Children encountering each other through storytelling: Promoting intercultural learning in schools

Abstract

Schools need concrete pedagogical tools to promote intercultural learning. The Storycrafting method is used to promote interactions between children that lead to a dynamic, rather than static, experience of culture. Children 9–11 years old exchanged stories told using the Storycrafting method with another class in Finland, Scotland, or an international school in Europe. To understand how children experience the intercultural encounters, the children’s stories and other ethnographic materials are analyzed and frames are developed. These frames are telling to entertain, telling to challenge, telling from real-life experiences, telling from shared experience, responding sensitively and responding defensively. Approaching intercultural learning through Storycrafting creates a shared narrative culture and avoids stereotyping the Other, which is a common limitation in intercultural exchange projects.     

A changing child welfare workforce: What worker characteristics are valued in child welfare?

A child welfare system is responsible for making difficult decisions. Child welfare workers are charged with assessing and determining when a child is in need of protection, including when it is necessary to intervene on behalf of children when their caregivers’ abilities and/or situation is deemed to put them at risk of abuse or neglect. Although the child welfare workforce in Ontario attended to an estimated 125,281 child maltreatment investigations in 2013, little is known about the skills, education, and experiences of these investigating workers. Notwithstanding assumptions about the qualifications and characteristics necessary for effective child welfare practice, few studies explicitly link the specific characteristics of workers to children, youth, and families achieving positive case outcomes. These assumptions have been shaped by a multitude of factors including knowledge of human resources, professional standards, and educational requriements. This study examined data from five cycles over twenty years of Ontario Incidence Studies (-1993, -1998, -2003, -2008, -2013) to provide a profile of child welfare workers. This is the first study to examine the changing profile of child welfare workers in any province in Canada and provides a foundation for developing effective recruitment and professional development strategies, and promoting a positive work environment. Policy and practice implications for the changing needs of these families are discussed.     

Adolescents’ motives for selling sex in a welfare state – A Swedish national study

In addition to money or other compensation, other motives for selling sex may be important in a welfare country such as Sweden. The aim of this study was to carry out an exploratory investigation of adolescents’ motives for selling sex in a population-based survey in Sweden. A total of 5839 adolescents from the third year of Swedish high school, mean age 18.0 years, participated in the study. The response rate was 59.7% and 51 students (0.9%) reported having sold sex. Exploratory factor analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis were used to identify groups of adolescents according to underlying motives for selling sex. Further analyses were carried out for characteristics of selling sex and risk factors. Three groups of adolescents were categorized according to their motives for selling sex: Adolescents reporting; 1) Emotional reasons, being at a greater risk of sexual abuse, using sex as a means of self-injury and having a non-heterosexual orientation. 2) Material but no Emotional reasons, who more often receive money as compensation and selling sex to a person over 25 years of age, and 3) Pleasure or no underlying motive for selling sex reported, who were mostly heterosexual males selling sex to a person under 25 years of age, the buyer was not known from the Internet, the reward was seldom money and this group was less exposed to penetrative sexual abuse or using sex as a means of self-injury. In conclusion, adolescents selling sex are a heterogeneous group in regard to underlying motives.     

Effectiveness of a school-based intervention to prevent child sexual abuse—Evaluation of the German IGEL program

BackgroundChild sexual abuse (CSA) is a problem with severe consequences for victimized children. A variety of interventions have been developed and implemented over the last decades to prevent CSA. However, most of them have not been systematically evaluated to determine their effectiveness. The IGEL program is a school-based intervention to prevent CSA in third-grade primary school children in Germany.MethodsThis study was conducted using a quasi-experimental design, in which almost 300 children and their parents from eight intervention and four control schools were surveyed three times (pretest, posttest, 3 months later). In order to measure outcomes, a questionnaire was developed based on validated instruments to assess the knowledge, courses of action and self-protective skills of the children. Furthermore, increased anxiety and generalized touch aversion were examined as potentially harmful side effects of the program.ResultsThe results clearly demonstrate increased CSA-related knowledge and courses of action in children from the intervention group compared to the control children. These effects were medium-sized and sustained for at least three months after the last session. No meaningful negative side effects were detected in the evaluation for either the children or parents.ConclusionThe outcome evaluation indicates that the IGEL program is an effective intervention in terms of knowledge about CSA and known courses of action, and may therefore contribute to the prevention of CSA in primary schools. Despite this positive core finding of the intermediate outcomes, some adaptations of the program to children with different cultural backgrounds were made prior to further dissemination.     

Area-socioeconomic disparities in mental health service use among children involved in the child welfare system

Relying on data from a nationally representative sample of youth involved in the child welfare system (CWS) in 1999–2000 (the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being, Cohort 1) and 2008–2009 (Cohort 2), this study implemented a diverse set of disparity indicators to estimate area-socioeconomic disparities in mental health (MH) services use and changes in area-socioeconomic disparities between the two cohorts. Our study found that there are area-socioeconomic disparities in MH service use, indicating that the rates of MH service use among youth referred to the CWS differ by area-socioeconomic positions defined by county-level poverty rates. We also found that area-socioeconomic disparities increased over time. However, the magnitude of the increase varied widely across disparity measures, suggesting that there are different conclusions about the trend and magnitude of area-socioeconomic disparities, depending upon which disparity measures are implemented. A greater understanding of the methodological differences among disparity measures is warranted, which will in turn impact how interventions are designed to reduce socioeconomic disparities among children in the CWS.     

Neighborhood crime undermines parenting: Violence in the vicinity of households as a predictor of aggressive discipline

Child discipline is a central component of parent-child interactions. Evidence suggests corporal discipline impairs children’s physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development and compromises their future chances, especially since it is more frequently used against at-risk children. Using geocoded data for 1209 children under the age of five and their mothers, this study analyses the relation between the occurrence of crimes in close proximity to households in four major urban municipalities of Colombia and a particularly violent corporal discipline practice: hitting children with objects. Results indicate that exposure to violent crimes, such as homicides and personal injuries, predicts a higher probability of hitting children with objects, even after controlling for a set of individual, family, and neighborhood characteristics. Sensitivity analyses suggest violent crimes are not related to other discipline methods, and less threatening crimes, such as robbery and drug trafficking, are not associated with hitting children with objects. These findings suggest households’ walls are permeable, and outside threats may interfere with families’ dynamics and well-being. Future directions and implications are discussed.     

Ongoing child welfare services: Understanding the relationship of worker and organizational characteristics to service provision

Ongoing child welfare services are put in place after completion of the initial maltreatment investigation when there is a perceived need to mitigate the risk of future harm. The knowledge of how clinical, worker, and organizational characteristics interact with this decision to provide ongoing child welfare services is not well integrated in the research literature. Using secondary data from the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect-2008, this study’s primary objective is to understand the relationship of clinical, worker, and organizational characteristics to the decision to transfer a case to ongoing child welfare services and their relative contribution to the transfer decision in Canada. Findings indicate that several clinical level variables are associated with families receiving ongoing services. Additionally, organizational factors, such as type of services offered by the organization and the number of employee support programs available to workers, significantly predicted the decision to transfer a case to ongoing services. While no worker factors, such as education, amount of training, experience, or caseload, were associated with ongoing service receipt, the intraclass correlation coefficient of the final three-level parsimonious model indicated substantial clustering at the worker level. Results indicate that Canadian child welfare workers make decisions differently based on factors not available in the current study and that what would be deemed as important worker characteristics do not necessarily predict this outcome. Findings and implications for future research are discussed.     

The impact of a statewide trauma-informed child welfare initiative on children’s permanency and maltreatment outcomes

This article presents findings of a state-wide trauma informed child-welfare initiative with the goal of improving well-being, permanency and maltreatment outcomes for traumatized children. The Massachuetts Child Trauma Project (MCTP), funded by the Administration of Children and Families, Children’s Bureau was a multi-year project implementing trauma-informed care into child welfare service delivery. The project’s implementation design included training and consultation for mental health providers in three evidence-based treatments and training of the child-welfare workforce in trauma-informed case work practice. The learning was integrated between child-welfare and mental health with Trauma Informed Leadership Teams which included leaders from both systems and the greater community. These teams developed incremental steps toward trauma-informed system improvement. This study evaluated whether MCTP was associated with reductions in child abuse and neglect, improvements in placement stability, and higher rates of permanency during the first year of implementation. Children in the intervention group had fewer total substantiated reports of maltreatment, including less physical abuse and neglect than the comparison group by the end of the intervention year. However, children in the intervention group had more maltreatment reports (substantiated or not) and total out-of-home placements than did their counterparts in the comparison group. Assignment to MCTP, however, was not associated with an increase in kinship care or adoption. Overall, the results are promising in reinforcing the importance of mobilizing communities toward improvements in child-welfare service delivery.     

Examining the psychometric properties of the Infant–Toddler Environment Rating Scale-Revised Edition in a high-stakes context

The psychometric properties of the Infant–Toddler Environment Rating Scale-Revised Edition (ITERS-R) were examined using 153 classrooms from child-care centers where resources were tied to center performance. An exploratory factor analysis revealed that the scale measures one global aspect of quality. To decrease redundancy, subsets of items were selected randomly and by experts who rated items according to ease of administration and importance to quality. The shorter subsets demonstrated good discriminant validity, adequate to good psychometric properties, and high associations to the full ITERS-R score. They also demonstrated similar associations to staff education and staff-to-child ratio, as the full instrument. The best assessment of quality was demonstrated by the shortened subset that included items that assess both structural and process features of quality. Multilevel-analyses indicated that classrooms from the same providers score more similarly on ITERS-R than classrooms from other providers. The implications for using the ITERS-R in high-stakes contexts are discussed.