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.     

How do industry and country impact firm performance? A national and supranational analysis

We contribute to the literature of the country, industry and firm effects on performance by developing an autoregressive cross-classified mixed-effect linear model that examines heterogeneity in the profitability of corporations in emerging and developed economies, as well as corporations located in different supranational regions. To this purpose, we simultaneously decompose abnormal returns into permanent and transitory components at the firm, industry, country and industry–country levels. We find that firms in emerging countries have significantly higher rates of performance persistence and different sources of persistence compared to firms located in developed countries. These differences are also evident between different supranational regions and countries at different levels of institutional development.

     

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.     

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.     

Complex home care: challenges arising from the blurring of boundaries between family and professional care

Over the last 50 years, increasingly complex care (such as tracheostomy management, dialysis or enteral feeding) has shifted from hospital to home, with a concomitant rise in patient self-management and care given by family members. Recognition of the importance of the contribution of family care to the health system is also growing. This article reports the findings of a New Zealand study which explored the experiences of family carers who manage technical health procedures at home. It then draws attention to some broader issues raised by shifting complex care from professional management in hospital settings to family care at home, namely the ways in which complex home care blurs the boundaries between professional and family care (creating the ambiguous position of the expert carer) and questions of safety and responsibility in family care. We also discuss the implications for policy around family caregiving in New Zealand. Given the potential physical and mental health impacts of caring, it is time for renewed consideration of what family carers should be expected or allowed to manage and how the health system can support them in their important role.     

Racial/Ethnic Minority Vocational Research Trends: An 11‐Year Update

This study extends Flores et al.'s ( 2006 ) 36‐year analysis of racial/ethnic minority (REM) career research to identify recent trends in choice of topics and leading individual and institutional contributors. The authors identified 166 articles on REM career research published from 2005 to 2015 in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, The Career Development Quarterly, the Journal of Career Assessment, and the Journal of Career Development. Of these studies, 92% were empirical, with more than three quarters of these using quantitative rather than qualitative methodology. Most frequently, the empirical studies (n = 153) were based on samples of high school (30.7%) or undergraduate (34.6%) students. The authors discuss the implications of their findings and suggest ways to expand REM career research in the future.     

Seeking Liberation,Facing Marginalization: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders' Conditional Acceptance in Hip‐Hop Culture

Using interview data with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hip‐hop participants, we analyze how respondents construct hip‐hop as a liberating space where they can circumvent limiting racial and ethnic stereotypes. However, an intersectional lens reveals the constraints that hip‐hop's hypermasculinity places on AAPI men as well as the ethnosexualized expectations that AAPI women must negotiate. The experience of AAPI men and women in hip‐hop due to their unique position in racial and gender hierarchies interacts with stereotypical notions of AAPI people in wider society to relegate these participants to the margin rather than center of hip‐hop culture. Thus, we find respondents' constructions of hip‐hop less an indicator of hip‐hop culture's openness than a statement of how constricting the mainstream U.S. culture is for AAPI Americans, rendering hip‐hop's conditional acceptance preferable by comparison.