Planning for community: understanding diversity in resident experiences and expectations of social connections in a new urban fringe housing estate,Australia

Master-planned estates are a major source of new housing for growing cities. Much research finds these residential developments lack genuine social connections between residents despite marketing of ‘close-knit’ community. Selandra Rise is a new residential development on the urban fringe of Melbourne, Australia. The estate was planned with a focus on community infrastructure and resident well-being. The resident population was younger and more culturally diverse than most other master-planned community case studies. A longitudinal research design was used to explore resident understanding, experiences and needs relating to place-based community. Interviews were conducted with residents before moving to the estate and 9–18 months after moving. Some residents considered community as an amenity provided by the master-planned environment that did not require their social participation. Others aspired to make social connections with neighbours but had varying levels of success. Past experiences which contributed to aspirations for connecting with local community, and the ways that these aims were realised or hindered, are discussed. Understanding diverse resident expectations of community and insights from their lived experience are used to make recommendations for planning new neighbourhoods and designing community development programmes.     

“Last Night,I Did a Striptease for My Husband”

Representations in popular media at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first suggest that North American culture idealizes a kind of femininity constituted in erotic display while at the same time disavowing the parallel performance of that femininity in strip culture. This paper begins to consider why femininity is so insistently constituted on these terms, focusing in particular on women's advice media, self-help, and exercise programs of erotic dance as a domestic activity, and working to identify and understand the implications of that representation, for women who work as erotic dancers and for women who do not, with reference to the ways in which these two categories of femininity are constituted and maintained as separate categories through representation and to the effects of this separation for the labour of erotic dance and for the performance of femininity in the everyday. This paper undertakes to understand this complicated relationship and to determine what precisely is at stake in such representations, how to read them, and what they mean.     

A Theorem on Products of Random Variables, With Application to Regression

It is shown that the product of two independent random variables in the domain of attraction of the normal distribution is also in the domain of attraction of the normal distribution, while if the product is in the domain of attraction of the normal distribution and one of the variables has finite variance, the other is in the domain of attraction of the normal distribution. This result is applied to prove the asymptotic normality of the regression coefficient in a linear regression when the error variance is not necessarily finite.     

Clinical observations on interferences of early father absence in the achievement of femininity

In clinical work, we have observed that the loss of the father through divorce has a significant effect on the young girl's developing sense of feminity. This paper briefly reviews the research findings from sex-role development theory and psychoanalytic theory, and presents clinical discussions of latency aged girls whose parents divorced during their daughter's early and oedipal years. The most common defensive or coping patterns seen in these child patients during latency are identified, with clinical material presented to illustrate both the existence of these patterns and implications for treatment.     

A two-study investigation of item wording effects on leader–follower convergence in descriptions of the leader–member exchange (LMX) relationship

The leader–member exchange (LMX) theory of leadership focuses on the quality of relationships built between leaders and subordinates; LMX measures are designed to assess the quality of these relationships. Since the leader and subordinate are jointly embedded in the relationship, it is reasonable to assume that their ratings of their relationship will converge to some reasonable extent. However, leader–member convergence on the most widely used measures, the LMX-7 and SLMX-7 scales, has historically been low. To address this, we conduct two studies to investigate whether item wording and content might be a cause of poor LMX convergence. The obtained results support the conclusion that the wording and content of these measures are, in fact, introducing attributional and social desirability biases into the rating process and causing some of the poor LMX convergence that is commonly seen. Implications for extant and future LMX research are discussed.     

FACTORIAL ANALYSIS OF RECIDIVIST DATA

This paper presents a method of fitting factorial models to recidivism data consisting of the (possibly censored) time to ‘fail’ of individuals, in order to test for differences between groups. Here ‘failure’ means rearrest, reconviction or reincarceration, etc. A proportion P of the sample is assumed to be ‘susceptible’ to failure, i.e. to fail eventually, while the remaining 1-P are ‘immune’, and never fail. Thus failure may be described in two ways: by the probability P that an individual ever fails again (‘probability of recidivism’), and by the rate of failure Λ for the susceptibles. Related analyses have been proposed previously: this paper argues that a factorial approach, as opposed to regression approaches advocated previously, offers simplified analysis and interpretation of these kinds of data. The methods proposed, which are also applicable in medical statistics and reliability analyses, are demonstrated on data sets in which the factors are Parole Type (released to freedom or on parole), Age group (≤ 20 years, 20–40 years, > 40 years), and Marital Status. The outcome (failure) is a return to prison following first or second release.     

Telephone sessions in the treatment of a child during the therapist's absence because of threatened miscarriage

This paper concerns a specific experience during the treatment of an eleven year old boy when the therapeutic work was interrupted by the therapist's threatened miscarriage which confined her to bed. The patient had been traumatized at about the age of four when a younger sibling was born. Following the birth of the sibling the mother became depressed and was hospitalized for close to a year. Accordingly, the therapist's illness reevoked the patient's early trauma serving to fuse the original event with the interruption of the current treatment. This afforded an opportunity for demonstrating to the patient the persistent effects of the first trauma and the evidence of the unconscious fantasies deriving from it. Under the circumstances it was decided to continue the treatment by telephone.     

The essence of being connected: the lived experience of mothers with young children in newer residential areas

Parenthood is a significant life transition and a time of increased social support need. In newer residential areas, a lag in social infrastructure and family relocation can influence potential isolation of families with young children. This qualitative study explored the lived experiences of being connected to local communities for mothers with children aged 0–5 years. Family insights were obtained through in-depth interviews with 12 mothers who were primary caregivers, homeowners and living in newer residential areas in outer suburban Perth, Western Australia. For mothers with young children, being connected to the local community appears to be shaped from their past and present lived experience as well as future aspirations. Connectedness evolves and may develop more slowly in newer communities where social relationships and networks are often recently formed. ‘Interaction’, ‘knowing what's going on’ and ‘help is nearby if you need it’ were identified as the essential themes of connectedness for mothers and families in this study. Belonging was identified as an incidental theme as not all mothers who felt connected felt like they belonged. The findings provide insight for professionals and agencies working with families with young children as well as planners of newer residential areas.     

The Problem Is Fraud: Is the Solution Government Bounties?

Whistle‐blowing is the disclosure of organizational wrongdoing by internal or external parties either within the organization or publicly to outsiders who may be able to effect a positive change in action or activities. Organizations have been encouraged, especially since the passage in 2002 of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, to establish a culture in which whistle‐blowing is seen as a positive mechanism to correct misconduct rather than a negative attack. This article addresses (1) whistle‐blowing in relationship fraud and (2) governmental “bounties” paid to persons who are willing to provide knowledge of organizational transgressions. The fraud could occur through a variety of mechanisms but, regardless of the fraud's cause, the long‐run result will be harmful to the organization, its employees, its customers, and the society in which the organization operates. The question is whether bounties are the most effective means by which to reduce the harm created by fraud.