Disclosure on Campus: Students’ Decisions to Tell Others About Unwanted Sexual Experiences,Intimate Partner Violence,and Stalking

The scope of student victimization occurring on college campuses is problematic, drawing the attention of researchers and campus officials. While most researchers of the disclosure of these unwanted experiences tend to examine just 1 form of victimization, a direct comparison of the disclosure of different types of campus victimization within a singular study is missing in the literature. The current study aimed to address this issue by examining 4 types of victimization experiences (unwanted sexual contact, unwanted sexual intercourse, intimate partner violence, and stalking) in a college population. A common set of possible predictors of disclosure were examined, including both demographic (e.g., gender, race, age) and situational factors (e.g., alcohol use, level of fear, relationship with perpetrator). While patterns of similarity across all victimization experiences emerged, the impact of gender, race, age, and alcohol use on disclosure decisions varied substantially by victimization type. The findings of this study address the gap in the current literature by providing a comparison and contrast of the influence of predictors across different types of victimization. Furthermore, the findings provide needed information that could help colleges and universities develop ways to encourage support-seeking and reporting among students.     

Pretending to be authentic: challenges for students when reflective writing about their childhood for assessment

Critical reflection potentially allows social work and human service (SWHS) students to understand how past experiences can shape their future practice. This study of 20 Australian undergraduate SWHS students with a history of childhood adversity found reflective writing for this purpose was not a useful pedagogical practice. Rather than developing skills in critical reflection students found the task performative, linked to academic requirements, where they needed to display emotional containment. Consequently, SWHS academics need to examine reflective writing about childhood adversity for assessment as this process may not enable students to build skills in critical reflection that drive professional development.     

Police responses to diversity: A social representational study of rural British policing in a changing representational context

In the first decade of the 21st century, British policing faced two new challenges in how it responded to social diversity: As well as instituting reforms in response to a highly publicized report describing the British police as ‘institutionally racist’ (Macpherson, 1999 ), they faced challenges associated with rapid increases in numbers of immigrants into the UK. Studying social representations at such times of change allows access into processes, themes and value systems that may otherwise remain hidden. This paper uses social representations theory to explore interview accounts provided by regular police officers of interactions with members of minority groups. Empirically, we focus on an area of diversity policing that has received relatively little previous attention: Police work in a rural context that has recently played host to large numbers of migrant workers. Our analysis shows that interviews operate as a site of resistance in which respondents attempt to rework hegemonic representations of the police as prejudiced and to re‐present themselves and their work as able to respond appropriately to diversity. Fairness as a defining characteristic of good police practice is a central representational theme that links identity construction processes to police work with minority groups. Recent immigrant groups are represented as both needing and deserving help to assimilate into British culture: Their lack of acculturation and language difficulties provide additional challenges to police work and to how this is judged as ‘fair’. We discuss the broader origins and implications of police officers' understandings of fairness and the use of social representations theory to study representational fields within organizational settings. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“There Is a Lot of Junk on the Web!”: Using Web Site Evaluation in an Introductory Religion Course

This essay describes a web site evaluation project which served as the final assignment for an undergraduate “Introduction to Religion” course. The essay discusses lessons learned from the design and implementation of this web‐based research assignment over three consecutive semesters. It includes insights from an instructor and a reference librarian who collaborated on this project.     

Post Christian pastoral care: the wisdom of not knowing

Emergent religious pluralism leads many of us to reflect on pastoral care practices that have evolved mostly within the Judeo Christian tradition. This article makes public my reflections and offers ideas for a ministry of curiosity that is more conversant with an increasingly Post Christian society.     

The dimensions of change in therapeutic community treatment instrument

In this article, the authors describe the refinement and preliminary evaluation of the Dimensions of Change in Therapeutic Community Treatment Instrument (DCI), a measure of treatment process. In Study 1, a 99-item DCI, administered to a cross-sectional sample of substance abuse clients (N = 990), was shortened to 54 items on the basis of results from confirmatory factor analyses and item response theory invariance tests. In Study 2, confirmatory factor analyses of the 54-item DCI, completed by a longitudinal cohort of 993 clients, established and validated an 8-factor solution across 2 subpopulations (adults and adolescents) and 2 time points (treatment entry and 30-days postentry). The results of the 2 studies are encouraging and support use of the 54-item DCI as a tool to measure treatment process.     

The President’s New Freedom Commission: Capitalizing on Opportunities to Advance School-Based Mental Health Services

The report from President George W. Bush’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (NFC), Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America(2003), proposes goals and recommendations for improving mental health services. This report has significant implications for the delivery of mental health services through the schools. A focused discussion of the potential opportunities and challenges of implementing NFC recommendations related to school-based mental health is presented. Strategies for addressing five key areas at the intersection of school mental health and the Commission’s recommendations include: stigma reduction, suicide prevention, expansion and improvement of school mental health, and screening and treatment of co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders.     

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: doctoral students' experiences of family therapy research training through alternative forms of data representation

In this study, we interviewed 14 doctoral students from 10 COAMFTE-accredited doctoral programs to learn more about how they experienced their research training and what they might suggest to strengthen the research culture in their training programs. We solicited somewhat unconventional data--metaphors, poetry, free associations, critical experiences--to (a) tap into our participants' underlying thought processes, (b) capture the multifaceted nature of their doctoral research training, and (c) represent the richness of our participants' subjective experiences. The themes we identified reflect both positive and negative research training experiences and suggest several ways that family therapy program faculty might improve their programs' research training and culture.