Effect of COVID-19 on Household Food Insecurity and Poverty: Evidence from Ghana

Social Indicators Research - Following the outbreak of COVID-19 and its heavy toll on the global community and humanity, a fierce debate on the pandemic and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)...     

Adolescent Leisure Activities: Social Class,Sex and Ethnic Differences

It has been suggested that leisure is increasingly important to quality of life, and that patterns of awareness of and participation in leisure activities are established in adolescence. A study of 520 fifteen-year-olds mapped their awareness of leisure opportunities in school and community, explored patterns in the forms of leisure they see as possible for themselves, and examined differences in awareness associated with sex, social class and ethnicity. In all dimensions significant variations were associated with gender; in most cases these tended to diminish, however, with decreasing socioeconomic status. Variations on the basis of ethnicity were limited mainly to home activities.     

Realities and Constraints: Pathways For Female School Leavers

This article analyses the pathways open to female; leavers as they make the transition from school to work or to post-secondary education. Trends which have social significance are investigated in terms of participation rates, employment patterns, representation across areas in post-secondary education, and status attainment within employment. Four types of explanations for the sex-differentiated pathways found were explored: sex-role socialization, value orientations, the opportunity structure, and discriminatory practices. The significance of differential patterns is explored within the general context of equality of opportunity and the increasing impact of technological change.     

Structured or General Enrichment Programmes for Preschool Children?

The burgeoning interest in preschool education is not without its problems. Not least of these are issues relating to an educational philosophy to guide the types of programmes developed in preschools for different groups of children (especially those labelled ‘socio-culturally’ disadvantaged). In addition, there are problems of implementation connected with the financing of the preschool movement, and the provision of adequate numbers of professionally prepared staff. This article attempts to examine critically some of the key issues in enrichment programmes for preschool children, and subsequently to make some policy recommendations.     

24-month update on the impact of roundtables on permanency for youth in foster care

Although the number of children in foster care has decreased in recent years (U.S. DHHS, 2012), additional strategies are needed to help youth achieve legal permanency before they age out of foster care. One such strategy is the permanency roundtable, which convenes a team of professionals to facilitate the permanency planning process by identifying realistic solutions to permanency obstacles for youth. Nearly 500 youth went through the initial permanency roundtable process in Georgia in 2009. Just over half were male (57%) and over nine in ten (92%) were African American. At the start of the roundtables, the median age was 13, and the median length of stay in foster care was 52 months. Two years after their roundtable, 50% of the nearly 500 children had achieved legal permanency. Analyses, presented separately for three age groups (0–6, 7–12, and 13–18), examine outcomes and predictors of legal permanency. Recommendations, limitations, and areas for future research are discussed.     

A Rationale for Teaching Communication Skills to the Culturally Deprived

This paper presents a theoretical rationale for explaining the learning and achievement weaknesses noted in ‘culturally deprived’ children. Based on a theory of social competence which reveals schools as denying the validity of such children's experiences and ignoring the different competences they bring with them to the learning situation, the model suggests new teaching strategies which develop ‘first-order’ communication outputs as a prerequisite to ‘higher-order’ cognitive outputs. Research evidence of the applicability of the model is examined and an attempt to apply the teaching strategies in Australia is described.     

Reimagining the Northern Territory Intervention: Institutional and cultural interventions into the Anglo‐Australian imaginary

This paper draws on the example of the Northern Territory Intervention to examine the role of Australia's broader socio‐cultural context in maintaining racist policies concerning Indigenous self‐governance. Central to this paper is the claim that legislative, constitutional, and other structural reforms are limited on their own to prevent institutional practices of violence and exclusion that are bound up with popular ways of imagining Indigenous and non‐Indigenous identities. In light of the potential limitations of top‐down reforms to prevent the perpetuation of discriminatory policymaking in relation to Australia's First Peoples, this paper explores the value of bottom‐up initiatives that constructively engage the imaginative, affective, and reflective capacities of individuals to facilitate a ‘critical re‐imagining’ (The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations, Oxford University Press, 2013) of Indigenous Australians as social and political actors. Developing and supporting such initiatives, on this view, is integral to the wider task of promoting and protecting Indigenous rights, interests, and entitlements.