A Roadmap for CANS Validation

In nearly every jurisdiction, juvenile or family courts will be using the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) tool to assess whether children can safely be treated in family-like settings to meet federal Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) requirements. Yet, a number of peer-reviewed publications have raised serious concerns regarding the lack of CANS validation research. Rather than reject CANS, this article provides a roadmap for validating the tool with data that jurisdictions have already collected. Courts should require these three simple analyses before relying on the assessment.     

Wither the ‘development contract’? Historical conjunctures in Naomi Hossain’s The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh’s Unexpected Success

This paper examines methodological avenues for a historical sociology of development through a close reading of Naomi Hossain’s recent book, The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh’s Unexpected Success (2017). Hossain’s conjunctural perspective, the formative moment of Bangladesh in environmental catastrophe, war and famine in the 1970s, establishes a novel account of the country’s development trajectory. Contingencies of the moment and consequent political uncertainties committed an emergent national elite to a largely informal but substantive social compact against future crises of subsistence. The result was a specific, transnational power configuration rendering Bangladesh a test case for developmental interventions and the production of knowledge regarding them. Debates in critical development studies have often posited that such ‘elite commitment’ is a consequence and not so much a precondition for social improvement, brought about through struggles from ‘below.’ How might these positions be reconciled by shifting the temporal frames of reference? By rendering historical processes legible as conflicting and complementary interactions between different social forces and actors? How can such actors be envisaged without presuming their identities and interests as fixed or given, but rather, as shaping and being shaped by such processes? These questions motivate the immanent critique and reappraisal of Hossain’s timely work, highlighting its significance for dynamic analyses of historical capitalism today through the ‘universal particularities’ of the national case.     

Multilevel Governance: Framing the Integration of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Policymaking

Scholars embrace multilevel governance as an analytical framework for complex problems, such as climate change or water pollution. However, the elements needed to comprehensively operationalize multilevel governance remain undefined in the literature. This article describes the five necessary ingredients to a multilevel framework: sanctioning and coordinating authority, provision of capacity, knowledge co-production, framing of co-benefits, and engagement of civil society. The framework’s analytical utility is illustrated through two contrasting case examples—watershed management in the United States and air quality management in China. The framework balances local and central actors, which can promote a more effective governance regime.     

The need for protection and punishment in victims of violent and nonviolent crime in the Netherlands: The effect of relational distance

A crime victim’s relationship to the offender is widely recognized as an important variable in the study of victims and the criminal justice system. However, studies concerning comparisons of the needs of victims at various relational distances to the offender are lacking. The authors studied how the victim’s need for protection and punishment correlated to the victim’s relational distance to the offender. The authors distinguished more than the usual two victim-offender relationships (known vs. stranger offender), so that the needs of victims at intermediate relational distance (offender is known to the victim, but not an intimate) to the offender might become visible. A total of 370 victims were interviewed about their reasons for reporting the crime. Respondents were divided into three groups: small (intimates), intermediate (nonintimates), and large (strangers) relational distance. While controlling for gender of the victim and type of crime, the needs of victims were found to vary with the relational distance to the offender.     

Predictors of the Likelihood to Provide Intergenerational Activities in Child and Adult Day Care Centers

Abstract

This study examined the relative contribution of various factors to the likely provision of intergenerational activities in child and adult day care settings. Two hundred and twenty-six administrators rated their: (a) current frequency of contact with children and older adults; (b) current frequency of intergenerational activities in their settings; (c) attitudes toward intergenerational exchanges, using the Inter-generational Exchanges Attitudes Scale; and (d) self-reported likelihood to provide intergenerational activities in the future. As was predicted, attitudes toward intergenerational exchanges accounted for significantly more (p< .0001) of the overall variance in likelihood scores (12.8%) than did either current intergenerational program activity (3.7%) or current intergenerational contact (2.0%).     

Chapter 11: Therapeutic Foster Parent:

Training can help foster parents manage reactions to the foster child, avoid stress and burnout, and cope with the difficult times so that placement is sustained. Training is necessary so foster parents will not take the child's aggressive behavior personally, will avoid becoming embroiled in power struggles, and will be less likely to become hurt or embarrassed by the child's behavior. Training will involve individual consultation by the social worker as well as participation in a foster parent group. Staff will assistn foster parents to develop behavioral management and communication skills as well as their own coping and self-control skills. Foster parents are given permission to take care of their own needs, are assisted in developing stress management skills, learn how to increase their own self-esteem, and learn to use cognitive approaches to handle their own emotions. Foster parents develop an understanding that they cannot change the child's behavior but can only change the way which they respond to the child, which may provide the child opportunities to change his or her own behavior.     

Foreword

No abstract available for this article.     

Contextualizing Not-Knowing: Terminology and the Role of Professional Identity

This chapter provides a context for the concept of not-knowing, including a discussion of how the concept was framed. The experience of not-knowing in professional youth work is framed in relationship to other concepts explored by the social work and therapeutic literature (including vicarious trauma, helplessness, secondary trauma, and burnout), as well as those offered by the limited youth work and nursing literature discussing similar concepts (disruption and hurt, suffering, commitment in spite of conflict, and the struggle to go along when you do not believe). The standing of youth work in the professions and its own struggles to professionalize are explored, with attention to how not-knowing affects and is affected by these efforts.     

It's Just a Little Too Human: Questions of Vocation

SUMMARY

Among youth workers who experience moments of not-knowing what to do, many often describe their thoughts and reactions to the phenomenon in vocational and existential terms. They ask what right they have to work in the helping professions if they find themselves simply unable to be helpful. In many cases, the vocational crises following experiences of not-knowing contribute to burnout and youth workers' decisions to leave the field altogether. This chapter describes the fourth of five themes associated with youth workers' experiences of not knowing what to do: questions of vocation. In addition to presenting the dominant theme, this chapter discusses the three variations on it, as described by youth worker participants: (a) What am I supposed to do? (b) Who am I to deal with this? and (c) Maybe the problem is me.