Mental Health Literacy and Eating-Disordered Behavior: Beliefs of Adolescent Girls Concerning the Treatment of and Treatment-Seeking for Bulimia Nervosa

This research examined the “mental health literacy” of adolescents concerning eating-disordered behavior. A vignette describing a fictional 16-year old female meeting diagnostic criteria for bulimia nervosa was presented to 522 female high school students, followed by a series of questions concerning treatment of and treatment-seeking for the problem described. Results indicated that primary care practitioners, mothers and close female friends were most highly regarded as potential sources of help. Self-help interventions, including the use of vitamins and minerals, were also highly regarded, whereas participants were less positive about the benefits of mental health specialists and ambivalent about the use of anti-depressant medication. Most participants believed that the problem described would be difficult to treat, and that relapse was likely even given appropriate treatment. An additional finding of note was that among participants with a high level of eating disorder symptoms (n=36, 6.9%), recognition of an eating problem was poor. We conclude that beliefs likely to be conducive to low and/or inappropriate treatment-seeking for eating problems may be common among adolescent girls. In addition, the findings suggest that prevention programs for the eating disorders need to target not only at-risk individuals, but also individuals in their immediate social environment.     

State Poverty Rates: Do the New Welfare Policies Make a Difference?

This article uses four models to identify the best predictors of state poverty levels and changes in state poverty rates since the implementation of welfare reform. The policy decisions based on the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) by the states are tested along with more traditional variables identified in the literature. Using several measures of state poverty, the analysis finds that those states with the lowest poverty rates are those with the healthiest economies, and the most generous state spending on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). States with the highest percentage of their TANF rolls made up of black citizens tend to have the highest rates of poverty. Initial poverty rates are found to be important in that states with higher initial poverty levels are capable of generating a larger reduction in poverty than states with lower initial rates. With the exception of limited evidence on sanctions, none of the PRWORA–based policies were found to have any effect on poverty rates.     

The development,function and future of home furlough programs

Home furloughs are widely recognized as serving valid correctional aims. This was not always the case: when temporary release programs were first established, prevailing penal philosophy emphasized isolation from the community and institutional efforts to achieve inmate reform. It was not until penologists began to address the offender’s post-release adjustment difficulties that temporary release came to be viewed as a valuable aid to offender rehabilitation. Today, the graduation of release that home furloughs can provide make temporary release programs a routine and valuable aspect of correctional programming. Home furloughs can serve a variety of correctional objectives in addition to their principal function of facilitating inmate readjustment to the community. Temporary respites from confinement may humanize the prison experience and promote therapeutic goals. Home visits may act as incentives for good inmate behavior and may serve broader aims than those addressed by more narrowly focused conjugal visiting programs. Finally, observations of the offender’s performance on furlough may assist parole officials in evaluating an offender’s readiness for release. Although the future of temporary release programs is unclear, it appears that the multitude of functions served by home visits will insure their place in correctional programming. However new influences on correctional managers, such as the reforms proposed in the “justice model for corrections,” will undoubtedly modify the administration of temporary release programs and may well lead to some unanticipated consequences for the correctional community.     

Public preferences regarding police facebook posts: a macro-level analysis

ABSTRACT

Police agencies have adopted social media quite widely, but researchers have paid relatively little attention to the phenomenon. To date few studies have explored public reaction to police use of social media. The current study uses a purposive sample with 7,116 police Facebook posts collected from 14 different police agencies during a one-year period to answer two principal research questions: (1) with respect to the number of likes, number of shares, or number of comments regarding different themes present in police Facebook posts, are there differences among police agencies corresponding to differences in the thematic content in their postings? and (2) What factors are related to the public reaction (i.e., likes, shares, comments) to a police Facebook post? The findings from ANOVA and negative binomial regression models clearly indicate that citizens do have definite preferences on police Facebook posts – they are more likely to like and make comments on posts of police personnel and police-public relations, but less likely to share posts of Social Networking Sites. Also, they are more prone to like posts with narratives and pictures, but less likely to favor posts containing hyperlinks. Policy implications and practice guidelines, study limitations, and future research are also discussed.     

Reversing the ‘Tragedy’ of the Commons? Sustainable Management and the Commons Act 2006

The Commons Act 2006 is the first statute since the Commons Registration Act 1965 to address the problems associated with the management of common land in England and Wales. A key focus for the 2006 Act is the introduction of mechanisms for the sustainable management of common land, including self‐regulatory commons councils. This article examines the ‘sustainable’ management of common land in historical and contemporary perspective. It sets the 2006 Act, and the sustainable management of common land, in the wider context of the ongoing debate triggered by Hardin's ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ and subsequent institutional and post‐institutional scholarship on common pool resource management. It uses historical and qualitative research data drawn from three case studies to demonstrate the irrelevance of Hardin's thesis in an English context, and identifies the Commons Registration Act of 1965 as the true ‘tragedy’ of the English and Welsh commons. The case studies also illustrate the challenges posed by the introduction of legal mechanisms to promote the ecologically sustainable management of the modern commons, and inform the critique of the Commons Act 2006 developed in the article.     

The Projection of Development: Cinematic Representation as A(nother) Source of Authoritative Knowledge?

Popular representations of development need to be taken seriously (though not uncritically) as sources of authoritative knowledge, not least because this is how most people in the global North (and elsewhere) ‘encounter’ development issues. To this end, and building on the broader agenda presented in a previous article exploring the usefulness of literary representations of development, we consider three different types of cinematic representations of development: films providing uniquely instructive insights, those unhelpfully eliding and simplifying complex processes, and those that, with the benefit of historical hindsight, usefully convey a sense of the prevailing assumptions that guided and interpreted the efficacy of development-related interventions at a particular time and place. We argue that the commercial and technical imperatives governing the production of contemporary films, and ‘popular’ films in particular, generate a highly variable capacity to ‘accurately’ render key issues in development, and thereby heighten their potential to both illuminate and obscure those issues.