‘Needed not wanted’: An interdisciplinary examination of the work-related challenges faced by irregular migrants

Using an integrative perspective drawn from vocational psychology and migration studies, this article explores the lives of irregular migrants, which represents a unique aspect of work-based migration. Irregular migrants are those individuals who travel from regions without much work to states that offer some means of employment, without formal immigration documentation. The relational and social contexts of migration of working people to states that offer employment (albeit limited and with many attendant risks) are presented. Using the broad framework provided by the psychology of working coupled with the relational perspectives of working, prominent resources and barriers in the working lives of irregular migrants are described, including social capital, social support, culture as a source of support, and social oppression. Future directions for research that can inform public policy are provided at the conclusion of the article.     

Collaborative helping maps: a tool to guide thinking and action in family-centered services

This article highlights "disciplined improvisation" as a metaphor for community-based work with multi-stressed families. It introduces Collaborative Helping maps as a tool that both helps workers think their way through complex situations with families and provides a structure to support constructive conversations between workers and families about challenging situations. The article illustrates this map through a clinical vignette and uses interviews with workers to highlight ways in which the map can both enhance worker thinking and support constructive conversations between workers and families about problems that could easily divide them and lead to polarization and escalating tension.     

Power as a Structural Phenomenon

In an effort to inform empowerment theory and research, this paper provides a structural conception of power. First, we examine the essential features present in three dominant conceptions of power in community psychology: social power, psychopolitical power, and relational power. Next, commonalities in the key features of power identified by these conceptions are explored and pared down to yield a more parsimonious conception of power that is grounded only in the structural pattern of relationships through which resources are exchanged. Drawing on social exchange theory, we offer a method for measuring this streamlined, structural conception of power that allows for its more precise examination. Finally, we discuss the implications of a structural conception and measurement of power for targeting and facilitating empowering processes and evaluating empowered outcomes.     

Relationship Education for Incarcerated Adults

As relationship education (RE) programs become more widely implemented, it is important to measure and document the changes associated with RE for diverse audiences. Also, researchers have been challenged to examine the impact of RE with more disadvantaged groups. While we are seeing an increase in this area, only three studies have examined RE with an incarcerated sample. These previous studies examined only those currently in a relationship and focused primarily on couple functioning. The aim of this study was to expand the existing literature by examining RE with a broader sample of incarcerated adults, regardless of current relationship status, and to expand our understanding of its association with outcomes beyond the couple domain by also including measures of individual and parental functioning. In addition, we examined whether change from pre‐ to posttest was moderated by individual characteristics. Using a sample of incarcerated adults (N = 122), the study found positive change in three domains of functioning (couple, individual, and parental). Specifically, results indicated change on five of the eight outcome variables examined. Overall, we found both similarities and differences among program participants on changes from pre‐ to posttest. For the majority of outcomes, the positive change from pre‐ to posttest emerged regardless of individual characteristics.     

New Sexism in Couple Therapy: A Discursive Analysis

The persistence of gender inequality in postindustrial societies is puzzling in light of a plethora of changes that destabilize it, including shifts in economy, legislation, and the proliferation of feminist politics. In family relations, such persistence manifests as a disconnect between couples aspiring to be more egalitarian yet continuing to enact traditional gender roles and hierarchies. There is an emerging consensus that gender inequality persists because of people's continued reliance on sexist ideology or gendered assumptions that constitute women as innately distinct from and inferior to men. Sexist ideology changes its form to accommodate to changing socio‐economic conditions. Contemporary forms of sexism are old ways of legitimizing male power articulated in new and creative ways, often by incorporating feminist arguments. To effectively recognize and address “new sexism,” scholars and practitioners require new, innovative research frameworks. Our objective in writing this article is two‐fold. First, we seek to advance discursive (i.e., focused on language in use) approaches to the study of sexism. Second, we present the results of a discursive analysis of “new” sexist discourse in the context of couple therapy. The study provides preliminary evidence that, despite endorsing egalitarian norms, couples studied continue to rely on gender binaries and remain entrenched in old‐fashioned patterns of gender inequality. Implications of these results for the practice of couple therapy and for future research are discussed.     

小学生领导力萌芽与发展的实证研究

摘 要 本研究以四年级学生为研究对象,通过话语分析,探究了八个无领导小组八次讨论过程中领导力的萌芽状况及其影响因素。结果发现,小学生可自发出现领导力行为,但只有两个小组会涌现出明显的领导者,并表现为独立领导和协同领导两种不同模式。对学生和教师行为的综合分析显示,学生领导力的形成与教师示范、反馈及同伴互动存在密切关系,这对学生领导力的培养具有重要的启示意义。     

SDDRS: Stacked Discriminative Denoising Auto-Encoder based Recommender System

Recommender systems are widely used in our life for automatically recommending items relevant to our preference. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most successful methods in recommendation field. Matrix Factorization (MF) based recommender system is designed according to the basic strategy of the CF algorithm, which is widely adopted recently. However, the rating matrix utilized by these models is usually sparse, so it is of vital significance to integrate the side information to provide relatively effective knowledge for modeling the user or item features. The key problem is to extract effective features from the noisy side information. However, the side information contains a lot of noise except rating knowledge, which makes it a challenging issue for extracting effective features. In this paper, we propose Stacked Discriminative Denoising Auto-Encoder based Recommender System (SDDRS) by integrating deep learning model with MF based recommender system to effectively incorporate side information with rating information. Extensive top-N recommendation experiments conducted on three real-world datasets empirically demonstrate that SDDRS outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.     

Daily Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptom Accommodation and Relationship Functioning in Military Couples

Romantic partners’ accommodation of trauma survivors’ posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms (e.g., taking on tasks, survivors avoid participating in social withdrawal) is associated with lower relationship satisfaction for both partners and survivors. Little is known about associations of partner accommodation with other aspects of relationship functioning, like intimacy. Sixty‐four male military veterans with at least subclinical PTSD and their partners participated in a 2‐week daily diary study. Veterans completed nightly measures of PTSD symptoms, while female partners completed nightly measures of accommodating behaviors performed that day. Both partners reported feelings of intimacy each night. Multilevel models revealed that accommodation was significantly, negatively associated with feelings of intimacy, with stronger effects for partners (t = ?8.70) than for veterans (t = ?5.40), and stronger effects when veterans had lower (t = ?7.43) rather than higher (t = ?5.20) levels of daily PTSD symptoms. Therapists should consider accommodating behaviors as a potential impediment to relationship intimacy, particularly when veterans have less severe symptoms of PTSD. Accommodating behaviors are an ideal treatment target in behavioral couple therapies.     

Designing Games to Teach Ethics

This paper describes a teaching methodology whereby students can gain practical experience of ethical decision-making in the engineering design process. We first argue for the necessity to teach a 'practical' understanding of ethical issues in engineering education along with the usual theoretical or hypothetical approaches. We then show how this practical understanding can be achieved by using a collaborative design game, describing how, for example, the concept of responsibility can be explored from this practical basis. We conclude that the use of games in design education can provide an excellent basis for discussing practical and ethical reasoning during the process of design.     

New Evidence for the Social Embeddedness of Infants' Early Triangular Capacities

Infants appear to be active participants in complex interactional sequences with their parents far earlier than previously theorized. In this report, we document the capacity of 3‐month‐old infants to share attention with two partners (mothers and fathers) simultaneously, and trace links between this capacity and early family group‐level dynamics. During comprehensive evaluations of the family's emergent coparenting alliance completed in 113 homes, we charted infants' eye gaze patterns during two different mother‐father‐infant assessment paradigms. Triangular capacities (operationalized as the frequency of rapid multishift gaze transitions between parents during interactions) were stable across interaction context. Infants exhibiting more advanced triangular capacities belonged to families showing evidence of better coparental adjustment. Theoretical and practice implications of these findings are discussed.