Parenting and the Harry Potter stories: a social care perspective

This paper analyses the capacities of the parents in the Harry Potter stories, written by J. K. Rowling, from a social care perspective. It argues that there is a synergy between what the social sciences have discovered about ‘good enough parenting’ and the insights that can be gathered from entering the imaginative world of literature. This is illustrated by a discussion of the qualities of the parents and parent substitutes in the four books published between 1997 and 2000. It concludes that fictional experiences of childhood create empathy in the reader and enable us to confront the need for imagination as parents and practitioners, while the social sciences keep knowledge grounded and evidenced. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tolerating Force: A Contextual Analysis of the Meaning of Tolerance

This study employs college student survey data to examine the specific social conditions that influence tolerance of the use of force against children. The findings reveal that a certain ambivalence exists regarding parental force to control the behavior of children. Although the respondents are tolerant of parental force used to counteract disrespectful provocations by children, they are less tolerant of force used to counteract age-related misbehaviors. Implications of these findings are discussed in light of current and future social and family policy.     

Infants' Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size

What do novice word learners know about the sound of words? Word‐learning tasks suggest that young infants (14 months old) confuse similar‐sounding words, whereas mispronunciation detection tasks suggest that slightly older infants (18–24 months old) correctly distinguish similar words. Here we explore whether the difficulty at 14 months stems from infants' novice status as word learners or whether it is inherent in the task demands of learning new words. Results from 3 experiments support a developmental explanation. In Experiment 1, infants of 20 months learned to pair 2 phonetically similar words to 2 different objects under precisely the same conditions that infants of 14 months (Experiment 2) failed. In Experiment 3, infants of 17 months showed intermediate, but still successful, performance in the task. Vocabulary size predicted word‐learning performance, but only in the younger, less experienced word learners. The implications of these results for theories of word learning and lexical representation are discussed.     

Achieving the indeterminate: Accomplishing degrees of certainty in life and death situations

This paper explores technology's pivotal position at the intersection of control and uncertainty. It examines two areas: Intensive Care and a Labour Ward. Building on the work of Davis (1960), it argues that certainty and uncertainty are socially constructable and reconstructable. This is actively achieved by the deployment of strategies involving particular paradigms (the biomedical model) and artefacts (medical technology). Power lies in control over knowledge and the structures and practices which sustain it, including those embedded in advanced technology. The contribution of medical technology to the achievement of certainty in Intensive Care and end-game Obstetrics (the Labour Ward) is considered. Achieved certainty in medical situations is seen as: the structured masking of uncertainty by the application of medical iconography, artefacts and techniques to create the illusion of certainty. The accomplishment of uncertainty in Obstetrics (as a precursor to technological intervention) is also explored. The accomplishment of uncertainty in medical situations is seen as associated with the structured projection of uncertainty, involving using medical discourse rooted in the medical paradigm to exaggerate the generality of risk and the probability of pathology. It is argued that the highly structured and routinised settings of ICU and the labour Ward, not only aid control by the medical profession but diminish perceptions of uncertainty.     

Evaluating community initiatives

The increasing emphasis on using research evidence as a basis for policy and practice change has led the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to consider better methods of evaluation. A theories of change approach has been found to be particularly valuable.