Promoting the Culturally Sensitive Diagnosis of Mexican Americans: Some Personal Insights

This article presents a series of personal guidelines for promoting the culturally sensitive psychiatric diagnosis of Mexican American/Chicano clients. These guidelines are primarily based on the authors' collective experiences in diagnosing and treating this population.     

Two Factor Additive Conjoint Measurement with One Solvable Component

This paper addresses conditions for the existence of additive separable utilities. It considers mainly two-dimensional Cartesian products in which restricted solvability holds w.r.t. one component, but some results are extended to n-dimensional spaces. The main result shows that, in general, cancellation axioms of any order are required to ensure additive representability. More precisely, a generic family of counterexamples is provided, proving that the (m+1)st order cancellation axiom cannot be derived from the mth order cancellation axiom when m is even. However, a special case is considered in which the existence of additive representations can be derived from the independence axiom alone. Unlike the classical representation theorems, these representations are not unique up to strictly positive affine transformations, but follow Fishburn's (1981) uniqueness property. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.     

Communication flow and change theory within a family therapy supervision model

This article portrays a model of family therapy clinical supervision using change theory that is most appropriate for use with the videotape, audiotape, case presentation and debriefing from the live session. The most powerful tool during this process is that of communication and assessment of change theorys tools of confidence and conviction. The concepts presented are meant to add an additional dimension to family therapy supervision in cooperation of other theories, not as an end in themselves.Special thanks to Ms. Geri Koncilja of the Informational Technology Center at Colorado State University, Pueblo for illustration and graphic assistance.     

Revisiting Hispanic Adolescents' Resilience to the Effects of Parental Problem Drinking and Life Stress

Two previous studies found that life stress and parental alcoholism were not as highly related to distress for Hispanic adolescents as they were for European American adolescents (M. Barrera Jr., S. A. Li, and L. Chassin, 1993, 1995). Those findings could be interpreted as evidence of Hispanic youths' resilience, but limitations of the stress measure and the homogeneity of the Hispanic sample threatened this interpretation. The present study improved on those previous studies by using a new measure of uncontrollable stressors and a more heterogeneous Mexican American sample. Participants in this study were 175 Mexican American and 59 European American adolescents and their parents. Unlike the previous studies, results did not show that Mexican American adolescents were more resilient to parental problem drinking or life stress than were European American adolescents. Overall, life stress was related to adolescents', mothers', and fathers' reports of adolescents' psychological distress above and beyond the effects of ethnicity and socioeconomic factors.     

Economic Hardship, Neighborhood Context, and Parenting: Prospective Effects on Mexican�CAmerican Adolescent��s Mental Health

This study examined family and neighborhood influences relevant to low-income status to determine how they combine to predict the parenting behaviors of Mexican-American mothers and fathers. The study also examined the role of parenting as a mediator of these contextual influences on adolescent internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Study hypotheses were examined in a diverse sample of Mexican-American families in which 750 mothers and 467 fathers reported on their own levels of parental warmth and harsh parenting. Family economic hardship, neighborhood familism values, and neighborhood risk indicators were all uniquely associated with maternal and paternal warmth, and maternal warmth mediated the effects of these contextual influences on adolescent externalizing symptoms in prospective analyses. Parents' subjective perceptions of neighborhood danger interacted with objective indicators of neighborhood disadvantage to influence maternal and paternal warmth. Neighborhood familism values had unique direct effects on adolescent externalizing symptoms in prospective analyses, after accounting for all other context and parenting effects.     

Development and Validation of the Workplace Age Discrimination Scale

Purpose

Workplace age discrimination research is proliferating, but researchers lack a valid measure with which to capture targets’ discriminatory experiences. We developed a measure of perceived workplace age discrimination that assesses overt and covert forms of discrimination and then compared older, middle-aged, and younger workers’ experiences.

Design/Methodology

In Study 1, we developed the Workplace Age Discrimination Scale (WADS) based on older workers’ experiences using a deductive approach, a qualitative study, and two quantitative surveys. In Study 2, we validated the measure among young employees using a qualitative and two quantitative surveys. In Study 3, we tested the WADS among middle-aged workers and tested models of invariance between age groups.

Findings

Participants frequently endorsed covert discriminatory experiences, which the WADS reflects. The WADS contains convergent and discriminant validity, high reliability, and a unidimensional structure across age groups. It demonstrates criterion-related validity among older and younger workers but not middle-aged workers, given their low experiences of age discrimination. Age discrimination frequency follows a U-shaped pattern across age groups.

Implications

Researchers can use the WADS to identify long-term outcomes of age discrimination and to further compare workers’ discriminatory experiences. Practitioners and policymakers can use the measure to develop interventions to ameliorate workplace age discrimination and inform policymaking.

Originality/Value

The WADS is the first validated measure of targets’ perspectives of workplace age discrimination. Our results challenge assumptions that only older workers experience age discrimination (younger workers’ means were highest) and that age discrimination is usually overt in nature (it is often covert).

     

Family,peer, and neighborhood influences on academic achievement among African-American adolescents: One-year prospective effects

Using a 1-year prospective design, this study examined the influence of family status variables (family income, parental education, family structure), parenting variables (maternal support and restrictive control), peer support, and neighborhood risk on the school performance of 120 African American junior high school students. In addition to main effects of these variables, neighborhood risk was examined as a moderator of the effects of parenting and peer support. Family status variables were not predictive of adolescent school performance as indexed by self-reported grade point average. Maternal support at Time 1 was prospectively related to adolescent grades at Time 2. Neighborhood risk was related to lower grades, while peer support predicted better grades in the prospective analyses. Neighborhood risk also moderated the effects of maternal restrictive control and peer support on adolescent grades in prospective analyses. These findings highlight the importance of an ecological approach to the problem of academic underachievement within the African American community.     

Immune disorders and handedness in dyslexic boys and their relatives

Thirty dyslexic and 30 control boys aged 7–11 years were compared for frequency of immune disorders and handedness as well as for family history of immune disorders and learning disabilities (dyslexia and stuttering). They were also compared for neurological status and for history of speech and language difficulties. There were no significant differences between the two groups in the frequency of immune disorders and in handedness. The results showed significantly more dyslexic boys with soft neurological signs and signs of speech and language disorders. The frequency of dyslexia was significantly higher in the relatives of the dyslexic boys. Also significantly more mothers of the dyslexic boys reported difficulties during pregnancy and complications at delivery. The results are discussed in terms of Geschwind's hypothesis and neuromaturational delay as possible determinants of developmental dyslexia.