Trajectories of Adolescent Aggression and Family Cohesion: The Potential to Perpetuate or Ameliorate Political Conflict

Correlations between intergroup violence and youth aggression are often reported. Yet longitudinal research is needed to understand the developmental factors underlying this relation, including between-person differences in within-person change in aggression through the adolescent years. Multilevel modeling was used to explore developmental and contextual influences related to risk for youth aggression using 4 waves of a prospective, longitudinal study of adolescent/mother dyad reports (le="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; line-height: 16px;">N = 820; 51% female; 10–20 years old) in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a setting of protracted political conflict. Experience with sectarian (i.e., intergroup) antisocial behavior predicted greater youth aggression; however, that effect declined with age, and youth were buffered by a cohesive family environment. The trajectory of aggression (i.e., intercepts and linear slopes) related to more youth engagement in sectarian antisocial behavior; however, being female and having a more cohesive family were associated with lower levels of youth participation in sectarian acts. The findings are discussed in terms of protective and risk factors for adolescent aggression, and more specifically, participation in sectarian antisocial behavior. The article concludes with clinical and intervention implications, which may decrease youth aggression and the perpetuation of intergroup violence in contexts of ongoing conflict.

Trauma and Family Therapy: Reflections on September 11 from Northern Ireland

This article draws on the author's experience of living and working in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Connections between the traumatic events of September 11 and the situation in the north of Ireland of ongoing civil conflict and violence are developed and aspects of therapeutic practice are described. Coping with the effects of trauma presents systemic therapists with multiple and complex challenges in whatever sociopolitical context they practice. A therapist stance that combines flexibility and openness of attitude with the creative use of therapeutic practices, including those from other modalities, will assist systemic therapists in rising to these challenges.

Philosophers and practical men: Charles Babbage, Irish merchants and the economics of information

Before the emergence of coordination of production by firms, manufacturers and merchants traded in markets with asymmetric information. Evidence suggests that the practical knowledge thus gained by these agents was well in advance of contemporary political economists and anticipates twentieth-century developments in the economics of information. Charles Babbage, who regarded merchants and manufacturers as the chief sources of reliable economic data, drew on this knowledge as revealed in the evidence of manufacturers and merchants presented to House of Commons select committees to make an important pioneering contribution to the theory of production and exchange with information asymmetries.

Child Protection Work and Family Support Practice in Five Family Centres

Academic interest in the work of family centres in the United Kingdom has largely been concerned with categorising the work of such centres in terms of issues of childcare ideology, working practices and degree of service user control. Meanwhile, the re-focusing of child protection services in order to develop child welfare services has largely dominated childcare social work in recent years, with scant attention paid to the role of family centres in relation to this debate. This study is concerned with examining the perspectives of staff and service users in five 'client focussed' family centres in Northern Ireland in relation to how child protection issues are understood and dealt with. It was found that staff enter into negotiations with both referrers and service users to conceptually reframe child protection work as family support practice. This leads to the development of partnership relationships between staff and service users based upon mutual high regard. The work of such centres leaves them well placed to provide integrated services to children in need in line with current government priorities, but could leave some children vulnerable where child protection issues are not amenable to conceptual reframing along family support lines.

Identical extraction behavior and coordination of trivalent or hexavalent f-element cations using ionic liquid and molecular solvents

The extraction of both UO22+ and trivalent lanthanide and actinide ions (Am3+, Nd3+, Eu3+) by dialkylphosphoric or dialkylphosphinic acids from aqueous solutions into the ionic liquid, 1-decyl-3-methylimidazolium bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl)imide has been studied and compared to extractions into dodecane. Radiotracer partitioning measurements show comparable patterns of distribution ratios for both the ionic liquid/aqueous and dodecane/aqueous systems, and the limiting slopes at low acidity indicate the partitioning of neutral complexes in both solvent systems. The metal ion coordination environment, elucidated from EXAFS and UV-visible spectroscopy measurements, is equivalent in the ionic liquid and dodecane solutions with coordination of the uranyl cation by two hydrogen-bonded extractant dimers, and of the trivalent cations by three extractant dimers. This is the first definitive report of a system where both the biphasic extraction equilibria and metal coordination environment are the same in an ionic liquid and a molecular organic solvent.