Rural youth education and support program: the Casterton experience

Young people's lives have been directly and indirectly affected by the dynamics of decline in rural Australia. In early 1999, the Casterton region experienced the suicides of two young people. These events led to the funding of a rural youth education and support program at the town's secondary college. The program adopts a multi-layered approach to reduce risk factors and strengthen the protective factors amongst students at the college through the enhancement of social connectedness, personal safety and freedom, and educational participation. The program provides interventions at the individual, school and community levels through case management, the delivery of group programs and opportunities for community participation. This approach recognises the importance of early intervention and a holistic approach to health and well-being in the student population. This paper provides an overview and preliminary evaluation of the program undertaken in 2002.

Youth publications, generation Y and hopes for the future of newspapers

If readership projections are correct, newspapers in the United States will become niche players by 2010. That is, in about half a decade fewer than half of American adults will read a daily newspaper. This will produce major problems in attracting advertising, the lifeblood of the newspaper business. The biggest decline in readership has occurred among Generation Y - people born between 1977 and 1995. They do not read newspapers to the extent their parents did. They get their news elsewhere, mainly online. As part of a process to attract readers, many of America's major publishers launched a series of youth-focused newspapers in the 18 months to March 2004. The aim was to try to get the elusive 18-24-year-old demographic into the habit of daily reading, hoping that over time they would migrate to more traditional outlets. This paper explores the background to these youth-focused publications, describes the main players and issues involved, and provides a case study of a youth-focused pioneer, the Tribune Company s Red Eye, which is published in Chicago.

A self-representation analysis of the effects of individualist-collectivist interactions within organizations in individualistic cultures

Purpose – Increasingly, organizations in the Asia-Pacific region are recognizing the importance of cross-cultural management to the sustainability of their competitive edge. Although the literature is replete with cross-cultural studies of individualism and collectivism, little information is available on the factors that foster effective individualist–collectivist interaction (ICI) within organizations. This paper attempts to provide a theoretical description of individualists and collectivists at the individual
level of analysis, which offers specific testable hypotheses about the effect of self-representation on prejudice between individualists and collectivists (ICs).

Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, a theoretical model is presented in which intergroup prejudices and interpersonal prejudices mediate the effects of ICI and bicultural orientation toward cross-cultural experiences and, in which, the dissimilarity openness of the climate
moderates the level and outcome of prejudices flowing from ICI.

Findings – The model depicts that the outcomes of ICI are mediated by the intergroup prejudices of collectivists and the interpersonal prejudices of individualists, which are moderated by the extent of diversity-oriented HRM policies and practices and individuals’ orientation to cross-cultural experiences. When workforces become culturally diverse, organizations should modify HRM practices to enable the full use of the range of skills and talents available from the diversity, and to ensure affective and behavioral costs are minimized. As globalization and international competition will continue to increase, organizations including those in the Asia-Pacific region, should seriously reevaluate their HRM policies to adapt and take advantage of an increasingly culturally diverse workforce.

Originality/value – The model provides a useful basis upon which organization researchers and practitioners can base their respective agendas.

Impact of an empowerment-based parent education program on the reduction of youth suicide risk factors

Purpose: To evaluate the impact of parent education groups on youth suicide risk factors. The potential for informal transmission of intervention impacts within school communities was assessed.

Methods: Parent education groups were offered to volunteers from 14 high schools that were closely matched to 14 comparison schools. The professionally led groups aimed to empower parents to assist one another to improve communication skills and relationships with adolescents. Australian 8th-grade students (aged 14 years) responded to classroom surveys repeated at baseline and after 3 months. Logistic regression was used to test for intervention impacts on adolescent substance use, deliquency, self-harm behavior, and depression. There were no differences between the intervention (n = 305) and comparison (n = 272) samples at baseline on the measures of depression, health behavior, or family relationships.

Results: Students in the intervention schools demonstrated increased maternal care (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] 1.9), reductions in conflict with parents (AOR .5), reduced substance use (AOR .5 to .6), and less delinquency (AOR .2). Parent education group participants were more likely to be sole parents and their children reported higher rates of substance use at baseline. Intervention impacts revealed a dose-response with the largest impacts associated with directly participating parents, but significant impacts were also evident for others in the intervention schools. Where best friend dyads were identified, the best friend’s positive family relationships reduced subsequent substance use among respondents. This and other social contagion processes were posited to explain the transfer of positive impacts beyond the minority of directly participating families.

Conclusions: A whole-school parent education intervention demonstrated promising impacts on a range of risk behaviors and protective factors relevant to youth self-harm and suicide.

Youth alcohol and other drug use in the United States and Australia: a cross-national comparison of three state-wide samples

Although youth drug and alcohol harm minimization policies in Australia are often contrasted with the abstinence and zero tolerance policies adopted in the United States, there has been little research directly comparing youth substance use behaviour in the two countries. Three state representative samples in Victoria, Australia (n = 7898) and in the US states of Oregon (n = 15 224) and Maine (n = 16 245) completed a common cross-sectional student survey. Rates of alcohol use (lifetime alcohol use, recent use in the past 30 days), alcohol use exceeding recommended consumption limits (binge drinking: five or more drinks in a session), other licit drug use (tobacco use), and norm-violating substance use (substance use at school, use in the past 30 days of marijuana or other illicit drug use) were compared for males and females at ages 12-17. Rates were lower (odds ratios 0.5-0.8) for youth in Maine and Oregon compared to Victoria for lifetime and recent alcohol use, binge drinking and daily cigarette smoking. However, rates of recent marijuana use and recent use of other illicit drugs were higher in Maine and Oregon, as were reports of being drunk or high at school. In contradiction of harm minimization objectives, Victoria, relative to the US states of Oregon and Maine, demonstrated higher rates of alcohol use exceeding recommended consumption limits and daily tobacco use. However, findings suggested that aspects of norm-violating substance use (substance use at school, marijuana use and other illicit drug use) were higher in the US states compared to Victoria.

How using a wiki can help break the ice between cultures

In this paper, we describe how a wiki has been used to help break the ice between cultures in an online subject. The number of International student enrollments has been on the increase in recent years and therefore the student demographics within the classroom have changed. It is the intension of this paper to show how a wiki has been implemented to promote interaction between students from different cultures.

Mixed cultures of food-grade probiotic bacteria and enteric bacteria demonstrate both synergism and inhibition on menaquinone production

The interaction between probiotic (Enterococcus spp., Lactobacillus spp., and Lactococcus spp.) and enteric (Bacteroides spp., Escherichia coli, and Salmonella spp.) bacteria with respect to menaquinone production was examined. Menaquinones were measured in cell pellets by high-pressure liquid chromatography and the main homologues produced were MIK_7–11. The growth of both Bacteroides and E. coli cultured with the 3 probiotics was significantly inhibited with concomitant reduction in menaquinone production. The vitamin K status of humans could be affected by consumption of probiotic dairy foods via the contribution made by gut microflora.

Structural deficiency or cultural racism: the educational and social experiences of Arab-Australian youth

This paper discusses the cultural, attitudinal and structural factors that impact upon the social experiences and educational achievements of Arabic-speaking background (ASB) students in three Melbourne secondary schools with high levels of cultural and linguistic diversity. The paper makes the case for and then outlines a multidimensional approach to multicultural education to better integrate ASB students and their families into the schooling environment. Key strategies developed and tested include a model of school-community partnership, online and interactive teacher support material (TSM) as well as on-going teacher professional development workshops on reflexive approaches to cultural diversity and intercultural tension.

Conflict resolution across cultures

Objective: To investigate the dimensions of culture that may underlie difficulties in cross cultural conflict resolution.

Method: 43 Australian and 40 Chinese creative artists completed an 82-item scale measuring the four dimensions of cultural values identified by Hofstede. They then responded to two conflict scenarios by answering a series of questions based on the Littlefield, Love, Peck, and Wertheim model of conflict resolution.

Results: The groups did differ on each of the four cultural value dimensions. They interpreted and responded to the scenarios differently.

Conclusions: The value dimensions of culture are associated with conflict response, and further studies investigating the role of gender and individual conflict pathways are required in order to develop guidelines for intercultural conflict resolution more fully.

Creativity as capital in the literacy classroom: youth as multimodal designers

Many school literacy practices ignore adolescents' new digitally mediated subjectivity as it has been shaped by the new media age. Youth possess often unappreciated repertories of practice which allow them to use their imagination and creativity to combine print, visual and digital modes in combinations that can be applied to new educational, civic, media and workplace contexts. This paper reports on research in two middle years classrooms in New York City's Chinatown, where students' design skills were recognised and validated when they were encouraged to critically re-represent curricular knowledge through multimodal design. The curriculum, rather than privileging print-only representations, recognised the linguistic, social, economic and cultural capital that different students brought to school. The findings suggest schools should harness youths' creativity – that often manifests itself through their capital resources – as they integrate and adapt to the new digital affordances acquired through their out-of-school literacy practices.

Intervening early to reduce developmentally harmful substance use among youth populations

Early-onset or frequent substance use during adolescence increases the risk of developing mental health problems, as well as a range of other adverse outcomes (eg, alcohol or drug dependence, educational underachievement, health problems, social difficulties) during late adolescence and early adulthood.

Increases in rates of risky drinking among young people are particularly concerning, suggesting that an effective, evidence-based alcohol policy and preventive framework needs to be developed.

Restricting the supply of licit and illicit substances to adolescents, delaying the age that licit substances can be legally purchased, reducing positive media portrayals of substance use, and banning targeted promotions, should be universal, public prevention priorities.

Mass-media campaigns need to deliver coherent and credible evidence-based messages to young people, utilising a broad array of dissemination strategies.

Clear policy and guidelines for parents regarding appropriate alcohol use for adolescents also need to be developed.

Prevention programs should target children and adolescents in families with parents who use drugs, young people who have been suspended from school, or those with mental health problems.

Preventive screening and targeted brief interventions can be effectively delivered in a variety of settings by a range of health professionals.