Prevalence of trauma, PTSD, and dissociation in court-referred adolescents

This study examines the prevalence of trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and dissociative symptoms in adolescents. The sample consisted of 76 females and 76 males, between the ages of 12 and 18, referred to the Child Guidance Clinic of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for a psychological evaluation. Two sets of analyses were conducted. One set included the entire sample; the second set excluded those individuals whose listed referral problem included only being a victim of abuse. Results of the study suggest a high prevalence of trauma in both genders; however, females had significantly higher rates than those reported in males. Similarly, female adolescents demonstrated significantly higher prevalence rates of PTSD symptoms compared with their male counterparts in the entire sample and showed a trend toward significance in the analysis of the subsample. There was a low prevalence of dissociative symptoms across both genders.     

Perceptions of responsibility for clinical risk management: evidence from orthopaedics practitioners, practice managers and patients in an Australian capital city

The article describes a study of the perceptions of three groups--patients, orthopaedic surgeons and the surgeons' practice managers--concerning three types of legal risk associated with the duty of care: failure to follow up, failure to warn and failure to diagnose. The study found there is cause for concern about doctors' follow-up and documentation of patient care. Doctors may be unaware of the Australian courts' propensity to emphasise practitioner responsibility rather than patient autonomy. A further important result is the considerable disparity between the surgeons' views and the views of their practice managers about the duty of care. The article draws out implications for improved risk awareness and suggests further research.     

TexPool's Experiences in the 1990s: Policy Implications for Other State Investment Pools

The State of Texas's local government investment pool, TexPool, has faced major challenges in the 1990s. This article provides an overview of two major events involving TexPool: (1) a $2.2 billion "run" on the pool in 1994 and (2) the out-sourcing of TexPool's functions in 1997. The article describes these events and analyzes potential implications for other state-administered investment pools. The article addresses issues such as: (1) the need to develop investment policies and practices that are suitable for a particular pool's objectives and purpose, (2) whether a state government has a responsibility to ensure that participants in a state investment pool do not incur losses, (3) the possible implications of having an elected official as the person with primary responsibility for overseeing the pool, and (4) concerns related to the outsourcing of state investment pools. This article is intended to encourage debate on the policies and practices of state investment pools, which currently are serving more than 15,000 local governments in the United States.     

PRE-CONDITIONS FOR THE EMERGENCE OF MULTICOMMUNITY COLLABORATIVE ORGANIZATIONS1

This article looks at collaborative actions in small, rural communities. Collaborative actions involve strong linkages among a stable membership in specific and often complex purposes and usually are long term. They involve formal processes and structural patterns of collaboration. They emerge from disaster occurrences which trigger fiscal stress or perceived stress to form collaborative action. Since there is often no push by public opinion to maintain them, there is a need for public incentives to support capacity building. These incentives are instrumental in the formation and maintenance of these collaborative actions. Organizational formation is also tied to an identifiable policy entrepreneur or several entrepreneurs. Their maintenance relies on an early focus on visible, effective strategies and an emphasis on collaborative skills building.     

In Search of the Rosetta Stone of the Mediation Profession

Although people have their choice today of an ever-growing number of how-to books and articles about the mediation process, this plenitude was hardly always the case. In fact, back in the early 1950s in the United States, three young mediators with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) drafted a 62-page memo on the subject of their work which included 120 different techniques of mediation, many of which would be familiar and useful to practitioners today. Their pioneering work, however, was neither recognized nor encouraged by the FMCS; in fact, it was suppressed. This article focuses on the reasons for the suppression of that work, providing an overview of the vast changes that have taken place in mediation's history and the federal labor-management mediation agency over the past half-century.     

Cultivation and Use of Opium in Rural India: Bottom-Up Insights Into Anti-Drug Efforts

Although India is a major supplier of licit (i.e., legally grown) opium, it is also a leading producer of illicit (i.e., illegally grown) opium. To learn who might be involved in both types of production, the researchers interviewed 50 licensed opium farmers in Madhya Pradesh. Those interviews covered, among other aspects, farmers’ opium use, community attitudes towards addiction and trafficking, and knowledge of government-set opium prices and regulations. In general, some of those interviewed outlined both informal social controls and shunning, used against rural addicts, and support, even if grudgingly given, for government regulation. Those same interviews, however, revealed evidence of important social/economic changes that are undercutting the limited efficacy of extant formal controls in curtailing opium use, addiction, and trafficking.     

Sense of Belonging Among High School Students Representing 4 Ethnic Groups

The authors investigated the dimensions and mechanisms of belonging relevant to motivation and achievement among high school students representing 4 ethnic groups. Using survey data from 9th to 12th grade students (N = 5,494) attending 7 ethnically-diverse high schools, structural equation modeling was employed to explore, independently for each ethnic group, the relationships between students’ perceptions of their belonging (encompassing relationships with teachers and peers, extracurricular involvement, and perceived ethnic-based discrimination), motivation (efficacy beliefs and valuing school activities), and academic success. All 4 measures of belonging were significant for European-American and Latino students. However, friendship nominations were not significant for all groups, suggesting potential variability in perspectives across ethnic groups. The strength of the structural model postulating belonging as a mediator, including statistically significant indirect paths, supported the hypothesis that the belonging construct accounted for much of the relationship between student motivation and success across groups.Beverly Faircloth is a doctoral candidate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include the developmental and motivational processes that support adolescent school engagement in ethnically diverse settings.Jill Hamm is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996. Her research interests are adolescents’ peer relations in ethnically diverse schools and classrooms.