Director's leadership and burnout among residential child care workers : possible implications for practice

This commentary essay discusses the findings of a study involving direct care workers of children in residential care and their perspectives regarding aspects of leadership in their institutions, in order to identify key implications for practice. The article is based on a large study conducted in Israel that examined perspectives from children, residential care workers and directors on various aspects of the social climate of their institution. In this piece we focus on the reports of 201 direct care workers in 24 Jewish residential care settings for at-risk children on levels of burnout, including emotional exhaustion and low sense of personal accomplishment with their work. We examine correlates of this phenomenon, including, among other aspects, their perception of the leadership of their institution's director. The study uses the conceptual framework suggested by Hoy, Smith & Sweetland (2002) originally used to examine the leadership of school principals. We adapted it to the residential child care context, to examine collegial leadership and trust in the director. Collegial leadership refers to workers' perceptions of the director's commitment to them and of the openness and supportiveness expressed in the leadership behaviour of the director towards his or her workers. Trust includes workers' confidence in the reliability, intentions, competence and honesty of their director. The study found that higher levels of perceived collegial leadership and higher levels of trust in the director were linked with lower levels of workers' burnout. These findings emphasize the importance of a positive working atmosphere and trusting relationships between workers and directors. The findings also highlight the benefits of a director sharing his or her knowledge with staff and his or her openness to the staff's views. Some possible key implications of these findings, which are further discussed in this article, include recommendations for directors' training and supervision, routine monitoring of the social climate in children's residential care settings, and the development of leadership models in those settings

'They've always been there for me': grandparental involvement and child well-being

With diversifying families, increased life expectancy, growing numbers of dual-worker households and higher rates of family breakdown, grandparents are now playing an increasing role in their grandchildren’s lives. Despite growing importance there has been little empirical research exploring how grandparental involvement impacts on young people’s well-being. This national study, which includes a survey of 1596 children (aged 11—16) and in-depth interviews with 40 young people, aimed to address this deficit. Multivariate analyses demonstrate that grandparental involvement is significantly associated with child well-being — results that are reinforced by qualitative evidence. Findings suggest grandparents may be under-recognised in the policy agenda

Peer sexual harassment in adolescence: Dimensions of the sexual harassment survey in boys and girls

The phenomenon of adolescent sexual harassment is a topic that has taken on special relevance in recent decades. However, general consensus regarding its nature, prevalence and dimensions has yet to emerge. This study used a representative sample of 3,489 Andalusian adolescents from the second stage of Compulsory Secondary Education (E.S.O.) and the Spanish Baccalaureate (Bachillerato), and it is primarily focused on two main objectives: to test the factor structure of the "sexual harassment" scale in boys and girls, and to analyzethe prevalence of hte sexual harassment among adolescent students. Descriptive analyses andconfirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were performed, allowing us to explore the nature of the phenomenon and to describe its prevalence. The results obtained revealed a two-dimensionalstructure of this scale in both boys and girls: one dimension reflecting visual-verbal forms of sexual harassment and the second dimension including physical forms. Regarding to prevalence,the outcomes shown a high prevalence of sexual harassment involvement across both sexes during adolescence. However, boys were more involved in victimization and aggression than girls. The importance of analyzing the phenomenon in greater depth is also highlighted

Exploring inequities in child welfare and child protection services: explaining the 'inverse intervention law'

Attempts to record, understand and respond to variations in child welfare and protection reporting, service patterns and outcomes are international, numerous and longstanding. Reframing such variations as an issue of inequity between children and between families opens the way to a new approach to explaining the profound difference in intervention rates between and within countries and administrative districts. Recent accounts of variation have frequently been based on the idea that there is a binary division between bias and risk (or need). Here we propose seeing supply (bias) and demand (risk) factors as two aspects of a single system, both framed, in part, by social structures. A recent finding from a study of intervention rates in England, the 'inverse intervention law', is used to illustrate the complex ways in which a range of factors interact to produce intervention rates. In turn, this analysis raises profound moral, policy, practice and research questions about current child welfare and child protection services

Animal health surveillance in Scotland in 2030: Using scenario planning to develop strategies in the context of "Brexit"

Animal health surveillance is necessary to protect human and animal health, rural economies, and the environment from the consequences of large-scale disease outbreaks. In Scotland, since the Kinnaird review in 2011, efforts have been made to engage with stakeholders to ensure that the strategic goals of surveillance are better aligned with the needs of the end-users and other beneficiaries. The aims of this study were to engage with Scottish surveillance stakeholders and multidisciplinary experts to inform the future long-term strategy for animal health surveillance in Scotland. In this paper, we describe the use of scenario planning as an effective tool for the creation and exploration of five plausible long-term futures; we describe prioritization of critical drivers of change (i.e., international trade policy, data-sharing philosophies, and public versus private resourcing of surveillance capacity) that will unpredictably influence the future implementation of animal health surveillance activities. We present 10 participant-developed strategies to support 3 long-term visions to improve future resilience of animal health surveillance and contingency planning for animal and zoonotic disease outbreaks in Scotland. In the absence of any certainty about the nature of post-Brexit trade agreements for agriculture, participants considered the best investments for long-term resilience to include data collection strategies to improve animal health benchmarking, user-benefit strategies to improve digital literacy in farming communities, and investment strategies to increase veterinary and scientific research capacity in rural areas. This is the first scenario planning study to explore stakeholder beliefs and perceptions about important environmental, technological, societal, political, and legal drivers (in addition to epidemiological “risk factors”) and effective strategies to manage future uncertainties for both the Scottish livestock industry and animal health surveillance after Brexit. This insight from stakeholders is important to improve uptake and implementation of animal heath surveillance activities and the future resilience of the livestock industry. The conclusions drawn from this study are applicable not only to Scotland but to other countries and international organizations involved in global animal health surveillance activities

Why place matters in residential care: the mediating role of place attachment in the relation between adolescents’ rights and psychological well-being

Little evidence exists on the relationship between rights’ perceptions and well-being outcomes during the adolescence, and particularly in care, as well as on the mediating role of place attachment. Young people in residential care are psychologically and socially vulnerable, showing greater difficulties than their peers do in the family. Youth’s rights fulfilment in residential care may positively affect their psychological functioning together with positive attachments to this place. A sample of 365 adolescents in residential care settings (M = 14.71, SD = 1.81) completed a set of self-reported measures, specifically, the Rights perceptions scale, the Place attachment scale and Scales of psychological well-being. Results revealed significant mediating effects of place attachment (Global scale and subscales of Friends Bonding and Place Dependence) on the relationship between Participation and Protection rights in residential care and Psychological well-being (Positive Relations with others, Personal Growth and Self-Acceptance). The positive role of rights fulfilment in residential care, specifically participation opportunities, as well as the role of youth’s attachment to the care setting are discussed based on previous evidence and theoretical assumptions. A set of practical implications is described.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Relations Between Parenting and Adolescent's Attachment in Families Differing in Solidarity Patterns

To explain attachment development in adolescence in different contexts we applied the family solidarity model (e.g., Bengtson, 2001) generally used to analyze intergenerational adult children-elderly parents relations. The model differentiates four family solidarity patterns which were assumed in our study to occur in adolescent –parent relations, though with a different distribution. We tested a susceptibility hypothesis assuming that effects of parenting will be stronger in family patterns with higher, compared with lower, affectual solidarity. A sample of Polish adolescents, their mothers ( N=570, both), and their fathers ( N=290) was surveyed as part of the Value-of-Children Study (Trommsdorff & Nauck, 2005). Four family patterns were identified: highly affectual amicable and harmonious; and less affectual and most frequently displayed detached and disharmonious patterns. The parenting susceptibility hypothesis was supported: For amicable and harmonious families, adolescents’ perception of maternal rejection was more strongly related with their attachment compared with the other family types. Partly in line with our hypothesis, effects of paternal rejection on adolescents ’ attachment were strongest in amicable families, however, not significant in harmonious families. The study demonstrates that the relation between parenting on adolescents ’ attachment representation is influenced by the pattern of family parents –child relations

Azotobacter genomes: the genome of Azotobacter chroococcum NCIMB 8003 (ATCC 4412)

The genome of the soil-dwelling heterotrophic N2-fixing Gram-negative bacterium Azotobacter chroococcum NCIMB 8003 (ATCC 4412) (Ac-8003) has been determined. It consists of 7 circular replicons totalling 5,192,291 bp comprising a circular chromosome of 4,591,803 bp and six plasmids pAcX50a, b, c, d, e, f of 10,435 bp, 13,852, 62,783, 69,713, 132,724, and 311,724 bp respectively. The chromosome has a G+C content of 66.27% and the six plasmids have G+C contents of 58.1, 55.3, 56.7, 59.2, 61.9, and 62.6% respectively. The methylome has also been determined and 5 methylation motifs have been identified. The genome also contains a very high number of transposase/inactivated transposase genes from at least 12 of the 17 recognised insertion sequence families. The Ac-8003 genome has been compared with that of Azotobacter vinelandii ATCC BAA-1303 (Av-DJ), a derivative of strain O, the only other member of the Azotobacteraceae determined so far which has a single chromosome of 5,365,318 bp and no plasmids. The chromosomes show significant stretches of synteny throughout but also reveal a history of many deletion/insertion events. The Ac-8003 genome encodes 4628 predicted protein-encoding genes of which 568 (12.2%) are plasmid borne. 3048 (65%) of these show > 85% identity to the 5050 protein-encoding genes identified in Av-DJ, and of these 99 are plasmid-borne. The core biosynthetic and metabolic pathways and macromolecular architectures and machineries of these organisms appear largely conserved including genes for CO-dehydrogenase, formate dehydrogenase and a soluble NiFe-hydrogenase. The genetic bases for many of the detailed phenotypic differences reported for these organisms have also been identified. Also many other potential phenotypic differences have been uncovered. Properties endowed by the plasmids are described including the presence of an entire aerobic corrin synthesis pathway in pAcX50f and the presence of genes for retro-conjugation in pAcX50c. All these findings are related to the potentially different environmental niches from which these organisms were isolated and to emerging theories about how microbes contribute to their communities

Community Violence and Youth: Affect, Behavior, Substance Use, and Academics

Community violence is recognized as a major public health problem (WHO, World Report on Violence and Health,2002) that Americans increasingly understand has adverse implications beyond inner-cities. However, the majority of research on chronic community violence exposure focuses on ethnic minority, impoverished, and/or crime-ridden communities while treatment and prevention focuses on the perpetrators of the violence, not on the youth who are its direct or indirect victims. School-based treatment and preventive interventions are needed for children at elevated risk for exposure to community violence. In preparation, a longitudinal, community epidemiological study, The Multiple Opportunities to Reach Excellence (MORE) Project, is being fielded to address some of the methodological weaknesses presented in previous studies. This study was designed to better understand the impact of children’s chronic exposure to community violence on their emotional, behavioral, substance use, and academic functioning with an overarching goal to identify malleable risk and protective factors which can be targeted in preventive and intervention programs. This paper describes the MORE Project, its conceptual underpinnings, goals, and methodology, as well as implications for treatment and preventive interventions and future research