Working systemically with family violence: risk, responsibility and collaboration

In this article we describe a project which aims to ensure prevention and continued protection from violence for family members. We outline our theoretical approach to assessment and working with violence in family relationships and the associated ethical problems. We identify three recurrent themes: risk, collaboration, and responsibility. We focus on our work with couples, where the man is violent towards the woman. Within this discussion we identify other important clinical issues.     

The interplay of community and family risk and protective factors on adjustment in young adult immigrants

We examined the direct and interactive effects of community violence and both family cohesion and conflict on collective efficacy and aggressive behaviours among immigrant young adults. Participants included 221 young adults (ages 18–26; mean age = 21.36; 45.7% female, 190 born outside the U.S.) who completed self-report measures of their exposure to neighbourhood violence, social cohesion, collective efficacy and prosocial behaviours toward friends and strangers. Results, in general, showed that community violence and family cohesion were positively associated with collective efficacy whereas community violence and family conflict were positively associated with aggressive behaviours. Family cohesion and conflict also moderated the links between community violence and aggressive behaviours. Discussion focuses on the interplay of community and family processes and the relations to adjustment of immigrant young adults.     

Guilt: A gendered bond within the transnational family

Between 1999 and 2003 Argentinians lived an economic, social and political crisis that led some of them to emigrate, mainly to the United States and Spain. There are few studies on Argentinean migration and even fewer studies that take emotions and gender during the migration process into account. The aim of this work was to understand the link between gender and guilt within the migration process. In order to consider this, I analyzed the expression of guilt within the narrative of Argentinean migrants in Miami, United States and Barcelona, Spain. In-depth interviews of Argentinean migrants were conducted in both cities. Research shows that guilt is a gendered emotion, which allows migrants to temporarily stay attached to their family in a gendered way during the migration process. Nonetheless, its expression depends on four different factors that are interrelated: representations of gender role and “imagined family”, representations' changes during the migration process and the context of departure and the context of arrival.     

Personhood,culture and family therapy

This paper argues that ideas about personhood and relationships vary cross-culturally and that although it is not always obvious or easy to discover, this variation is particularly salient to family therapy. This argument is supported by a dual definition of culture emphasizing both continuity of cultural themes (generative aspect) and the reconstitution, redefinition and change of such themes through interaction and communication (interactive aspect). The effectiveness of interventions which are isomorphic with ideas which families themselves hold about personhood is demonstrated through work with two families, one Punjabi and one Bangladeshi.     

The hidden meanings of metaphors in family therapy

This study investigates how two therapists' beliefs and practices influence the therapeutic process when they organize social interaction according to a metaphor of a royal family. The therapeutic process is described through the case of a boy called Pelle. He comes to therapy together with his family. It is shown how the therapists collaborate in the process of implementing the worldview of the predefined normative standard for family life. In the short term the therapists' use of the metaphor can be seen as an intervention to accomplish immediate change in a non-threatening way. In the long term the cost of using the metaphor was that the mother got a confirmation about herself as a less powerful parent and the child got an image of being a failure. This study points out that metaphors as therapeutic tools have to be analyzed critically before they are used or more specifically the therapists have to examine what kind of values and meanings are hidden in the metaphor and who will gain and loose if it is used as an intervention.     

Annotation: culture and family therapy

This annotation considers the importance of understanding culture for the theory and practice of family therapy. A number of theoretical approaches are described. Some are concerned with ubiquitous and universal family processes like the family life cycle, while others are concerned with the particularity of family life such as the content of myths and rituals. Some practical implications for the participants of the therapy, and the choice of therapeutic approach is discussed.     

A community psychology of object meanings: Identity negotiation during disaster recovery

What do material goods intended for personal consumption mean to community? We use the extreme example of natural disaster recovery in a community to explore this question. Our work describes how members make sense of material objects that transition from private to public possessions (damaged goods) and public to private possessions (donated goods). By blending consumer and community psychology perspectives with our narratives, we employ a three-dimensional framework for analyzing object meanings: (1) material objects as agents of communitas (a shared sense of “we”), (2) material objects as agents of individualism (a focus on “me”), and (3) material objects as agents of opposition (the “we” that speaks for “me” and “us” versus “them”). This theoretical frame allows us to show how different conceptions of identity lead to conflicting meanings of objects within community, and to explain how and why object meanings shift as objects move across time and space from private to public and from scarcity to abundance. We also provide implications for coping with disasters that consider collective and individual identities as well as oppositional stances in between.     

Multiple meanings,number of related meanings,frequency of occurrence,and the lexicon

A series of experiments was conducted examining lexical access of words with multiple meanings. Words with many meanings were accessed faster than words with few meanings. This effect was obtained independently of word frequency. Furthermore, while words may have several etymological derivations, the number of derivations does not affect access. Finally, among words with an equal number of derivations and an equal number of meanings, those whose meanings tend to be associated with only one derivation are also accessed faster. The relation between number of meanings and word frequency is discussed, especially with respect to the role number of meanings may have played in other research.     

The health of employed women and men: work,family, and community correlates

Research into clarifying the relationship between social roles and health has increasingly focused on studying the particular circumstances in which occupying multiple roles may enhance or diminish well‐being. This study examined the association between a general measure of well‐being—self‐rated health—and the perceived quality of work, family and community in a sample of employed urban‐dwelling Canadians in a mid‐size city, and whether the nature of the association differed for men and women. Few gender differences were found in the perceived quality of work, family and community. However, men and women differed significantly in the specific type of quality measures associated with general health. For women, satisfaction with one's partner/spouse and in the money available to meet basic family needs had a stronger association with self‐rated health. For men, the significant correlates were satisfaction with family relationships (other than one's partner) and the community physical environment. For both women and men, a more socially cohesive community was associated with better self‐rated health. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Concepts,structures, and meanings

Concepts are basic elements of thought. Piaget has a conception of the nature of concepts as informational or computational operations performed in an inner milieu and enabling the child to understand the world in which it lives and acts. Concepts are, however, not merely logico‐mathematical but are also conceptually linked to the mastery of language which itself involves the appropriate use of words in social and interpersonal settings. In the light of Vygotsky's work on the social and interactive nature of children's thinking and the nature of language as an essentially public currency of rule‐governed signs, we are led to reconstrue conceptual mastery as the acquisition of an interactive and interpersonal repertoire of tools which introduces the child to the world of those who educate it. In this way we come to see the elements of mind as constitutively involving that activity in which the determinants of meaning constrain and direct the child's linguistic development.     

Parental autonomy support and ethnic culture identification among second-generation immigrants

Born and raised in the United States, children of immigrants often face conflict over whether to endorse the norms and traditions of the family's country of origin (the natal culture) or those of mainstream U.S. society (the host culture). The authors hypothesized that when immigrant parents allow children to make their own choices concerning their cultural identity, their children will be more likely to internalize the natal culture and will experience greater well-being. Ninety-nine college-aged 2nd-generation immigrants rated their well-being, perceptions of their mother's and father's autonomy support, and their endorsement of both natal and U.S. cultures. Results demonstrated that paternal, but not maternal, autonomy support predicted greater well-being and greater endorsement of the natal culture and that immersion in the natal culture predicted some indices of well-being. Several explanations for the possibly greater significance of paternal versus maternal autonomy support in the context of immigrant families are considered.     

Working mothers and the family context: Predicting positive coping

Working mothers (N = 204) were administered questionnaires to assess their degree of role strain, and their perceptions of their work, child care, and family environments. Few differences were found between women who were single (n = 40) versus married (n = 164), or who worked part- (n = 37) or full-time (n = 167). Role strain among working mothers was found to be related to factors in their work and home environments, such as their job satisfaction, and the degree of conflict in their families. The sample was also found to experience a great deal of time pressure and reported a lack of resources to care for their sick children. Implications for the understanding of vocational behavior are presented.     

Cultural differences in family, marital, and gender-role values among immigrants and majority members in the Netherlands

This study examined the size of differences in self-reported family, marital, and gender-role values in five cultural groups in the Netherlands (6338 Dutch mainstreamers and 422 Turkish, 369 Moroccan, 429 Surinamese, and 394 Antillean first- and second-generation immigrants). It was found that the three value scales were neither completely independent, nor could they be merged into a single value scale. The factor structures of all scales were identical for the five cultural groups, implying that the concepts can be compared. Age, sex, and notably education accounted for a substantial part of the cultural differences in all values. Cultural differences were larger for marital and family values than for gender-role values. Family and marital values yielded the same rank order of mean scores in the five cultural groups: Turks and Moroccans scored the lowest (having the most traditional values), followed by Surinamers, Antilleans, and Dutch mainstreamers. This rank order corresponds with the ethnic hierarchy of cultural groups that is based on the evaluation of ethnic groups by mainstreamers according to their liking of and likeness to ethnic groups. Generational differences were not found for family and gender-role values but first-generation immigrants in all groups had more traditional marital values than had second-generation immigrants. It was concluded that the theoretical framework based on a combination of three Hofstede dimensions (individualism-collectivism, power-distance, and femininity-masculinity), a model of the hierarchy of the ethnic groups in the Dutch society, and acculturation theory provided an adequate way to address family, marital, and gender-role value differences in the five cultural groups.     

Contextual influences on acculturation processes: The roles of family,community and society

The paper outlines the major approaches to the psychological study of acculturation, drawing particular attention to the importance of context. Three significant contexts are highlighted: family, ethnic community, and society/nation. New perspectives from our evolving program of acculturation research are introduced to illustrate contextual influences on acculturation, and future directions for empirical work are recommended.     

Working nonstandard schedules and variable shifts in low-income families: associations with parental psychological well-being, family functioning, and child well-being

Longitudinal data from the New Hope Project--an experimental evaluation of a work-based antipoverty program in Milwaukee, Wisconsin--was used to explore concurrent and lagged associations of nonstandard schedules and variable shifts with parental psychological well-being, regularity of family mealtimes, and child well-being among low-income families. Working a combination of variable shifts and nonstandard hours was associated concurrently with lower teacher-reported school performance and engagement and higher levels of externalizing behavior problems. Fixed nonstandard schedules were associated with lagged decreases in parent-reported school performance, whereas working variable shifts was associated with lagged increases in parent-reported school performance.     

Working Pasteur's Quadrant: harnessing science and action for community change

Community psychology in general and the field of prevention in particular has unquestioningly accepted the assumption that the research process should proceed in a linear fashion from a search for basic knowledge to application in the community context. This ignores the compelling insight offered by Stokes (1997) that the drive for new knowledge and the pursuit of application can be combined in a single effort. If research in community psychology pursues the drive for application without an equal commitment to the development of knowledge about underlying community processes of social cooperation and change, it will become a field less capable of innovative and enduring contributions to community well-being and effectiveness. Opportunities abound in community psychology for the simultaneous pursuit of new knowledge and more effective practice. We offer the example of a community leadership development program to promote collective efficacy as a case in point.