The Reliability and Validity of a Child and Adolescent Participation in Decision Making Questionnaire

Background
There is a growing impetus across the research, policy and practice communities for children and young people to participate in decisions that affect their lives. Furthermore, there is a dearth of general instruments that measure children and young people’s views on their participation in decision making. This paper presents the reliability and validity of the Child and Adolescent Participation in Decision Making Questionnaire (CAP-DMQ) and specifically looks at a population of looked-after children where a lack of participation in decision making is an acute issue.
Methods
The participants were 151 looked after children and adolescents between 10-23 years of age who completed the 10 item CAP-DMQ. Of the participants 113 were in receipt of an advocacy service that had an aim of increasing participation in decision-making with the remaining participants not having received this service.
Results
The results showed that the CAP-DMQ had good reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = .94) and showed promising uni-dimensional construct validity through an exploratory factor analysis. The items in the CAP-DMQ also demonstrated good content validity by overlapping with prominent models of child and adolescent participation (Lundy 2007) and decision making (Halpern 2014). A regression analysis showed that age and gender were not significant predictors of CAP-DMQ scores but receipt of advocacy was a significant predictor of scores (effect size d=.88), thus showing appropriate discriminant criterion validity.
Conclusion
Overall, the CAP-DMQ showed good reliability and validity. Therefore, the measure has excellent promise for theoretical investigation in the area of child and adolescent participation in decision making and equally shows empirical promise for use as a measure in evaluating services which have increasing the participation of children and adolescents in decision making as an intended outcome.

Select Document: Sir George Radcliffe’s “Original of Government” (1639) and Absolutist Political Theory in Stuart Ireland

A seventeenth-century manuscript miscellany, which once belonged to Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, contains a short treatise on the origins of government by Sir George Radcliffe. Radcliffe was legal assistant to Sir Thomas Wentworth, lord deputy of Ireland (from January 1640 earl of Strafford and lord lieutenant). The treatise insisted on the divine origin of all human political power and implied that the best form of government was absolute monarchy, in which the monarch was free of all human law and subject to divine restraint alone. It will be suggested below that the composition of this treatise can be dated to the summer of 1639. This introduction will offer an outline of Radcliffe’s education and political career, explain the genesis of his treatise on government, point out some pertinent aspects of its argument, and finally assess the document’s significance.

Shared Photography: (Photo)journalism and political mobilisation in Rio de Janeiro's favelas

One of the most important civic phenomena emerging from favelas in Rio de Janeiro today is “community (photo)journalism”, which is practised by favela residents who are trained in journalistic and artistic techniques to raise critical awareness and promote political mobilisation in- and outside favelas. This paper looks at some of the work produced at one training place for community photographers, the agency-school Imagens do Povo (“Images of the People”) in Nova Holanda, a favela located in Rio’s North Zone. Using an ethnographic approach, this article first provides an account of the working practices of the School and its photographers. This is followed by a discussion of a small sample of their photographic work, for which we employ a social semiotic paradigm of image analysis. This methodological synergy provides insights into how these journalists document long-term structural as well as “spectacular” violence in favelas, while at the same time striving to capture some of the “beauty” of these communities. The paper concludes that this form of photographic work constitutes an important step towards a more analytical brand of journalism with different news values that encourage a more context-sensitive approach to covering urban violence and favela life.

KEYWORDS: alternative media, Imagens do Povo, multimodality, news values, photojournalism.

Applying the security-development nexus on the ground: Land restitution in Colombia

The general consensus on the security-development nexus is that both are key to achieving sustainable peace in war-torn societies. However, this debate has largely taken place among international actors, with little empirical evidence about how security and development relate to each other or are even considered by local actors. The current paper applies the security-development nexus to the case of land restitution in Colombia. Following decades of internal armed conflict, in 2012 the national government passed sweeping land restitution legislation amid on-going violence. Through in-depth interviews and focus groups with multiple actors involved in this process, ranging from international organizations to national government units, from regional institutions to local communities, the paper analyses the objectives, impact, challenges and opportunities for land restitution related to security and development. Undermining peacebuilding, a lack of coherence in the integration of security and development priorities limits the extent to which either supports, or is promoted by, land restitution efforts in Colombia. The paper concludes with reflections on how the security-development nexus may promote peacebuilding amid on-going conflict.

Implications of coping strategies and community cohesion for mental health in Colombia

In the face of mass human rights violations and constant threats to security, there is growing recognition of the resilience of people and communities. This paper builds on such work by investigating the effects of individual coping strategies, perceived community cohesion, and their interaction on mental health symptoms in Colombia. The study was conducted five years after the mass demobilisation of the former paramilitaries and takes an exploratory quantitative approach to identify two distinct forms of coping approaches among participants living in the Caribbean coast of Colombia. A constructive coping approach included active engagement, planning behaviours, emotional support, acceptance and positive reframing of daily stressors. A destructive coping approach in this study entailed denial of problems, substance use and behavioural disengagement from day-to-day stress. In addition, the strength of perceived community cohesion, or how close-knit and effective the individuals feel about the community in which they live, was examined. Structural equation modelling revealed that a constructive coping approach was significantly related to lower depression, while a destructive coping approach predicted more symptoms of depression. Although there was not a significant direct effect of perceived community cohesion on mental health outcomes, it did enhance the effect of constructive coping strategies at the trend level. That is, individuals who used constructive coping strategies and perceived their communities to be more cohesive, reported fewer depression symptoms than those who lived in less cohesive settings. Implications for promoting constructive coping strategies, as well as fostering cohesion in the community, are discussed.

Resolving conflict in bipolar societies: The fate of political settlements in Fiji and Northern Ireland

Ethnically divided societies that might be described as ‘balanced bicommunal’ (where there are two communities, each of which comes close to representing half of the population) pose a particular challenge to conventional principles of collective decision-making, and commonly threaten political stability. This article analyses the experience of two such societies – Northern Ireland and Fiji – with a view to exploring whether there are common processes in the route by which political stability has been pursued. We assess the manner in which a distinctive relationship with Great Britain and its political culture has interacted with local conditions to produce a highly competitive, bipolar party system. This leads to consideration of the devices that have been adopted in an effort to bridge the gap between the communities: the Fiji constitution as amended in 1997, and Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement of 1998. We focus, in particular, on the use of unusual (preferential voting) formulas for the election of parliamentarians and of an inclusive principle in the selection of ministers, and consider the contribution of these institutional devices to the attainment of political stability. We find that, in both cases, the intervention of forces from outside the political system had a decisive impact, though in very different ways. In addition to being underpinned by solid institutional design, for political settlements to work effectively, some minimal level of trust between rival elites is required.