Triadic Interaction among Newly Acquainted 2-year-olds

Are children as young as 2 years old able to interact in groups of three? The study applied the family triad model first introduced by Parke, Power, and Gottman (1979 ) to the case of peer interaction. In Experiment 1 , the model was refined for use in studies of peer interaction and applied to an existing dataset of 16 triads of newly acquainted 24‐month‐olds. In Experiment 2 , the triadic coding system was further refined and applied to 12 single‐sex triads of newly acquainted 2‐year‐olds. The findings demonstrated that 2‐year‐olds are capable of triadic interaction although the predominant interaction pattern in triads is still dyadic. Contrary to past reports, triadic interaction was more likely to occur when the children were not in conflict. Both girls and boys were capable of triadic interaction.     

Book reviews

Nathan Glazer Ethnic Dilemmas Harvard, Harvard University Press. 1985

Giddens, Anthony The Constitution of Society, Berkeley, University of California, 1985, pp.XXXVII, 402. Notes, glossary, diagrams, bibliographic notes and index.

Jeremy Rifkin Declaration of a Heretic. Boston. London, Melbourne and Henley, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, pp.X,140.

Ted Benton The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism: Althusser and his Influence, New York, St.Martin's Press, 1984, pp. VII,259.

Raymond L. Garthoff Détente and Confrontation Washington, The Brookings Institution, 1985, pp.XVI,1126.

Joseph J. Collins The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. A Study in the Use of Force in Soviet Foreign Policy, Massachusetts/Toronto, D.C. Heath and Company/Lexington, 1986, pp. XV, 195.

Jan Shipps Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1985, pp.211.

Robert Jay Lifton Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners, New York, Basic Books, 1985, pp.478     

Evaluating the Quality of Social Work Supervision in UK Children’s Services: Comparing Self-Report and Independent Observations

Understanding how different forms of supervision support good social work practice and improve outcomes for people who use services is nearly impossible without reliable and valid evaluative measures. Yet the question of how best to evaluate the quality of supervision in different contexts is a complicated and as-yet-unsolved challenge. In this study, we observed 12 social work supervisors in a simulated supervision session offering support and guidance to an actor playing the part of an inexperienced social worker facing a casework-related crisis. A team of researchers analyzed these sessions using a customized skills-based coding framework. In addition, 19 social workers completed a questionnaire about their supervision experiences as provided by the same 12 supervisors. According to the coding framework, the supervisors demonstrated relatively modest skill levels, and we found low correlations among different skills. In contrast, according to the questionnaire data, supervisors had relatively high skill levels, and we found high correlations among different skills. The findings imply that although self-report remains the simplest way to evaluate supervision quality, other approaches are possible and may provide a different perspective. However, developing a reliable independent measure of supervision quality remains a noteworthy challenge.     

The challenge of creating ‘alternative’ images of ageing: Lessons from a project with older women

This article analyses two participatory projects designed to engage older women in the creation of new imagery of old age. While it was hoped that this imagery would offer an ‘alternative’ to mainstream depictions or indeed offer older women a presence amidst the much noted absence of images of older women, the brief left it open to the professional photographers recruited to the project and to the participants themselves to direct the representations. In recent years, critical gerontologists have repeatedly called for artistic challenges to conventional ways of imaging old age. By working with two groups of older women, the intention was that ‘ordinary’ older women (non-celebrity, non-artist) could be included in that challenge and imagery created which would show the lives of older women honestly. In the case of the two projects described here, professional photographers were enlisted to give visual form to the women's views on ageing and their lives as older women and deliver ‘exhibition quality’ images. Important factors in determining the types of images produced included the artistic style and preferences of the photographers and their respective ages, both of which are explored here. In-depth analysis of some of the images produced shows that while they did not succumb to the usual ‘heroes of ageing’/‘bodily decline’ binary (Featherstone & Hepworth, 2005), they did not escape other dualistic categorisations. The images can be broadly viewed as nostalgic/melancholic or humorously carnivalesque. This finding is evidence of how difficult it is to create ‘alternative’ images of older women which defy established modes of categorisation.     

Rhythmic Grouping Biases Constrain Infant Statistical Learning

Linguistic stress and sequential statistical cues to word boundaries interact during speech segmentation in infancy. However, little is known about how the different acoustic components of stress constrain statistical learning. The current studies were designed to investigate whether intensity and duration each function independently as cues to initial prominence (trochaic‐based hypothesis) or whether, as predicted by the Iambic‐Trochaic Law (ITL), intensity and duration have characteristic and separable effects on rhythmic grouping (ITL‐based hypothesis) in a statistical learning task. Infants were familiarized with an artificial language (Experiments 1 and 3) or a tone stream (Experiment 2) in which there was an alternation in either intensity or duration. In addition to potential acoustic cues, the familiarization sequences also contained statistical cues to word boundaries. In speech (Experiment 1) and nonspeech (Experiment 2) conditions, 9‐month‐old infants demonstrated discrimination patterns consistent with an ITL‐based hypothesis: intensity signaled initial prominence and duration signaled final prominence. The results of Experiment 3, in which 6.5‐month‐old infants were familiarized with the speech streams from Experiment 1, suggest that there is a developmental change in infants’ willingness to treat increased duration as a cue to word offsets in fluent speech. Infants’ perceptual systems interact with linguistic experience to constrain how infants learn from their auditory environment.     

The social adjustment of children of low intelligence: Part III 1

This article examines the dilemmas faced by undocumented immigrants within the criminal justice system vis-à-vis the immigrant detention center and the resulting implications for social work. It explores the new realities for undocumented immigrants in the United States, including an explanation of state policies that have led to the criminalization of immigrants. The criminal justice and homeland security responses to undocumented immigrants, including the trend toward the privatization of immigration detention centers are analyzed. Finally, the implications of these trends for social work practice are discussed.     

Transition from school for youths with a disability: issues and challenges

Australian research has demonstrated that students with a disability are more likely to remain out of the full‐time workforce. These research findings have been the catalyst for a call for a comprehensive career development and transition planning approach for all students with disabilities in schools as well as for employers to rethink the role of people with disabilities in the workforce. In the Australian context the transition from school for individuals with a disability is complicated by a disparate and fragmented group of service agencies providing a range of services, including employment, supported accommodation, recreation and leisure pursuits, as well as training and placement, along with, at times, a deep‐seated prejudice towards people with disabilities in the market place. This paper reviews a number of issues and challenges confronting individuals with a disability making the transition from school to the post‐school environment.