Coping with Concerns: An Exploratory Comparison of Australian,Colombian, German,and Palestinian Adolescents

Consistent with an emphasis on positive psychology, and on ability rather than deficit, this study of adolescents in 4 communities sought to examine how young people cope with their concerns. Samples of Australian, Colombian, German, and Palestinian students completed the general form of the Adolescent Coping Scale, an 80-item instrument used to measure coping. A comparison of young people's usage of 3 coping styles and 18 coping strategies within these communities indicated that Palestinian youth report greater usage of all but three strategies (namely, physical recreation, relaxation, and tension reduction), and German youth report the least usage of 2/3 of the strategies assessed. Both Palestinian and Colombian youth were noted to utilize more seek to belong, focus on the positive, social action, solving the problem, seeking spiritual support, and worry than were German or Australian adolescents. When the relative usage of coping strategies within national settings was considered, some noticeable differences were apparent. For example it was found that regardless of the national setting young people reported most frequent use of working hard and use of problem solving strategies. When it comes to more culturally determined activities such as physical recreation, the Australian and German students ranked this strategy more highly in their coping repertoires than do the Colombians, and more noticeably, the Palestinian students. For example, although physical recreation is ranked as the second most commonly used strategy for the German sample, it is ranked 16th by the Palestinians. The study demonstrates the importance of identifying coping strategies that are reflective of each community under investigation. Similarity in coping cannot be assumed across different student populations. Consequently caution needs to be exercised when importing coping programs from one community to another.     

Why Smaller Councils Make Sense

This article presents a case for smaller local governments based on notions of economic efficiency and community identity service responsiveness and political accountability. The arguments of sceptics (or those favouring greater council amalgamations) are challenged and refuted. Further elaboration of the case can be found in my recent book Secession: A Manifesto for an Independent Balmain Local Council (2001).     

Political Partisanship and Welfare State Reform in Advanced Industrial Societies

In this article we evaluate two claims made in recent studies of the welfare states of advanced industrial societies: first, that welfare states have remained quite resilient in the face of demands for retrenchment; and second, that partisan politics have ceased to play a decisive role in their evolution. Addressing the first claim, we present analysis from a new data set on unemployment insurance and sickness benefit replacement rates for 18 countries for the years 1975–99. We find considerably more evidence of welfare retrenchment during the last two decades than do recent cross-national studies. Second, we examine the "end of partisanship" claim by estimating the effects of government partisanship on changes in income replacement rates in sickness and unemployment programs. Our results suggest that, contrary to claims that partisanship has little impact on welfare state commitments, traditional partisanship continues to have a considerable effect on welfare state entitlements in the era of retrenchment .     

Capacity building: Shifting the paradigms of practice

Capacity building is now one of the most frequently invoked of current development concepts and yet it continues to defy a shared definition of what it means in practice. Is it possible that capacity building demands such a radically new form of practice, such a radically new form of thinking, that our current approaches are doomed to failure, not because we lack adequate models or 'technologies', but because our very approach to the issue is inadequate? Arguing that conventional capacity-building initiatives have tended to focus on the material and tangible aspects of the capacity of an organisation and its people to be critically self-aware, the author outlines some fundamental shifts which would be both entailed and generated by concentrating on the practice of the development practitioner in relation to organisational development, rather than focusing on external appearances or rushing to the training manuals.     

A Qualitative Study of Young Women’s Abusive First Relationships: What Factors Shape their Process of Disclosure?

Journal of Family Violence - We qualitatively explored young women’s intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization within abusive first relationships (characterized by physical IPV, coercive...     

Reparations for the Herero Genocide: Defining the limits of international litigation

The Herero were the first ethnic group to be subjected to genocidein the twentieth century. In 2001, the Herero became the firstethnic group to seek reparations for colonial policies thatfit the definition of genocide. The Herero are the latest plaintiffto use the procedures of the Alien Torts Claim Act of 1789 toseek reparations in a US federal court for war crimes committedoverseas. This article analyzes the legal arguments by Hererosagainst Germany within the context of current understandingsof international law and identifies the challenges that lieahead for this claim. The article also explores the implicationsof the Herero claim for other ethnic groups victimized by colonization.