Parks Service. The histories of the national parks were qualitatively coded in order to further explore this controversy, or what we have termed “mission rivalry”.     

Supporting foster and kinship carers to promote the mental health of children

The majority of children and young people removed from the care of their parents by the state of Victoria, Australia, reside in foster or kinship care. These children have experienced a broad range of adverse conditions and are up to 4 times more likely to experience problems with mental health than their mainstream peers. This paper draws on the perspectives of foster and kinship carers, describing the disconnection between their role as mental health advocates and their interest in early intervention in a field which is dominated by crisis and the historic marginalisation of foster and kinship carers. Thirty‐one foster and kinship carers across greater metropolitan Melbourne, Australia, contributed to this study through interviews and focus groups. Participants demonstrated a practical understanding of mental health and an ability to identify a range of conditions that have an adverse impact on the mental health of children and young people in their care. The paper concludes that there is a lack of systemic support and even a range of barriers that affect the capacity of foster and kinship carers to promote the mental health and well‐being of the children and young people in their care.     

The Good Grandparent: Perspectives of Young Adults

As life expectancy increases, the role of grandparent has increased in duration and is continually adapting as families change in structure, function and form. Across the past several decades, researchers have examined grandparenting styles, finding some consistency as well as the emergence of newer styles, and evidence that grandparenting styles are related to the age and gender of both the grandparents and the grandchildren. In this study, we investigated young adults’ perceptions of grandparenting quality. University Students (N?=?470) from a Midwestern university responded to an online survey that asked them to evaluate the quality of their grandparents grandparenting now and at two retrospective points in time, childhood and adolescence. We hypothesized that the grandparents' performance of multiple styles of their role would be related to grandparenting quality. In addition, we expected that preferred grandparental roles would vary in relation to grandchildren's gender. The results of regression analysis indicated that, although grandparenting quality tended to decline across the respondents' developmental stages, higher ratings at an earlier stage were related to higher ratings at the latter two stages. Further, grandsons preferred grandparents who performed as supporters and advisors, whereas granddaughters preferred grandparents who functioned as supporter and friend. Overall, grandmothers were likely to be the more significant grandparent. Continual research on both grandchildren and grandparents will be needed to chronicle the development of the grandparental role in changing times.     

Case Reading as a Practice and Training Intervention in Domestic Violence and Child Protection

This article explores the role of a case-reading tool, developed by the Safe and Together Institute, deployed across five Australian states, and which engaged workers from child protection (CP) and specialist domestic and family violence (DFV) services. It aimed to assess the extent to which DFV is identified in CP case files and to assess the quality of case practice from a DFV-informed perspective, as documented in the case file. The Safe and Together approach to child welfare provides a robust foundation upon which practitioners from statutory and nonstatutory backgrounds can work collaboratively and reach consensus about how best to ensure the safety and wellbeing of children living with DFV. The case reading is both a process of transformative working for practitioners and an analytical tool through which their agencies can affect systemic change.

IMPLICATIONS

• A national audit of 20 child protection case files using the Safe and Together case-reading process indicated that documented child protection practice sits at the lower end of a domestic and family violence-informed Continuum of Practice.

• Analysis indicates a need to improve: child protection engagement with fathers who use DFV, assessments of their parenting role and its impact on children and family functioning; identification of adult survivors’ protective capacities and their impact on children.

• Research in this area may have broader implications for other professions and government policy both nationally and internationally.

     

Life with and without heart disease among women and men over 50

This article uses a demographic approach and data from the Health and Retirement Survey, a nationally representative sample of the U.S. population, to investigate sex differences in the length of life lived with heart disease and after a heart attack for persons in the United States age 50 and older. On average, women live longer than men with heart disease. At age 50 women can expect to live 7.9 years and men 6.7 years with heart disease. The average woman experiences heart disease onset three years older and heart attacks 4.4 years older than men.     

Sundown Town to “Little Mexico”: Old‐timers and Newcomers in an American Small Town*

Abstract For more than a century, communities across the United States legally employed strategies to create and maintain racial divides. One particularly widespread and effective practice was that of “sundown towns,” which signaled to African Americans and others that they were not welcome within the city limits after dark. Though nearly 1,000 small towns, larger communities, and suburbs across the country may have engaged in these practices, until recently there has been little scholarship on the topic. Drawing from qualitative and quantitative sources, this article presents a case study of a midwestern rural community with a sundown history. Since 1990 large numbers of Mexican migrants have arrived there to work at the local meat‐processing plant, earning the town the nickname “Little Mexico.” The study identifies a substantial decline in Hispanic‐white residential segregation in the community between 1990 and 2000. We consider possible explanations for the increased spatial integration of Latino and white residents, including local housing characteristics and the weak enforcement of preexisting housing policies. We also describe the racialized history of this former sundown town and whether, paradoxically, its history of excluding nonwhites may have played a role in the spatial configurations of Latinos and non‐Hispanic whites in 2000. Scholars investigating the contemporary processes of Latino population growth in “new” destinations, both in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas, may want to explore the importance of sociohistorical considerations, particularly localities' racialized historical contexts before the arrival of Mexican and other Latino immigrants.     

Endless Pressure: Life on a Low Income in Austere Times

Much has been written that details the decline in living standards following the ‘credit crunch’ in the UK. It remains that we understand to a lesser degree the lived reality of poverty through the Great Recession and into the era of austerity. This article draws on testimonies of 62 participants from low income households conducted in three different areas of the UK during 2012–13 to document the pressures that this period brought to bear on these households. According to these testimonies, the experience of poverty intensified in key respects: first, participants reported feeling, more than ever before, that they were ‘existing, rather than living’ due to the meagre budgets they were forced to live on; second, the precarious nature of work and social security contributed to a sense of insecurity that was all pervasive in our participants' lives; third, due to the pejorative political rhetoric and media coverage of poverty, our participants felt that their lives were placed under increased scrutiny which deleteriously impacted their wider relationships and sense of belonging. Our analysis demonstrates the profound consequences for those living on low incomes of the continued shift to residual forms of state welfare and the increased reliance on the ‘Big Society’ as a means to deal with the pressures identified in this article.