Maternal Distress and Parenting in the Context of Cumulative Disadvantage

To read this article's abstract in both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, please visit the article's full‐text page on Wiley InterScience ( http://interscience.wiley.com/journal/famp ). This article presents an emergent conceptual model of the features and links between cumulative disadvantage, maternal distress, and parenting practices in low‐income families in which parental incarceration has occurred. The model emerged from the integration of extant conceptual and empirical research with grounded theory analysis of longitudinal ethnographic data from Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three‐City Study. Fourteen exemplar family cases were used in the analysis. Results indicated that mothers in these families experienced life in the context of cumulative disadvantage, reporting a cascade of difficulties characterized by neighborhood worries, provider concerns, bureaucratic difficulties, violent intimate relationships, and the inability to meet children's needs. Mothers, however, also had an intense desire to protect their children, and to make up for past mistakes. Although, in response to high levels of maternal distress and disadvantage, most mothers exhibited harsh discipline of their children, some mothers transformed their distress by advocating for their children under difficult circumstances. Women's use of harsh discipline and advocacy was not necessarily an “either/or” phenomenon as half of the mothers included in our analysis exhibited both harsh discipline and care/advocacy behaviors. Maternal distress characterized by substance use, while connected to harsh disciplinary behavior, did not preclude mothers engaging in positive parenting behaviors.     

A Dyadic Analysis of the Between‐ and Within‐System Alliances on Distress

To read this article's abstract in both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, please visit the article's full‐text page on Wiley InterScience ( http://interscience.wiley.com/journal/famp ). This study examines the relationship between the therapeutic alliance and distress using the couple rather than the individual as the unit of analysis. One hundred and seventy‐three couples receiving treatment for relational distress at two university clinics participated in this study. The actor–partner interdependence model was used to analyze the relationship of each partner's between‐ and within‐system alliance scores and distress at session four. Results provide support for actor effects on relational distress for both male and female partners and for actor effects on psychological distress for female partners. Limited support was found for partner effects on distress. Furthermore, results indicate that the alliance between partners is a stronger predictor of improvement in early sessions in comparison with the alliance between the individual and the therapist.     

Assessing Individual Family Members' Constructions of Family Problems

Much contemporary family therapy theory and practice takes into account clients' cognitive constructions of their family problems. Recent calls for therapists to elicit and work with clients' causal explanations and narratives parallel accumulating evidence in the social-clinical literature about the predictive importance of attributions in family relationships. In this article, we introduce the Constructions of Problems Scale (CPS), provide preliminary evidence of its reliability and validity, and suggest ways in which it can be used clinically to reveal new areas for questioning and to generate new ideas. The CPS is a brief questionnaire that can be used to create a profile of each individual family member's private constructions. To complete the CPS, each family member writes a free-form narrative of the presenting problem and then rates his or her perceptions of the contributing causes. The CPS profiles can be used to compare the perspectives of different family members and to assess cognitive constructions at different points in treatment. We discuss its potential for these and other clinical uses.     

Caring for the Carers: A Note on Counseling for the Wider Impact of AIDS

AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Symdrome) affects the psychological functioning not only of people with AIDS but also of those who care for them. In this article we describe the provision of counseling for voluntary curers, using personal construct counseling. Some of the problems in providing such counseling are considered.     

Diversity within Spatial Cognition: Memory Processes Underlying Place Recognition

We conducted three experiments to explore distinct memory processes involved in remembering places in spatial environments. The results of all three experiments demonstrated the viability of the process-dissociation procedure for studying spatial cognition; that procedure yielded separate measures of the role of familiarity (implicit memory) and conscious recollection (explicit memory) in recognizing scenes along a previously viewed route of travel. Those measures were not affected by whether the participants viewed videotapes or also physically walked the route of travel. Increasing the delay between encoding and retrieval led to comparable effects for familiarity and conscious recollection (Experiment 1). In contrast, the adverse consequences of dividing attention during encoding were specific to conscious recollection; familiarity estimates were unaffected (Experiments 2 and 3). Overall, the results reinforced the viability of process dissociation as a vehicle for exploring diverse memory processes underlying place recognition.     

Review of Assessment of Career Decision Making

The Assessment of Career Decision Making (ACDM) was designed to measure decision-making styles and progress in coping with three developmental tasks of young people: adjusting to school, choosing a career, and choosing a major. It is the result of 20 years of research begun by Vincent A. Harren and carried on by his successors after his death in 1980 (Buck & Daniels, 1985). During this time, the ACDM has been revised six times. It is now a shorter instrument, with fewer subscales than previously. In its present form (Form F), the ACDM contains 94 items, all of which are answered “true” or “false.” It is most appropriate for use with high school or college students engaged in career planning.