Crossing the Line: Is Corporal Punishment Child Abuse?

The purpose of this study was to explore when corporal punishment crosses the line into abuse. Qualitative interviews were conducted with five child protection workers who work hand in hand with families and children where abuse allegations have been made. These audio-recorded interviews took place over a period of two weeks and the data were analyzed using grounded theory methodology. The most common themes that emerged were lack of resources, financial hardships, upbringing and MN State Statute. Given the high number of abuse allegations that are made, as well as the number of open child protection cases, it is important that research into why corporal punishment is used should be continued

Reconceptualizing Access to Justice

This Article argues that the assumptions that underlie how we currently conceptualize equal access to justice ensure that we will never achieve it. Much scholarly attention has been paid to the problem of access to justice for lowincome people, which is typically defined as unmet legal need. Most of this attention focuses on the crisis in civil courts of unrepresented parties. These scholars suggest court-focused solutions centered on providing more lawyers and legal advice to help deal with this pro se crisis. But the vast majority of justiciable civil problems are resolved (or not) without any contact with the legal system or the use of lawyers. In the current access to justice framework, lawyers are solely providers of legal advice, guiding people through the legal system but with no role in ameliorating the underlying issue that caused the legal crisis in the first place. By conflating access to justice with access to the courts, current approaches both limit the reach of the lawyer’s interventions and entirely miss the vast majority of people struggling with civil justice problems This Article therefore argues that the current conception of access to justice must be redefined because it is missing a crucial component: an examination of the limitations of our current legal services model. Lawyers must reimagine their role in achieving equal access to justice by considering and applying the lessons learned from poverty law and public interest scholars on how attorneys can achieve justice for the poor. Poverty law scholars have long advocated for the use of a wide range of lawyering skills in the broader fight against poverty and injustice, but this scholarly debate is entirely absent from our consideration of how to solve the problem of access to justice for low-income people. Applying lessons from poverty law reveals that lawyers must think creatively about their own ability to effectively intervene to solve civil justice problems beyond the confines of the courthouse

Right/Left Hemisphere Lateralization: Correlation Between Individual Differences in Subjective Wellbeing, Happiness, Life Satisfaction, Success, Personality and Thinking Styles

There has been a popularization in society of the Right hemisphere of the brain being responsible for creativity, and the Left hemisphere being responsible for logical and analytical thinking. However, it is not fully understood whether there is an underlying, neuroscientific basis to these claims or if such claims can be rendered factual. Recent studies have been conducted, revealing that right brained leaders emphasize in innovation and managing whereas left brained leaders focus on continuous improvement and planning (Kumar & Sharma 2016). The right and left hemispheres do possess interconnectedness, however as this study has shown, individuals tend to possess dominance on either hemisphere of their brain, which can then be associated with thinking styles and leadership; traits relating to the overall success of an individual, their life satisfaction, happiness, subjective well-being, and personality. Other studies have shown that there is a correlation between hemispheric dominance and the emotional intelligence in college students, which was correlated to a student’s academic success according to their score in emotional intelligence (Margaret & Lavanya 2017). From these two studies, other variables that are related to emotional intelligence, leadership, and thinking styles can be studied. Such variables include: individual personality, subjective happiness, subjective well-being, life satisfaction, and objective life success. This study hopes to determine the relation between hemispheric dominance and the mentioned variables in college students in the hopes of categorizing each participant, based on their responses, to being more left hemisphere or right hemisphere dominant, and identifying the implications of dominance as they relate to these variables

Crossing the Line: Is Corporal Punishment Child Abuse?

The purpose of this study was to explore when corporal punishment crosses the line into abuse. Qualitative interviews were conducted with five child protection workers who work hand in hand with families and children where abuse allegations have been made. These audio-recorded interviews took place over a period of two weeks and the data were analyzed using grounded theory methodology. The most common themes that emerged were lack of resources, financial hardships, upbringing and MN State Statute. Given the high number of abuse allegations that are made, as well as the number of open child protection cases, it is important that research into why corporal punishment is used should be continued

Critical Examinations of the Known and the Unknown in Social Science: Where Do We Go from Here?

If the use of social science assumptions and beliefs is what helped set fields of professional practice on the quest for recognition in the academy, what does the recent outpouring of publications on the limits of science reveal about sociocultural research prospects at the dawn of the 21st century? The last few years alone have witnessed the publication of special journal issues on the scientific wars of the nineties, year long professional association debates on the known and unknown, and new books and online data sources proclaiming the end of social science. Cumulatively, research and commentary on the limits of science offer pessimistic and optimistic arguments about advances in understanding intractable sociocultural problems that center on understanding extraordinary complexity. We come down on the optimistic side, encouraged by possibilities for using heuristic tools to identify propositions and ideologies presented across a variety of interpretive texts written to accomplish the function of expressing interpretations on the known and unknown in sociocultural research

Welfare Reform: The Positioning of Academic Work

Current welfare reform legislation raises a number of questions about how the field of human services will broaden its analytical and educational functions in a context of uncertainty about what welfare will look like in the years to come. How can information and insights about the distribution of welfare dollars and the process of leaving welfare by a heterogeneous population of clients become the basis of contrastive analysis? We describe information sources which can provide a framework for positioning academic work to use longitudinal quantitative tracking sources to lay out qualitative inquiry suggestions for collecting process data that will emerge over time. We suggest that such data will be valuable to practitioners working with persons composing their own histories in the face of the admonishing welfare construct get off welfare

Evaluation and Policy Analysis: A Communicative Framework

A major challenge for the next generation of students of human development is to help shape the paradigms by which we analyze and evaluate public policies for children and families. Advocates of building research and policy connections point to health care and stress experiences across home, school, and community as critical policy issues that expand the scope of contexts and outcomes studied. At a minimum, development researchers and practitioners will need to be well versed in available methods of inquiry; they will need to be "methodologically multilingual" when conducting evaluation and policy analysis, producing reports, and reporting their interpretations to consumer and policy audiences. This article suggests how traditional approaches to policy inquiry can be reconsidered in light of these research inquiry and communicative skills needed by all policy researchers. A fifteen year review of both policy and discourse processes research is presented to suggest ways to conduct policy studies within a communicative framework

Limitations of How We Categorize People

Social policy researchers and policy rules and regulation writers have not taken advantage of advances in assessing ways in which social representations of ideas about people can convey alternative explanations of social life. During the past decade a growing number of scholars have considered how representational practices and the representations that are outcomes of such practices have value. Neglecting to consider representational practices has consequences including failure to mobilize and sustain alternative ideologies that reject narrow perspectives on families and communities. As evidenced by recent OMB rulings on census categories, the dominant sense of meaning of population—and hence family and community—is quite similar to the 17th century sense of people as objects of a particular category in a place from which samples can be taken for statistical measurement. However, the contrastive analysis presented in this paper points out how sustained attention to consequences of use of sets of information categories collected to enumerate population to inform social policy can still materialize. In the wake of federal welfare reform, policy makers are particularly interested in questions of benefit relative to social service delivery and community revitalization. The presentation includes lessons learned from several dozen family, youth, school and community research projects

Elaborating the Grounding of the Knowledge Base on Language and Learning for Preservice Literacy Teachers

This purpose of this article is to present a qualitative inquiry into the genesis of sociolinguistic s and the contributions of eight sociolinguistic pioneers. This inquiry, based on an historical interpretation of events, reformulates the concept of validation as the social construction of a scientific knowledge base, and explicates three themes that offer a set of sociolinguistic constructs, questions, and propositions that can provide aspiring teachers with a frame of reference and set of guidelines for teaching language and literacy. An implication section, at the end of the article, illustrates sociolinguistic components that can be added to course syllabi in the preservice language and literacy curriculum