Invited Commentary: Fostering Resilience Among Native American Youth Through Therapeutic Intervention

This article offers a comprehensive overview and understanding of the needs of Native American Youth for researchers, educators, and practitioners based on current research and practice. Strengths and protective factors are discussed in terms of Native strengths in context, the strengths and resilience of Native ways, Indigenous ways of knowing, the relationship between cultural identity and the tribal nation, the importance of family, the roles of the wisdom keepers, spiritual ways, and communication styles. Contextual influences are explored in terms of the relationship between history and healing from intergenerational grief and trauma, the influence of acculturation, as well as current social, economic, and political issues that affect Native youth. Implications for research and therapeutic intervention are explored in terms of healing from historical trauma and oppression. The authors offer an overview of common presenting issues and recommendations, practical tribally-specific interventions, and reflections on what it means to work from a social justice and client/community advocacy perspective with a focus on providing effective therapeutic, culturally-based interventions with Native children and adolescents that promote resilience and foster positive development with this population.     

MEDIATING WITH HIGH-CONFLICT COUPLES

Models of mediation based on negotiation assume that participants can think and act rationally, whereas in reality, when individuals are overwhelmed by anger and pain, their capacity for reason and logic diminishes. Family mediators need to appreciate the intensity of the irrational feelings and reactions they see in mediation and to consider their personal impact. Mediators can help to contain family crises by adapting the family crises by adapting the model and methods in this article to fit different levels and patterns of conflict. An understanding of systems theory is particularly helpful in considering the functions of conflict and varying needs to maintain conflict. This article suggests that mediators can use different kinds of nonverbal and verbal communication and surprise those who expect mediators to give them a stock response.     

Cross-ethnic Invariance of Self-esteem and Depression Measures for Chinese,Filipino, and European American Adolescents

Self-esteem and depression are fundamental psychological adjustment constructs in the study of adolescent well-being. Most measures of these constructs have been developed and validated using European American samples, and while the correlates and predictors of psychological adjustment have been examined in multiple cultural settings, no existing research explicitly compares the equivalence of measures of self-esteem or depression for contemporary Chinese, Filipino and European American adolescents. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (the Add Health study), this study examines the factorial invariance of self-esteem and depression measures for European American adolescents and the two largest Asian American ethnic groups in the U.S.: Chinese and Filipino Americans. Results indicate strong evidence for invariance of the measure of self-esteem; however, the often-used measure of depression (CES-D) does not satisfy basic tests of measurement invariance for Asian Americans in this sample.

Organizational factors that contribute to youth workers' promotion of youth voice

The term youth voice has been identified as a mechanism that helps youth who are participating in out-of-school time programs (e.g., 4-H, Boys & Girls Club, Big Brother/Big Sister) achieve successful outcomes such as improved academic and social functioning. Youth voice promotion is commonly enacted in out-of-school time programs when youth workers extend opportunities to youth to provide feedback and make key program decisions. To date, scant research has focused on organizational factors that contribute to program staff (e.g., youth workers) willingness to promote youth voice. A structural equation model using person-environment fit theory within a Positive Youth Development theory framework was constructed to test organizational factors that contribute to youth voice promotion among youth workers. Data from 569 frontline youth workers within out-of-school time programs across the United States indicated that youth workers' abilities to form positive relationships with youth, professional efficacy, and ability to make decisions in their own jobs directly predicted youth workers' endorsement of youth voice. In addition, positive relationships partially mediated the effects of professional efficacy on youth voice promotion. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

affective politics,debility and hearing voices: towards a feminist politics of ordinary suffering

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich’s recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and argues that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice.