Identifying Barriers to Permanency: The Recruitment,Selection, and Training of Resource Parents

Staff and resource parents in the public child welfare agency and private child care facilities were invited to participate in research in one state to examine the barriers surrounding resource parent recruitment, training and selection, and strategies for achieving more timely permanency. Issues identified included the need for a shared vision among all stakeholders and the need to focus more on developing public and private agency partnerships. Data-driven strategies were then designed to address identified barriers. This process can serve as an example of how systems may use solicited input from the field to develop interventions or modify casework practice in an attempt to improve child and family outcomes as needed.     

Poor Maternity: Clare of Assisi's letters to Agnes of Prague

During the first half of the thirteenth century, Clare of Assisi and Agnes of Prague sustained a long epistolary relationship. Clare's part of the correspondence is extant, and reveals much about the intersection of the language of gendered piety and political ambition in this period. This article seeks, in particular, to place Clare's use of maternal imagery within the context of her attempts to build patronage networks in order to support her ambitions to secure the ‘Privilege of Poverty’ for herself and her sisters, the right to live without landed endowments and claustration.     

Women,Law and John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill's intellectual reputation is unarguable; his liberal credentials seemingly impeccable. Moreover there seems to be a Mill for everyone; liberal, radical, feminist. The precise nature of the feminist Mill has however remained a matter of considerable debate. The purpose of this article is less to engage this speculation, but rather to invite closer consideration of what Mill actually said and wrote about women and the law in nineteenth-century England. For Mill, the law was both an instrument of women's subjection and a prospective means of liberation.     

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The shift to companionate marriage in South Asia and elsewhere is widely read as a move from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ resulting in an expansion of individual agency, especially for women. This paper critically examines the narratives of urban middle-class women in Sri Lanka spanning three generations to illustrate that rather than indicating a radical shift in the way they negotiated between individual desires and social norms, the emphasis on ‘choice’ signals a shift in the narrative devices used in the presentation of the ‘self’. The paper illustrates how young women’s narratives about marriage appear to suggest ‘modernity’ as inevitable—that its processes are reconstituting the person who, less constrained by ‘tradition’ and collective expectations, is now experiencing greater freedom in the domain of marriage. However, it also shows how urban middle-class families in Sri Lanka have collectively invested in the narrative of choice through which ‘a choosing person’ is consciously created as a mark of the family’s modernity and progress. Rather than signalling freedom, these narratives about choice reveal how women are often burdened with the risks and responsibility of agency. The paper illustrates that the ‘choosing person’ is produced through narratives that emphasise agency as a responsibility that must be exercised with caution because women are expected by and obligated to their families to make the ‘right’ choices. Hence, a closer look at the individualised ‘choosing person’ reveals a less unitary, relational self with permeable boundaries embedded within and accountable to family and kinship.     

Increasing Community College Completion Rates Among Low-Income Students: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluation of a Case-Management Intervention

Community college completion rates are low, especially among low-income students. The existing policy and research attention has primarily focused on academic and financial challenges, but there is ample reason to think that non-academic obstacles might be key drivers of dropout rates for low-income students. This study focuses on the role of “life barriers” and investigates the effectiveness of intensive case-management services for low-income community college students. We evaluate the impact of the Stay the Course (STC) intensive case-management program through a multi-armed randomized controlled trial evaluation conducted between 2013 and 2016 in Fort Worth, Texas. Analysis of administrative records indicates that STC significantly increased persistence and degree completion for women; estimates for the full sample are imprecise. The statistically significant estimates for women imply that STC tripled associate's degree receipt by 31.5 percentage points. We find no difference in outcomes between students in an emergency financial assistance (EFA) only treatment arm and the control group. Given program costs of $4,343 per person, the implied cost per additional associate's degree is $27,140. This study complements existing literature on financial and informational interventions designed to increase completion rates and is most closely related to the smaller literature examining coaching and mentoring interventions.     

Theory vs reality: partisanship and Northern Ireland's Public Accounts Committee 2011–2016

Public accounts committees (PACs) are tasked with scrutinising executive use of public money, undertaking inquiries with the support of the legislative auditor. Through several means, an expectation is placed on members to be politically neutral in undertaking committee work. However, in the context of Northern Ireland, where consociationalism entrenches binary ethno-national identities throughout the political institutions, it would be expected that party-political interests would prevail and fracture the committee. This paper analyses Northern Ireland's PAC from three perspectives alongside qualitative data from interviews with committee members: theory, party-partisanship and changes in the committee's working relationship with the legislative auditor. It is argued that over the 2011–2016 mandate, this PAC coalesced and functioned well as a unit despite expectation to the contrary, and that the changing dynamics of its working relationship with the Northern Ireland Audit Office over this time are testament to its development in this way.     

First degree murder and complicity—conditions for parity of culpability between principal and accomplice

The Law Commission for England and Wales has published for consultation a proposal for an offence of first degree murder. A person found guilty of this offence whether as a principal or an accomplice will receive a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. It is argued that the conditions for liability as an accomplice put forward by the Commission do not fulfil the Commission's aspiration for a "parity of culpability" between principals and accomplices. The discussion has general implications for the reform of complicity laws.

Participation in Youth Programs as a Catalyst for Negotiation of Family Autonomy with Connection

Current research and theory suggest that the healthy path of autonomy development involves gradual negotiation of adolescents’ independence within a context of continued family connection. This theory-generating study examined the role that adolescents’ participation in youth programs plays in these adolescent-parent negotiations. Qualitative data from high-school-aged youth in 12 programs and from a sub-sample of parents were analyzed employing methods of grounded theory. These analyses suggest that program participation provides a pathway of opportunities for youth to exercise individual choice and develop qualities of self-reliance with parental approval. In turn, parents’ observation of self-reliance in the program and youth's demonstration of these qualities in family interactions can lead to changes in adolescent-parent relationships that provide youth greater family autonomy with connection.