This qualitative research study evaluated the impact of the Family Child Care Connection, a model designed to improve the quality of family child care for infants and toddlers. This 5-year project was administered by the YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago and implemented in four satellite networks of family child care providers located in low income…

This paper discusses the Modern School Movement (MSM), founded in 1924 by French educator Celestin Freinet (1896-1966) and widely-known throughout Europe yet largely unknown to English-speaking educators. The paper focuses on the MSM as the largest student writing network ever to have employed educational technologies as a central aspect of its…

In 1989, national attention was given to the unusual amount of cooperation and social connections among key policy actors in a major school-finance lawsuit in Kentucky. The case resulted in a judicial ruling declaring the entire state's school system unconstitutional. Accounts of this ruling attributed the unprecedented decision partly to…

This bibliographic essay describes and discusses important books in a variety of thematic areas associated with the New Age Movement, which is a distinctive communicative phenomenon characterized by unconventional beliefs and activities. The essay argues that the single subject pervading the peculiar phenomena and puzzling thoughtful critics is…

This guide for school districts offers a quick outline for developing good communications skills and public relations with news media personnel. Guidelines for good press relations are provided that emphasize the importance of keeping two-way, open communications with the media, with attention to: accuracy; being prepared; sharing the bad news as…

This journal issue concerns research projects conducted at the Hispanic Research Center of Fordham University in New York City. In the first article, Luis R. Marcos discusses research on the psychiatric evaluation and psychotherapy of bilingual Hispanic patients, focusing primarily on linguistic factors which affect evaluation and treatment of the…

The former HEW National Strategy for Youth Development (NSYD) model was created as a community-based planning and procedural tool to promote youth development and prevent delinquency. To assess the predictive power of NSYD Impact Scales in classifying youths into low, medium, and high delinquency levels, male and female students aged 10-19 years…

Teacher's behavior toward preschool children varying in attractiveness and children's behavior toward their teachers were investigated. Participating were 64 preschool children and 9 teachers. Children, who attended a private preschool in Houston, Texas, were white, equally divided by sex and age, and from middle-income homes. A group of 30 adult…

This case study, one in a series of research efforts designed to examine the utilization of the Administration on Aging's research, describes the different types of uses of findings of the Home Equity Conversion Project (HECP), which developed ways of converting home equity into usable income. The first chapter describes the project and overviews…

Although social networks play an important role in supporting families under stress, there is some evidence that families living a stressful dual career life style may have limited network resources. To describe support networks of dual career couples and to examine the relationship between the supportiveness of the network and satisfaction with…

Using longitudinal data on 101 sixth-graders who participated in the Pennsylvania Early Adolescent Transitions Study, the following two hypotheses were tested by means of path analysis: (1) the goodness of fit between a child's temperamental characteristics and the temperamental preferences held by the peer group is instrumental in determining a…

Social support is a significant component of mental health; yet, it has not been examined extensively among black Americans. This paper is a critical review of the research literature on informal social support. The review identifies how social support is conceptualized and defined, the importance of social support for mental health, and the…

The United States is known as a mobile society and recently Sweden has also seen higher rates of mobility. A study was conducted to examine how local residential mobility affects the lives of families in Sweden and in black and white communities in the United States, and to investigate how moving affects social networks. Interviews were conducted…

Recent research suggesting a link between loneliness and social networks and a difference between males and females in both the quantity and quality of relationships support the view that loneliness can be predicted by gender from social network variables. In one study, two samples were used to explore gender differences. Sample 1, 97 males and 82…

Social network analysis suggests that there may be important interactions between the source of support and the type of support offered. An alternative scoring procedure was designed for the Social Support Questionnaire (SSQ) to examine the relationships betwen social network structure, types of social support, and determinants of support…