Integrating systems of care in California for youth with severe emotional disturbance III: Answers that lead to questions about out-of-home placements and the AB377 evaluation project

This paper is the third in a series of reports on preliminary empirical findings from replications of an integrated system of care for youth suffering from serious emotional disturbance. The development of the innovative system of care was pioneered in Ventura County, California, and the replications in three other California counties were legislatively enabled through California legislation (Assembly Bill 377). This report presents results on the expenditure and utilization of foster homes, residential placements made through special education programs, and state hospitals. Evaluation results indicate that foster home and state hospital utilization and expenditures are lower for the counties replicating the innovative system of care than for the state of California as a whole. Expenditures for special education residential placements are either at the state rate or lower in one county. The cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that the replication counties are utilizing restrictive levels of care at lower rates than would be expected, given state-wide patterns. The results, in conjunction with prior findings, are discussed in the context of questions about the possible fates of youth who no longer live in publicly funded residential facilities.     

Establishing and Evaluating the Key Functions of an Interactive Systems Framework Using an Assets-Getting to Outcomes Intervention

Community practitioners can face difficulty in achieving outcomes demonstrated by prevention science. Building a community practitioner's prevention capacity—the knowledge and skills needed to conduct critical prevention practices—could improve the quality of prevention and its outcomes. The purpose of this article is to: (1) describe how an intervention called Assets‐Getting To Outcomes (AGTO) was used to establish the key functions of the ISF and present early lessons learned from that intervention's first 6 months and (2) examine whether there is an empirical relationship between practitioner capacity at the individual level and the performance of prevention at the program level—a relationship predicted by the ISF but untested. The article describes an operationalization of the ISF in the context of a five‐year randomized controlled efficacy trial that combines two complementary models designed to build capacity: Getting To Outcomes (GTO) and Developmental Assets. The trial compares programs and individual practitioners from six community‐based coalitions using AGTO with programs and practitioners from six similar coalitions that are not. In this article, we primarily focus on what the ISF calls innovation specific capacity and discuss how the combined AGTO innovation structures and uses feedback about its capacity‐building activities, which can serve as a model for implementing the ISF. Focus group discussions used to gather lessons learned from the first 6 months of the AGTO intervention suggest that while the ISF may have been conceptualized as three distinct systems, in practice they are less distinct. Findings from the baseline wave of data collection of individual capacity and program performance suggest that practitioner capacity predicts, in part, performance of prevention programs. Empirically linking practitioner capacity and performance of prevention provides empirical support for both the ISF and AGTO. Special Issue: Advances in Bridging Research and Practice Using the Interactive System Framework for Dissemination and Implementation; Guest Editors: Abraham Wandersman, Paul Flaspohler, Catherine A. Lesesne, Richard Puddy; Action Editor: Emilie Phillips Smith     

Psychological Hardiness in Learning and Quality of College Life of Business Students: Evidence from Vietnam

Vietnam’s continuing economic transformation has sharply increased the demand for highly-qualified business graduates. Vietnamese universities have responded to this increase in demand by improving the quality of their programs and raising their performance standards. The degree to which high-quality competitive programs increase students’ satisfaction with their educational experience is determined by their psychological hardiness in learning, their learning motivation, and their assessments of the functional value of business education. This study gathered survey data from a convenience sample of 1,024 business students in Vietnam, then validated measures of four constructs: Quality of College Life, psychological hardiness in learning, learning motivation, and perceived functional value of business education. The relationships among the constructs were estimated by Structural Equation Modeling. The results demonstrate that psychological hardiness in learning and learning motivation have statistically significant positive impacts on students’ perceived Quality of College Life. The impacts are significantly stronger for students with higher assessments of the functional value of a business education. These findings suggest that universities could enhance the Quality of College Life and academic performance by offering programs to cultivate students’ psychological hardiness in learning and their learning motivation, and by providing them with objective information about the functional value of business careers.     

Children's attributions for peer victimization: A social comparison approach

A social comparison framework was used to examine the relations between children's attributions for victimization and adjustment. In Study One, 192 nine-to ten-year-old children were asked why someone may pick on them. Results revealed attributions reflecting five causes of victimization that could be reliably sorted by direction of social comparison: (a) jealous peer (downward), (b) mutual antipathy (horizontal), (c) being different from each other (horizontal), (d) personal behavior (upward) and (e) being uncool (upward). Children's responses were used to create an attribution measure that was administered to 206 eight-to eleven-year-old children. Results were consistent with the social comparison hypothesis such that peer jealousy was uniquely associated with lower levels of loneliness and greater acceptance whereas personal behavior and not being uncool were correlated with greater loneliness and lower perceived acceptance and self-esteem. Findings supported the usefulness of a social comparison framework for understanding associations among attributions and adjustment.     

Community identity as resource and context: A mixed method investigation of coping and collective action in a disadvantaged community

Social identities enhance members' well‐being through the provision of social support and feelings of collective efficacy as well as by acting as a basis for collective action. However, the precise mechanisms through which identification acts to enhance well‐being can be complicated by stigmatisation, which potentially undermines solidarity and collective action. The present research examines a real‐world stigmatised community group in order to investigate the following: (1) the community identity processes that act to enhance well‐being and collective action and (2) the consequences of stigmatisation for these processes. Study 1 consisted of a household survey conducted in disadvantaged areas of Limerick city in Ireland. Participants (n = 322) completed measures of community identification, social support, collective efficacy, community action and psychological well‐being. Mediation analysis indicated that perceptions of collective efficacy are an important mediator of the effect of identification upon well‐being. However, levels of self‐reported community action were low and unrelated to community identification. In Study 2, 14 follow‐up multiple‐participant interviews with residents and community group workers were thematically analysed, revealing high levels of stigmatisation, which was reported to lead to disengagement from identity‐related collective action. These findings indicate the potential for stigma to reduce collective action through undermining solidarity and social support. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Holtzman Inkblot Technique as a Measure of Perceptual Development in Mental Retardation

To investigate the relationships between mental age and scores from the Holtzman Inkblot Technique (HIT), 96 mentally retarded and normal Ss comprising four criterion IQ-groups ranging in IQ from 34 to 106 were tested. Each group was matched for sex and chronological age. Results revealed consistent monotonic changes with IQ level for six HIT variables, including four that previously had proved to be reliable and meaningful indices of perceptual development. These results provide strong support for these HIT variables as indices of perceptual development and confirm the nature and direction of this development.     

Investigating the Optimal Psychological State for Peak Performance in Australian Elite Athletes

The aim of this study was to investigate the optimal psychological state for peak performance in Australian elite athletes. World championship and Olympic athletes (n = 17) and coaches (n = 6) from rowing, swimming, and diving were interviewed about the psychological states that contribute to peak performance. Results indicated that peak performance is characterized by the automatic execution of performance. A proposed model for the optimal psychological state identifies self-regulation, control, and trust as processes that assist athletes to transition from experiencing a diversity of psychological factors during competition to the automatic psychological state of peak performance.     

Vision merges with touch in a purely tactile discrimination

To construct a coherent percept of the world, the brain continuously combines information across multiple sensory modalities. Simple stimuli from different modalities are usually assumed to be processed in distinct brain areas. However, there is growing evidence that simultaneous stimulation of multiple modalities can influence the activity in unimodal sensory areas and improve or impair performance in unimodal tasks. Do these effects reflect a genuine cross-modal integration of sensory signals, or are they due to changes in the perceiver's ability to locate the stimulus in time and space? We used a behavioral measure to differentiate between these explanations. Our results demonstrate that, under certain circumstances, a noninformative flash of light can have facilitative or detrimental effects on a simple tactile discrimination. The effect of the visual flash mimics that produced by a constant tactile pedestal stimulus. These findings reveal that sensory signals from different modalities can be integrated, even for perceptual judgments within a single modality.