Digital Commons Network^™

Onset Of Major Depressive Disorder Among Adolescents, John P. Hoffmann, Scott A. Baldwin, Felicia G. Cerbone

Faculty Publications

Objectives: To examine the association between parental affective disorders and psychoactive substance use disor- ders and the onset of major depressive disorder (MDD) among adolescents and young adults and to determine whether this association is affected by stressful life events, family cohesion, self-esteem, or gender. Method: Prospective cohort study of 804 adolescents, aged 11–17 years, and their parents who were followed for seven consecutive years. The sam- ple was drawn from the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. Parental diagnoses were based on Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R administered during study screening stage. Diagnoses of MDD and age of onset were based …

Marriage Moments: A New Approach To Strengthening Couples' Relationship Through The Transition To Parenthood, Tamara Gilliland

Theses and Dissertations

Strengthening marriages is important to the well-being of individuals, families and communities. The transition to parenthood brings with it particular risks and opportunities for marriage relationships, yet no interventions have been successful in accessing a large number of couples during this critical time prepare and strengthen them for the challenges of becoming parents. The healthcare system has an established education infrastructure (childbirth education) that interacts with a significant number of couples during the transition to parenthood and has become increasingly open to incorporating relationship strengthening efforts into existing programs. The Marriage Moments program was designed to access couples through this …

Am I My Neighbor's Keeper : Toward A Community-Based Model Of Local Violence, George F. Bills

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this exploratory concurrent mixed methods study is to better understand the community context of domestic batterer intervention systems (Gondolf, 2002) by converging demographic trends in crime and arrest, family income, and marriage and divorce rates with community status indicators and marital conflict themes. In the study, county-level Uniform Crime Reports data, US Census data, and Vital Statistics data will be used to analyze community differences in social context and patterns of domestic violence in Cabell County, WV and Lawrence County, OH. At the same time, the local domestic batterer intervention system in Cabell County, WV, will be …

A Place To Call Our Own: Research On Housing And Housing Support Needs Of Young Lone Parents In Tallaght, Liza Costello, Liz Kerrins

Reports

Research report commissioned by the Young Families Matter Consortium, 2003.

Young Children’S Close Relationships Outside The Family: Parental Ethnotheories In Four Communities In Norway, United States, Turkey, And Korea, Vibeke G. Aukrust, Carolyn Pope Edwards, Asiye Kumru, Lisa Knoche, Misuk Kim

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Parents, preschools, and schools in different cultures vary greatly in the extent to which children are encouraged to develop long-term relationships with people outside the family circle—peers and teachers. In contemporary societies, parents face complex choices as they bridge children’s transitions to a wider world. This exploratory cross-cultural study used a newly developed questionnaire, Parental Concerns for Preschool Children Survey, to assess parental beliefs, values, and judgments. The sample included 521 parents from four cities: Oslo, Norway; Lincoln (Nebraska), United States; Ankara, Turkey; Seoul, Korea. Strong cultural community differences were found in parental descriptions of their own child’s friendships and …

Sex Stereotypes: A Comparison Of Hispanic And Caucasian Mother's Expectations And Wishes, Ngoc Thuy Pham

Theses Digitization Project

In order to understand how children develop gender stereotypes, research needs to be conducted regarding parent's beliefs about gender differences and gender expectations. This is because while there may be other environmental factors involved, parents still have powerful influence on their children. Gender identification starts early. Children learn that this is the way males or females are supposed to behave. Parents may shape and influence a child's beliefs concerning feminine and masculine identities even from the very first moments of a child's life.

Invisible Lives: A Qualitative Study Of 61 Parents Receiving Child Protective Services (Summary Report), Sarah Maiter

Partnerships for Children and Families Project

Involvement with child protective services (CPS) may be expected to be a stressful experience for parents. Usually their involvement is involuntary, initiated because someone believes they are not caring adequately for their children: this tells them that the community, or someone in the community, does not approve of them as parents. As families who become involved with CPS tend to be economically deprived and socially marginalized, they may view agency intervention as one more signs that they are not accepted by their community; moreover it brings the fear of losing their children, perhaps forever. In this context, it is especially …

Siege And Response: Families’ Everyday Lives And Experiences With Children’S Residential Mental Health Services (Summary Report), Gary Cameron, Catherine De Boer, Karen Frensch, Gerald R. Adams

Partnerships for Children and Families Project

Our purpose in interviewing families who had a child placed in residential children’s mental health treatment was to provide insight into the lives and service experiences of these families as they struggle to care for their child and find appropriate services. As we endeavored to code, categorize, and make sense of the information shared with us by families several other more pointed purposes emerged as integral to our efforts. More specifically we became interested in understanding the functioning of children requiring residential mental health treatment before, during, and after treatment with the aim to comment on general patterns of change …

Mothers’ Everyday Realities And Child Placement Experiences (Summary Report), Nancy Colleen Freymond

Partnerships for Children and Families Project

Placing a child in substitute care is one of the most challenging aspects of child welfare work. In situations of apprehension, child welfare workers may be required to make quick decisions about child placement sometimes with very limited information. This paper is based on interviews with mothers whose children were placed in substitute care. Mothers’ daily lives, including the nature of adversity in their lives, will be discussed. Mothers’ response to adversity and how they are impacted both positively and negatively by child welfare interventions will also be explored. Their experiences of placement reveals there is a disconnection between the …

Marital Satisfaction Among Adult Children Of Divorce: The Connection To Poor Conflict Resolution Skills, Deanna Michelle Graham

Theses Digitization Project

The focus of this study is on marital satisfaction among adult children of divorce and how they address conflict in their marriage.

A Match Made In Heaven: How Singles And The Church Can Live Happily Ever After, Wendy Widder

Alumni Book Gallery

Singles and the church may seem to go together like a grilled steak at a vegetarian party but God has a radically different plan . . . one where everyone truly belongs in the family of God.

A Workplace Study Of Four Southern-Ontario Children’S Aid Societies (Summary Report), Cheryl Harvey, Deena Mandell, Carol A. Stalker, Karen Frensch

Partnerships for Children and Families Project

Children’s Aid Societies have experienced extensive change since the implementation of recent child welfare reforms in Ontario. Agencies are facing a number of challenges including recruiting and retaining staff, high workloads, extensive requirements for documentation and administration, and less time to serve families and children. This paper explores employee experiences as service providers in child welfare. A survey was distributed to employees of four Children’s Aid Societies and employees participated in a series of focus groups. The paper discusses how workplace experiences contribute to job satisfaction, to stress and burnout, and to staff turnover. Actions organizations can take to improve …

Effects Of Divorce On Adolescents : Interventions, Abigail C. Buchan

Graduate Research Papers

The family environment is a major contributor to the development and well-being of children and adolescents. The traditional definition for family is ever changing, and diversity in families is becoming more acknowledged and accepted. It is well known that currently more than half of all marriages end in divorce. It is necessary to understand the significant challenges and issues that young people of divorced families are faced with in order to facilitate positive change and resiliency in the counseling process. The author provides a historical overview of the divorce epidemic, the effects of divorce on youth, as well as implications …

Transformations: Theory And Practice In Early Education: Proceedings Of The Conference Held In University College Cork, Saturday, 5th April, 2003, Noirin Hayes, Margaret Kernan

Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Seniors Count Follow-Up Study, Nina M. Silverstein, Heather Connors, May Jawad

Gerontology Institute Publications

Seniors Count is an ongoing outreach initiative under the direction of Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino with the leadership and support of Joyce Williams, Boston's Commissioner on Affairs of the Elderly. The program's purpose is to "identify and reach out to those members of the city's elderly population who live in private housing arrangements and help provide them with the information and services they [may] need" (Boston Commission on Affairs of the Elderly, 2002). Since the program's inception in 1999, it has reached over 5,500 community-dwelling elders in the City of Boston (Boston Commission on Affairs of the Elderly, 2002). …

Evidence-Based Development Of Health And Family Planning Programs In Bangladesh And Ghana, James F. Phillips, Tanya C. Jones, Frank K. Nyonator, Shruti Ravikumar

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

This paper describes two initiatives that have used experimental studies to guide the development of community-based health and family planning programs. In Bangladesh and Ghana, factorial experiments were implemented in stages. An exploratory phase developed a service system for community-based health care; an experimental phase assessed the demographic impact of the system; a replication phase examined the transferability of the experimental program to a non-research setting; and a scaling-up phase facilitated the extension of the new system to the national health care program. All stages were guided by research, with questions, mechanisms, and outcomes shifting as the process developed. Large-scale …

Determinants Of Old-Age Mortality In Taiwan, Zachary Zimmer, Linda G. Martin, Hui-Sheng Lin

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

Relationships among socio-demographic characteristics, general assessments of health, and old-age mortality are well established in developed countries. There is also an increasing focus on the connection between early-life experiences and latelife health. This paper tests these and other associations using representative survey data from Taiwan on the population aged 60 and older in 1989, 1993, and 1996 that have been linked to data on deaths between 1989 and 1999 from a national death registry. The study also explores the possible influence of Taiwan’s Universal Health Insurance Program, instituted in 1995, and whether or not the survival of some groups of …

Estimating Mean Lifetime, John Bongaarts, Griffith Feeney

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

The life expectancy implied by current age-specific mortality rates is calculated with life table methods that are among the oldest and most fundamental tools of demography. We demonstrate that these conventional estimates of period life expectancy are affected by an undesirable “tempo effect.” The tempo effect is positive when the mean age at death is rising and negative when the mean age is declining. Estimates of the effect for females in three countries with high and rising life expectancy range from 1.6 years in the United States and Sweden to 2.4 years in France for the period 1980-95.

Completing The Fertility Transition In The Developing World: The Role Of Educational Differences And Fertility Preferences, John Bongaarts

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

This study summarizes patterns of educational differentials in wanted and unwanted fertility at different stages of the fertility transition based on data from DHS surveys in 57 less developed countries. As the transition proceeds, educational differentials in wanted fertility tend to decline and differentials in unwanted fertility tend to rise. An assessment of fertility patterns in more and less developed countries with low fertility concludes that these differentials are likely to remain substantial when less developed countries reach the end of their transitions. This finding implies that the educational composition of the population remains a key predictor of overall fertility …

The Ghana Community-Based Health Planning And Services Initiative: Fostering Evidence-Based Organizational Change And Development In A Resource-Constrained Setting, Frank K. Nyonator, John Koku Awoonor-Williams, James F. Phillips, Tanya C. Jones, Robert A. Miller

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

Research projects demonstrating ways to improve health services often fail to have an impact on what national health programs actually do. An approach to evidence-based policy development has been launched in Ghana that bridges the gap between research and program implementation. The Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) initiative employs strategies tested in the successful Navrongo experiment to guide national health reforms that mobilize volunteers, resources, and cultural institutions to support community-based primary health care. Over the 1999 to 2002 period, 100 out of the 110 districts in Ghana adopted a CHPS initiative. This paper reviews features of the initiative …

Primary Schooling In Sub-Saharan Africa: Recent Trends And Current Challenges, Cynthia B. Lloyd, Paul C. Hewett

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

At the dawn of the twenty-first century we estimate that more than 37 million young adolescents aged 10-14 in sub-Saharan Africa will not complete primary school. Our estimates are based on data from nationally representative Demographic and Health Surveys from 26 countries, collectively representing 83 percent of the sub-Saharan youth population. This number is nearly twice the entire population of children aged 10-14 in the United States, virtually all of whom will complete primary school. Reducing the number of uneducated African youth is a primary objective of the United Nations as laid out in the Millennium Development Goal for education, …

The Feasibility Of Computer-Assisted Survey Interviewing In Africa: Experience From Two Rural Districts In Kenya, Paul C. Hewett, Annabel Erulkar, Barbara Mensch

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

This paper explores the use of an audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (audio-CASI) methodology in a household survey of adolescents in two districts of Kenya. Computer software was developed as part of a research project comparing audio-CASI with traditional methods of interviewing about sensitive behaviors, including sexual initiation, risky sexual behavior, coerced sex, and drug and alcohol use. The paper describes the experience of carrying out a household-based study using computers and explores the technical challenges faced by the data collection teams. Few problems emerged with the computer hardware and software, despite the difficult interviewing conditions. The adolescent respondents easily adapted to …

Condom Use And Abstinence Among Unmarried Young People In Zimbabwe: Which Strategy, Whose Agenda?, Ravai Marindo, Steve Pearson, John B. Casterline

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

This paper compares the views about abstinence and condom use expressed by young people in Zimbabwe in focus-group discussions with the views underlying national policies and religious and traditional beliefs. Young people’s decisions to adopt one or the other of these risk-reduction strategies may not necessarily indicate genuine individual choices, but rather their deference to adults’ interests as they understand those interests. Policymakers and traditional and Christian leaders promote abstinence as the exclusive strategy for all young people, whereas nongovernmental organizations and the private sector promote condom use. Evidence from the focus-group discussions indicates that adolescents are aware of this …

Wage Work And Marriage: Perspectives Of Egyptian Working Women [Arabic], Sajeda Amin, Nagah Hassan Al Bassusi

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

This paper explores young working women’s perceptions of marriage and work in contemporary Egypt at a time when an increase in age at marriage was evident from national survey data. Data from two nationally representative labor surveys, the Labor Force Sample Survey of 1988 and the Egypt Labor Market Survey of 1998, show that working conditions and employment opportunities declined significantly for young women even as their educational attainment increased. Indepth interviews were conducted with young women working in a range of salaried jobs in three locations: a rural village in Mansoura, a periurban district near Cairo, and in the …

Population And Development: An Introductory View, Geoffrey Mcnicoll

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

A brief overview of the relationships between population change and economic development, written for readers unfamiliar with the subject. The paper touches on the scale and pace of world development, the economic consequences of population size and rate of growth, patterns of demographic transition, and the scope for policy measures aimed at speeding that transition.

Population And Development: An Introductory View [Arabic], Geoffrey Mcnicoll

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

A brief overview of the relationships between population change and economic development, written for readers unfamiliar with the subject. The paper touches on the scale and pace of world development, the economic consequences of population size and rate of growth, patterns of demographic transition, and the scope for policy measures aimed at speeding that transition.

Surviving Against The Odds: Families’ Journeys Off Welfare And Out Of Homelessness, Donna H. Friedman, Tatjana Meschede, Michelle Hayes

Center for Social Policy Publications

Homeless families face complex challenges when making the transition from welfare to the workforce. By focusing on the experiences of homeless families participating in a Boston-based welfare-to-work program, the multimethod, longitudinal study described in this article explored factors contributing to more successful transitions as well as barriers faced by families having a harder time making the transition.

Nearly 90 percent of the families that were studied left a shelter with a housing subsidy and retained it 6 to 12 months later. Successful employment outcomes after exiting a shelter were more evident for families whose head of household was older, two-parent …

Retirement And High Level Human Capital, Irving Gershenberg

Gerontology Institute Publications

Given that demographic trends in economically advanced industrial countries such as our own continue to shift toward increasingly older, formally retired populations, we need to find ways to keep more of this older retired population productive. Economists and others differ in their estimation regarding the ability and/or willingness on part of the retired to retain, let alone utilize the know-how, the human capital accumulated prior to retirement. This is as true for those who have spent their work life engaged in producing and communicating new ideas and synthesizing and diffusing what is known, those who have accumulated what I term …

Characteristics Of Homeless Individuals Accessing Massachusetts Emergency Shelters, 1999-2001, Tatjana Meschede, Michelle Kahan, Michelle Hayes, Donna Friedman

Center for Social Policy Publications

The Center for Social Policy (CSP) at the McCormack Institute, University of Massachusetts Boston oversees the Connection, Service, and Partnership through Technology (CSPTech) project. CSPTech operates a homeless management information system being implemented throughout the Commonwealth. Founded in 1995, this project is a networked computerized record-keeping system that allows homeless service providers across Massachusetts to collect uniform client information over time. This information is aggregated in a database used by service providers, advocates, government officials, researchers, and people experiencing homelessness. Analysis of this information is critical to efforts to understand the extent of this problem in Massachusetts in an attempt …

An Examination Of Perceived Stress And Coping Patterns Of Pastoral Wives In The Nigerian Union Mission Of The Seventh-Day Adventist Church, Olufunmilayo Janet Ola

Dissertations

Purpose of Study. Most studies examining stress and coping patterns of pastoral wives have been conducted from an advanced country background. Even though all the researchers agreed that these pastoral wives do experience a certain amount of stress, very little is known about pastoral wives in third-world countries who are faced with poverty, illiteracy, diseases and cultural restraints. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine perceived stress and coping patterns of pastoral wives of the Nigerian Union Mission of the Seventh-day Adventist church.

Methodology. A quantitative method of collecting data was used in this study. The two psychological …