Stress-Reactive Rumination,Negative Cognitive Style,and Stressors in Relationship to Depressive Symptoms in Non-Clinical Youth

The role of cognitive vulnerability in the development of depressive symptoms in youth might depend on age and gender. The current study examined cognitive vulnerability models in relationship to depressive symptoms from a developmental perspective. For that purpose, 805 youth (aged 10–18, 59.9% female) completed self-report measures. Stress-reactive rumination was strongly related to depressive symptoms. Negative cognitive style (i.e., tendency to make negative inferences) in the domains of achievement and appearance was more strongly and consistently related to depressive symptoms in girls compared to boys. Negative cognitive style in the interpersonal domain was positively related to depressive symptoms in both girls and boys, except in early adolescent girls reporting few stressors. To conclude, the cognitive vulnerability-stress interaction may be moderated by the combination of age and gender in youth, which may explain inconsistent findings so far. Current findings highlight the importance of taking into account domain specifity when examining models of depression in youth.     

we say what we are and we do what we say: feminisms in educational practice in Aotearoa New Zealand

From four countries (Canada, England, New Zealand and the United States of America) and five disciplines (Counselling & Guidance, Adult Education, Early Years Education, Indigenous Education and Human Development), five feminists in academia come together to share how feminism affects their practice. Ranging in reflections on teaching, research, service and scholarship, this article describes a cooperative enquiry into feminism in action in Aotearoa, New Zealand.     

Democratic Representation and the National Dimension in Catalan and Basque Politics

This paper contributes to the research strand within empirical democratic theory dedicated to operationalizing representation and measuring levels of responsiveness. It discusses the merits and limits of the criterion of responsiveness for assessing the functioning of representative institutions. It builds on comparative findings about the susceptibility of party hierarchies to capture by relatively privileged segments of society, and on comparative findings about the consequences of policy packaging. It posits these as two crucial mechanisms that help account for the propensity of the democratic arena to become a relatively autonomous, privileged site for the construction of ideological hegemony. Furthermore, it presents original data from an elite survey of members of regional parliaments in Spain to illuminate the role of representative institutions and parties in recent efforts to forge and consolidate a particular type of ideological hegemony—micro-nationalist hegemony—in Catalonia and the Basque Country. It contrasts and explains the political dynamics operative in the two regions, emphasizing the divergent trajectories of left-wing party construction. In so doing, it contributes to the literature on nationalism as well, by honing in on the neglected arena of democratic politics as a critical site where the struggle for the success of nationalist hegemonic projects takes place.     

Security-sector reform: development breakthrough or institutional engineering?

This article provides the academic background to the development community’s recent and growing interest in security-sector reform. It seeks to understand how this debate has evolved and the direction it may take, especially in relation to its impact on policy and the resources available for security-sector reform in developing states. Although there are numerous initiatives underway that relate to security-sector reform, the input of the development community would be valuable towards establishing a more holistic and comprehensive perspective. This provides an enormous opportunity to influence the transformation of the security sector in certain countries. Yet such progress requires a broad and sustained level of cooperation among a range of different government departments in donor countries. This has never happened before and the outlook is bleak, which will severely constrain future attempts to move from ‘institutional engineering’ to holistic security-sector reform.     

Re-centring British Government: Beliefs, Traditions and Dilemmas in Political Science

Bevir and Rhodes have offered a useful addition to the tools of political scientists by developing an interpretivist approach to political science. Interpretation is a crucial mechanism for understanding the social world but one that has been underused in political analysis. This article welcomes Bevir and Rhodes' emphasis on interpretivism but suggests that there are a number of problems in the way they use the approach. In particular: they use a narrow definition of interpretivism; they caricature the nature of existing work in political science; the concept of tradition does too much work; and they pay insufficient attention to power and power relations.     

Priority setting in agricultural research: beyond economic surplus methods

The article examines the issue of priority setting in Third World agricultural research organizations, for those research sectors and topics which—mainly because of the difficulty of quantifying benefits—are outside the domain of economic surplus and benefit/cost techniques. The issue is redefined as one of processing ill‐structured decisions, i.e., decisions in which there is no unique, identifiable, objectively optimal solution. The implications of this for the concept of rational action in this field are explored, and the results used to define a practical approach. This centres on a radical review of the possible options and criteria in priority setting, using four techniques (challenge groups, repertory grid, creativity techniques and flow charting). The final section of the article examines the decision‐making aspects of these techniques in three priority‐setting contexts of increasing difficulty: within a department, where the issue is essentially one of technical choice between competing research lines; within a major institute or research sector, where there is substantial competition for resources; and in an institute or sector which is facing a crisis of resources or relevance. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.