Child Maltreatment and the Acquisition of Identity Capital: A Retrospective Exploration of a Transformative Social Justice Experience

Abstract

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to explore whether secondary classes foster the acquisition of certain agentic capacities for formerly maltreated adolescents. We utilized the identity capital model (ICM) to explore the identity capital acquired by a socioeconomically diverse group of 40 Black former students in a mandatory, high school transformative social justice (TSJ) class. All participants disclosed some form of child maltreatment. The most prominent IC acquired for all participants included purpose, social perspective taking, moral-ethical reasoning, and resilience. Implications are discussed.     

“What do we want and how do we get there”: A comparative content analysis of First Nations Comprehensive Community Plans in British Columbia

First Nations are important regional development actors, and yet their development ambitions and goals have often been ignored or poorly understood by settler governments. Since 2004, the Canadian federal government has supported First Nations governments and Tribal Councils to develop Comprehensive Community Plans (CCPs)—community planning documents that are meant to set priorities and guide development in the medium to long term. This study employs a quantitative content analysis of all publicly available CCPs and related strategic planning documents in British Columbia in order to understand development priorities and in doing so, reveals a mismatch between the interests of First Nations and settler governments.     

Youth participation informing care in hospital settings

Abstract

In this article, we use an ecocultural framework to understand young people’s experiences of the care provided by a specialist children’s hospital. This framework conceptualizes hospital culture as situated and embodied rather than separate from people and practices. Young people’s responses, gathered during a one-day forum at the hospital, suggest ways in which a hospital can respond to them not just as individual bodies but also as members of the families and peer groups who form their broader web of care. Their input highlights the importance of consulting young people about the operations of health services themselves, not just about the patient-medico relationships that they experience whilst using a service.     

Trust Your Compatriots, but Count Your Change: The Roles of Trust, Mistrust and Distrust in Democracy

Although trust is clearly central to human relations of all kinds, it is less clear whether there is a role for trust in democratic politics. In this article, I argue that trust is central to democratic institutions as well as to democratic political participation, and that arguments which make distrust the central element of democracy fail. First, I argue for the centrality of trust to the democratic process. The voluntary compliance that is central to democracies relies on trust, along two dimensions: citizens must trust their legislators to have the national interest in mind and citizens must trust each other to abide by democratically established laws. Second, I refute arguments that place distrust at the centre of democratic institutions. I argue, instead, that citizens must be vigilant with respect to their legislators and fellow citizens; that is, they must be willing to ensure that the institutions are working fairly and that people continue to abide by shared regulations. This vigilance – which is reflected both in a set of institutions as well as an active citizenry – is motivated by an attitude termed 'mistrust'. Mistrust is a cautious attitude that propels citizens to maintain a watchful eye on the political and social happenings within their communities. Moreover, mistrust depends on trust: we trust fellow citizens to monitor for abuses of our own rights and privileges just as we monitor for abuses of their rights and privileges. Finally, I argue that distrust is inimical to democracy. We are, consequently, right to worry about widespread reports of trust's decline. Just as distrust is harmful to human relations of all kinds, and just as trust is central to positive human relations of all kinds, so is distrust inimical to democracy and trust central to its flourishing.     

Scale 8 Elevations on the MMPI-2 among Women Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse: Evaluating Posttraumatic Stress, Depression, and Dissociation as Predictors

This paper investigated elevations on Scale 8 of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) in women survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) in order to assess whether symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, or dissociation account for such elevations. Participants were 73 women seeking outpatient treatment for CSA after-effects at a university-based community mental health center. A stepwise multiple regression analysis was conducted, including measures of commonly reported symptoms in CSA survivors: depression, posttraumatic stress, and dissociation. Regression analyses revealed that the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) accounted for the most variance in Scale 8 scores (59%), with the BDI as the best predictor. The Impact of Event Scale (IES) did not predict Scale 8 scores significantly above that achieved by the model above. Cross-validation results indicated good generalizability. Results suggest that depression and dissociation contribute most to scores on Scale 8. Implications of these findings for the clinical and empirical use of the MMPI-2 with CSA survivors are discussed.     

Further investigation of findings reported for the Minnesota sex offender screening tool-revised

Among a number of widely used risk assessment instruments with adult sexual offenders, the Minnesota Sex Offender Screening Tool-Revised (MnSOST-R) has been subject to relatively few evaluation studies. Only two independent research groups have published replication studies in the peer-reviewed literature with data not provided by the MnSOST-R's developers, and the results regarding the accuracy of predicting sexual recidivism have been mixed. In this article, important differences between the Barbaree et al. and Langton et al. studies are presented. Analyses reported for the various subsets comprising these two samples indicate that coding discrepancies in the Barbaree et al. study account for the different findings, with a moderate level of predictive accuracy using the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve ultimately found for the MnSOST-R in both data sets.