Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI): A Systemic Approach to Complex Developmental Trauma

Children and youth who have experienced foster care or orphanage-rearing have often experienced complex developmental trauma, demonstrating an interactive set of psychological and behavioral issues. Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) is a therapeutic model that trains caregivers to provide effective support and treatment for at-risk children. TBRI has been applied in orphanages, courts, residential treatment facilities, group homes, foster and adoptive homes, churches, and schools. It has been used effectively with children and youth of all ages and all risk levels. This article provides the research base for TBRI and examples of how it is applied.     

Revisiting Dynamic Social Impact Theory: Extensions and Applications for Political Science

Traditional social science research tends to regard political attitudes as the product of individuals’ internal processes. This approach ignores the existence of external influences on individual attitudes, particularly that of social communication. We argue that political attitudes are neither confined to the individual, nor are they wholly social constructions. This study examines how political information is structured and communicated through a social medium. We employ multi-agent simulation to replicate and extend a previous simulation of attitude formation based on Latané’s (American Psychologist 36:343–356, 1981) theory of social impact. Specifically, our extension of the previous model incorporates motivated reasoning processes, attitude persuasiveness, and agent uncertainty in order to more accurately capture the pervasiveness of social communication. These changes allow us to model effects not previously possible, such as attitude polarization and information cascades. Results from this study show that realistic structures in the distributions of attitudes can be recreated using prevailing aggregate- and individual-level models of attitude formation. By formally modeling the dynamics of social impact, researchers gain insight into social influences on individuals’ attitudes and the consequences for public opinion.     

Attributions for Improvement in Children Bullied at School

ABSTRACT

This mixed methods study describes attributions for improvement following reductions in victimization for children who were bullied at school. It also tests hypotheses from attribution theory about attributions associated with improvements. The sample was a subset of families who participated in an RCT of a family cognitive-behavioral program to reduce victimization; to be included, both the parent and child needed to report reductions in child victimization at 9 months. Attributions were compared across conditions, respondents (parents versus children) and time. Both parents and children attributed improvements most often to actions by the target child. Intervention families were more likely than control families to attribute changes to their own efforts than to external factors. The relevance of internal attributions for the success of interventions is discussed.     

The Decision Not to Furl the Confederate Flag in My Classroom

Over the last year and a half, a number of scholars, pundits, and journalists have criticized college campuses for coddling students by constructing environments that protect them from offensive opinions and evidence that disconfirms their prior attitudes. In this article, I suggest two pedagogical techniques that can help students encounter and digest evidence that may go against their preconceived worldviews and opinions: teaching rational versus irrational thought and quantitative research design and critique. Guiding undergraduates through empirical studies on sensitive topics and encouraging them to critique their findings in a rational, academic manner can help ease them into more reasoned and less reactionary discourse about race, gender, religion, politics, and any other controversial topic in today’s contentious climate. I use my own experience teaching students research design in the months following a race-related murder to illustrate the effectiveness of this method in an extreme circumstance.     

Post-secular Messianism Against the Law: Judith Butler on Walter Benjamin and ‘Sacred Life’

This essay focuses on Judith Butler’s configuration in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012a) of sacred life from the mystical motifs that traverse Walter Benjamin’s writings as the pivot of an anti-identitarian ethics committed to non-violent resistance. To gain critical leverage on Butler’s post-secular stance, my analysis turns to Talal Asad’s ‘Redeeming the “Human” Through Human Rights’ chapter from Formations of the Secular (2003), where he enunciates a disparity between a ‘pre-civil state of nature’ and the notion of ‘inalienable rights’ that informs the subject’s rights under secular law. In underscoring the secular state’s inability or refusal to ascribe sacredness to ‘real living persons’ over and against ‘“the human” conceptualized abstractly, or imagined in a state of nature’ as presumed by natural law, Asad indirectly articulates what is at stake in Butler’s explication in Parting Ways of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’. In this context, Butler unpacks Benjamin’s remarks about the sixth commandment’s non-coercive disposition and the inner struggle its provisional applicability prompts. A conception of ‘sacred life’ crystallizes through Butler’s emphasis on the open-endedness of this struggle, which encourages us to abandon a solipsistic investment in our own suffering in the process of acknowledging its eternally transient rhythm. I argue that Butler supplements this motif by drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s grounding of the political in cohabitation. My contention is that while ‘sacred life’ forms the backbone of Butler’s affirmation of civil disobedience, Arendt empowers Butler’s ethics to transcend Benjamin’s Jewish-messianic melancholy by radicalizing the passivity that refracts it.     

Agency Leaders, Gendered Institutions, and Representative Bureaucracy

This study examines three central questions: Do women state agency heads establish priorities that advance women's interests more frequently than men agency heads? Among state agency heads with women‐related top priorities, are there systematic differences between women and men in the influences on their priority choices? Do the organizational and political contexts in which agency leaders work explain variation in policy priorities? Analysis of data from a national survey of women and men department heads reveals that working in a redistributive agency affects whether a leader pursues a women‐centered policy agenda, regardless of the leader's gender, other personal characteristics, or reported influences on priority choice. The authors conclude that the way representative bureaucracy actually plays out can be more fully understood if the tenets of social science theory on gendered institutions are incorporated into analyses of how representative bureaucracy works.