Fair Treatment or Preferred Outcome? The Impact of Police Behavior on Victim Reports of Domestic Violence Incidents

This research is an exploratory test of two hypotheses emerging from debates about how police behavior may influence domestic violence victim reporting. From a procedural justice perspective, victims should be more apt to report victimization when previous encounters with police are viewed as procedurally fair. From a distributive justice perspective, denying victims their preferred outcome may discourage future police utilization. We find that satisfaction with police is related to both distributive and procedural justice but that re-utilization of police is conditioned by preferred outcome. Specifically, if the offender was arrested in accordance with victim preference, the victim is significantly more apt to utilize police in the future.     

Use of Internet Sources in International Studies Teaching and Research

This bibliographic review discusses and evaluates cost-free, reliable, quality online content useful to academics in international studies teaching and research at the college level, including how and where to locate such materials through guides, directories, gateway sites, repositories, and various types of search engines; considerations about Internet use in college classes; and undergraduate assignments that use sources of information from the Internet. There is also consideration of characteristics and trends of college student use of the Internet for research purposes, the "invisible" or deep web, electronic information literacy for academics, and maintaining current awareness on the fast-changing web.     

Cognitive factors contributing to adolescent depression

The purpose of this study was to investigate cognitive processes, which have been found in depressed adults, that may contribute to depression in adolescents. To this end, a modified version of Kelly's Role Construct Repertory Test was administered to 15 clinically depressed adolescents, 15 somewhat depressed adolescents, and 15 nondepressed adolescents, whose ages ranged from 13 to 16 years with the majority (75%) being female. Compared to the other groups, the clinically depressed group demonstrated lower self-esteem, greater pessimism about the future, more frequent polarized construing, increased interpersonal isolation, and a more external locus of control. Results are discussed in relation to findings from previous studies and recommendations are made for future research.This study is based upon Wayne Hammond's master's thesis, which was supervised by David Romney.Received MSc. from University of Calgary. Doctoral thesis will investigate substance abuse among the native Indians.Received Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the Institute of Psychiatry (The Maudsley Hospital) in London, England. Research interests include identity formation in adolescents.     

When farmworkers and advocates see trafficking but law enforcement does not: challenges in identifying labor trafficking in North Carolina

This article reports on the perceptions and experiences with labor trafficking of farmworkers, stakeholders, and law enforcement representatives in North Carolina. We found a sizeable number of farmworkers who had experienced labor trafficking violations, albeit with a convenience sample; and community agencies reported stories of labor trafficking victimization. However, most of the state and local law enforcement agencies that we attempted to contact simply ignored our requests for information about labor trafficking or reported no evidence of such victimization. Notwithstanding the sample limitations, we found a general lack of awareness of agricultural labor trafficking problems among law enforcement officials in our surveyed jurisdictions. We question whether our current law enforcement system will ever be in a position to effectively enforce the anti-labor-trafficking law; and suggest an alternative specialized mechanism be established.     

The predictive validity of the Depression Hopelessness Suicide screening form for self-harm among prisoners

The Depression Hopelessness Suicide Screening Form (DHS) includes 12 ‘critical items’, which have not been validated for the prospective prediction of self-harm. We conducted a retrospective cohort study (N = 4196) to validate the ability of the DHS critical items to prospectively predict inmates with at least one incident of self-harm during the first six months of imprisonment. While the critical items were highly sensitive (89.5%) at predicting incidents of self-harm, 51.3% of the inmates endorsed at least one item. Five items reflecting more recent and specific risk factors reduced the referral rate to 17.7%, while maintaining high sensitivity (84.2%). While the DHS has high sensitivity to predict inmates at risk of self-harm, treating all items as equally critical results in excessive numbers of false positives that likely exceed the capacity of prison resources for professional assessment and intervention. Referral rules based on recency and specificity of risk factors are proposed.     

Psychiatric correlates of medical care costs among veterans receiving mental health care

Research on increased medical care costs associated with posttraumatic sequelae has focused on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, the provisional diagnosis of Disorders of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise Specified (DESNOS) encompasses broader trauma-related difficulties and may be uniquely related to medical costs. We investigated whether DESNOS severity was associated with greater nonmental health medical care costs in veterans receiving mental health care. Participants were 106 men and 105 women receiving VA outpatient mental health treatment. A standardized interview assessed DESNOS severity. The dependent variables consisted of primary and specialty medical treatment costs. Sequential zero-inflated negative binomial regression was used to evaluate the variance in medical costs accounted for by DESNOS severity, controlling for PTSD severity and established predisposing, enabling, and need-based health care factors. Contrary to our hypothesis, in fully adjusted models, DESNOS severity independently added a significant amount of variance to lower specialty medical care costs, whereas PTSD did not consistently account for significant variance in medical care costs. Greater DESNOS severity appears to be associated with lower specialty medical care costs but not primary care costs. These findings may indicate that patients with DESNOS symptoms are at risk for being underreferred for specialty care.