Measuring the Difference Between Parental Alienation and Parental Estrangement: The PARQ-Gap

Parental alienation (rejection of a parent without legitimate justification) and realistic estrangement (rejection of a parent for a good reason) are generally accepted concepts among mental health and legal professionals. Alienated children, who were not abused, tend to engage in splitting and lack ambivalence with respect to their parents; estranged children, who were maltreated, usually perceive their parents in an ambivalent manner. The hypothesis of this study was that a psychological test—the Parental Acceptance–Rejection Questionnaire (PARQ)—will help to distinguish severely alienated from nonalienated children. The PARQ, which was used to identify and quantify the degree of splitting for each participant, was administered to 45 severely alienated children and 71 nonalienated children. The PARQ-Gap score—the difference between each child's PARQ: Father score and PARQ: Mother score—was introduced and defined in this research. Using a PARQ-Gap score of 90 as a cut point, this test was 99% accurate in distinguishing severely alienated from nonalienated children. This research presents a way to distinguish parental alienation from other reasons for contact refusal. The PARQ-Gap may be useful for both clinicians and forensic practitioners in evaluating children of separating and divorced parents when there is a concern about the possible diagnosis of parental alienation.     

CHILD PROTECTION EVALUATIONS The Forensic Stepchild

In child protection cases, the mental health evaluator is required to have a broad range of expertise in family violence and child and adult psychological issues. This article reviews epidemiological as well as other quantitative data to provide an empirical foundation by which to understand the problem of family violence, the characteristics of abusers and victims, and the consequences to the child who is a witness to or victim of family violence. Forensic evaluation guidelines and recommendations for structuring child protection evaluations are addressed.     

Can Political Participation Prevent Crime? Results from a Field Experiment About Citizenship,Participation, and Criminality

Democratic theory and prior empirical work support the view that political participation, by promoting social integration and pro-social attitudes, reduces one’s propensity for anti-social behavior, such as committing crimes. Previous investigations examine observational data, which are vulnerable to bias if omitted factors affect both propensity to participate and risk of criminality or their reports. A field experiment encouraging 552,525 subjects aged 18–20 to register and vote confirms previous observational findings of the negative association between participation and subsequent criminality. However, comparing randomly formed treatment and control groups reveals that the intervention increased participation but did not reduce subsequent criminality. Our results suggest that while participation is correlated with criminality, it exerts no causal effect on subsequent criminal behavior.     

Fighting to close the School of the Americas: Unintended consequences of successful activism

This article examines the structural and institutional changes that have occurred since the controversial United States School of the Americas (SOA) closed and its successor, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), opened in 2001. Placing these changes within a constructivist framework, the article uses the school as a case study to argue that human rights norm diffusion has both increased the amount of human rights in the curriculum and put the school in a much stronger institutional position than it had been. Human rights activists had successfully prompted change, but did not achieve their goal of closing the school. This article contributes to the literature by demonstrating how ideas about human rights can have important and lasting effects, but not always in ways that are either predictable or desirable for the political activists who spark them.     

Parents,Peers, Perceived Risk of Harm,and the Neighborhood: Contextualizing Key Influences on Adolescent Substance Use

Recent research has affirmed the need to examine contextual influences on adolescent substance use in a multilevel framework. This study examined the role of neighborhood opportunities for substance use in promoting adolescent substance use. Data came from two components of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods: the Longitudinal Cohort Study, consisting of interviews with youth and their primary caregivers across three waves of data with an average span of 4.5 years; and a Community Survey of neighborhood residents. Analysis used an Item-Response Theory-based statistical approach on 6556 substance use item responses from 1639 youth (49.0 % female) within 80 neighborhoods to assess the extent to which neighborhood opportunities for substance use had direct and indirect effects on adolescent substance use. Neither direct nor mediated effects of neighborhood opportunities for substance use on adolescent substance use were detected. But, analyses revealed moderating effects such that higher levels of neighborhood opportunities for substance use: (1) amplified the detrimental effects of parental substance use and peer substance use on youth substance use; and (2) attenuated the protective effect of adolescents’ perceived harm of substance use on adolescent substance use. The results suggest that the ways in which neighborhood characteristics impact adolescent behavior are nuanced. Rather than impact individual-level outcomes directly, neighborhood context may be particularly relevant by conditioning the effects of salient individual-level risk and protective factors for substance use.     

The decisive impact of tax administration practices on firms’ corruption Experience and Perceptions: Evidence from Europe and Central Asia

Two competing conceptualizations of corruption in the literature view it either as efficient or burdensome from firms’ perspective. Using data on the prevalence and the nature of firms’ interactions with tax authorities in twenty-eight Eastern European and Central Asian (ECA) countries, this paper contributes to evaluation of competing ideas in the literature about firms’ experience of corruption in tax administration. Special emphasis is given to examination of taxation-related determinants of corruption prevalence (frequency and magnitude of bribery), as well as the effect of the interaction with tax authorities on perception of tax and overall corruption. Regardless of country context, it appears that perceived corruption in tax administration and actual experiences with bribery during interactions with tax officials more than anything else affect the overall perceptions of corruption, thereby supporting the conceptualization of corruption in tax administration as burdensome, rather than efficient.     

Confidentiality and Privilege for Family and Child Protection Mediation: A Roadmap for Navigating the Innovation,Inconsistency and Confusion

This article will identify the inconsistency and confusion in mediation regarding the definition of mediation, the role of the mediator, and the difference between mediation confidentiality and privilege. Further, it will discuss the confusion and inconsistency in the protection of mediation communication, specifically regarding the definition of mediation communication, the time frame for protected communication, waiver of the protections and exceptions to protected mediation communication. It will provide a roadmap and fact pattern for determining whether mediation communications are protected and if so, the protection they are afforded. Lastly, it will offer recommendations so parties, professionals and the courts may better understand and reap the benefits of mediation.