Fifteen Years of the Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development: A Content Analysis

The authors present the results of a content analysis of articles that were published in the Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development (JMCD) during the last 15 years. The analysis identified the leading contributors (i.e., authors, institutions) to JMCD, evaluated the content of the articles, examined the type of articles, and highlighted the particular cultural groups that were studied most frequently. Los autores presentan los resultados de un análisis de el contenido de la Revista de Consejeria y Desarrollo Multicultural (JMCD), durante los ultimos 15 años. El análisis identificó los contribuyentes más destacados (en otras palabras, los autores, las instituciones) a JMCD; examinó el tipo del articulos y subrayó los grupos culturales que se estudiaron más frecuentemente.     

Do Children Have Privacy Rights in the Classroom?

Arguing that everyone has a right to privacy as control overaccess to `intimate' aspects of one's life, this author draws on thework of Julie Inness to discuss children's rights to privacy inclassrooms. Even if it is agreed that pupils should exercise this right,a central point is that there may be moral or other value considerationsthat justify setting the right aside. Among selected complexities, animportant extension is the right to psychological processes throughwhich learners acquire new knowledge.     

Development of the Family Therapy Enactment Rating Scale

This report describes the development of a new scale designed to establish how therapists intervene and clients respond during effective enactments in family therapy sessions. The Family Therapy Enactment Rating Scale (FTERS) was developed by clinically trained investigators who observed 27 videotaped family therapy sessions and listed therapist interventions and client responses during four phases of enactments: pre-enactment preparation, initiation, facilitation, and closing commentary. Interrater reliabilities for the FTERS were calculated by training 6 undergraduate volunteers to rate independently a sample of 12 enactments. When reliabilities were found to be relatively low, a second study was conducted in which the FTERS was revised and reliabilities were calculated with a different sample of 21 videotaped enactments and a new group of 6 undergraduate raters. Reliability for the FTERS was found to be sufficiently robust to make this measure of therapist interventions and client responses a useful instrument for evaluating what takes place during enactments. Findings on the FTERS were used to offer tentative guidelines for effective initiation and facilitation of enactments in family therapy sessions.     

Causal Information-Seeking Strategies Change Across Childhood and Adolescence

Intervening on causal systems can illuminate their underlying structures. Past work has shown that, relative to adults, young children often make intervention decisions that appear to confirm a single hypothesis rather than those that optimally discriminate alternative hypotheses. Here, we investigated how the ability to make informative causal interventions changes across development. Ninety participants between the ages of 7 and 25 completed 40 different puzzles in which they had to intervene on various causal systems to determine their underlying structures. Each puzzle comprised a three- or four-node computer chip with hidden wires. On each trial, participants viewed two possible arrangements of the chip's hidden wires and had to select a single node to activate. After observing the outcome of their intervention, participants selected a wire configuration and rated their confidence in their selection. We characterized participant choices with a Bayesian measurement model that indexed the extent to which participants selected nodes that would best disambiguate the two possible causal structures versus those that had high causal centrality in one of the two causal hypotheses but did not necessarily discriminate between them. Our model estimates revealed that the use of a discriminatory strategy increased through early adolescence. Further, developmental improvements in intervention strategy were related to changes in the ability to accurately judge the strength of evidence that interventions revealed, as indexed by participants' confidence in their selections. Our results suggest that improvements in causal information-seeking extend into adolescence and may be driven by metacognitive sensitivity to the efficacy of previous interventions in discriminating competing ideas.