One of the first books to unite practice, research, and theory in addressing manhood development, Manhood Development in Urban African-American Communities aids in the construction of more holistic and progressive notions of African-American manhood. Proceeding from a psychological perspective, this text explores issues of culture and race as they impact on the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral characteristics of African-American boys and men. You will see how the development of self-esteem and self-image in African-American men are specifically affected by issues of gender, race, culture, religion, and oppression. You will see how the development of self-esteem and self-image in African-American men are specifically affected by issues of gender, race, culture, religion. The understanding of culture, oppression, and gender you’ll gain from this book will enable you to promote the positive development of young men.Manhood Development in Urban African-American Communities covers theories, research, and intervention programs aimed at better understanding and addressing the challenges young African-American men face in urban areas. Psychologists, sociologists, social workers, and all others interested in research on youth development will be captivated by the books explorations of: the role of culture in the social development of African-American youth cluster profiles of racial socialization beliefs, giving special consideration to factors of spiritual/religious coping, extended family care, cultural pride reinforcement, and racial awareness oppression and sociopolitical development as a basis for interventions aimed at sociopolitical awareness and action findings from SQAKs (Student Questionnaire on Academic Performance, Cognitive Development, and Social Knowledge) completed by 100 participants of the RAAMUS (Responsible African-American Men United in Spirit) Academy and their implications for future youth interventions a multi-method study that explores the relationship between gender, spirituality, and spiritual well-being and several indices of religiosity, including religious participation and religious motivation a review of manhood and womanhood development in traditional African societies and the connection with contemporary developmentThe themes of gender, oppression-liberation, and culture found throughout Manhood Development in Urban African-American Communities provide a broad scope for the inclusion of a wide range of perspectives and disciplines, ranging from the psychological to the political. This broad perspective will bring to light the specific ways in which we need to change things to allow our young African-American men living in urban areas to form healthy, positive images of themselves as individuals and as part of a greater society in which they often face grave challenges.

Help a child meet the challenges of the “real” world! Our children spend a significant amount of time in school, working to develop the skills they need to succeed in the “real” world. But more and more, they face social and emotional challenges that can't be effectively addressed during school hours. Community Interventions to Create Change in Children reflects the efforts by psychologists to work outside the classroom, combining research with action to produce community-based interventions that address the concerns children struggle with every day: bullying and victimization, prejudice, cross-cultural friendships, poverty, and homelessness. Community Interventions to Create Change in Children presents varied interventions, methodologies, and practices with diverse groups of children. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies are used with accompanying case studies as psychologists interact with children in settings as varied as public parks, summer camps, and Kid's College, a Chicago-based program that promotes positive race relations. The book includes articles on: effective mentoring practices traditional behavioral reinforcement with homeless children survival skills for urban youth cross-cultural friendships prejudicial attitudes and behaviors and much more! Community Interventions to Create Change in Children is an essential resource for psychologists, educators, counselors, and social workers committed to making a difference in the lives of children.

Improve decision-making skills for community organizations and their leadersfrom a participatory perspective! This book will show you how (and why) participatory communities come into being and what they can accomplish, regardless of the current political climate. It also examines leadershipand the skills community leaders need to develop to be most effective. You’ll find ethnographic and psychosocial perspectives on the relationship between families and community organizations, leadership interventions designed to facilitate more effective decision-making, and moreall from organizations making a very real difference in a country that has had a strong community work tradition since the 1960s. This book presents an essential overview of the dynamics of urban low-income communities in Venezuela. With examples drawn from organizations designed to help a population that has been neglected by its government, Leadership and Organization for Community Prevention and Intervention in Venezuela is a unique source of inspiration and practical know-how. The intensive training workshops and restructuring projects documented in this book have proven to be positive and effective tools, strengthening Venezuelan communities despite the political unrest that has plagued the country. In Leadership and Organization for Community Prevention and Intervention in Venezuela, you’ll learn how community organizations are: providing shelter for people displaced by natural disasters providing essential services when the government can’tor won’t establishing community leadership rolesand helping community leaders to work more effectively transforming the perspectives of community leadersfrom narcissistic to altruistic and much more! With this book, you’ll examine the interaction between community organization and leadershipusing the liberating, dialogic, reflective, and conscientization approach developed by Latin American community psychology. The book’s approach is grounded and realistic. It highlights the outcomes of the authors’ participatory research and action in urban Venezuelan communities, focusing on organization, participation, modes of leadership, decision-making and meta-decision-making, the moral developmentand moral dilemmasof community leaders, and the interrelationship between family systems and community in Venezuela.

Increase your understanding of the etiology, prevention, and treatment of delinquency! This informative book provides you with specific strategies to assess delinquency and to increase the effectiveness of any prevention program. In addition, it presents a community peer model of delinquency with important implications for delinquency prevention programs and for delinquency research. Examining specific cultural groups in the United States, including Caucasians, East Asians, South-East Asians, Polynesians/Micronesians, and Vietnamese, as well as Japanese youths in their homeland, this model shows how families, schools, and neighborhoods affect the formation of peer groupsand how these groups can facilitate or inhibit delinquency. Culture, Peers, and Delinquency explores the interplay of historical, traditional culture with contemporary youth culture. It also examines the relationship between individual outcome and community disorganization and illustrates how peer relationships are conditioned by gender. The book will increase your understanding of the etiology, prevention, and treatment of delinquency with examples that show treatment alternatives and outcomes, focusing on: intercultural differences in major descriptors of the attitudes and activities of youth the demographics, economics, and history, as well as a fascinating and disturbing cultural analysis of the ever-increasing rate of juvenile delinquency in Japan the influence of peers and culture on Vietnamese youth gangs in Honolulu gender-difference studies of mixed-culture incarcerated adolescentsand what these youths have to say about the detention facility where they go to school a careful analysis of homes, schools, and neighborhoods in terms of their dysfunctions and how they increase the likelihood that their youth will spend time with similar peers and without adult supervision

Develop a positive working relationship between researchers and community groups focusing on HIV/AIDS prevention, and discover how to evaluate HIV/AIDS programs! An indispensable manual for everyone involved with HIV/AIDS research, prevention techniques, and the needs of individuals with HIV/AIDS, HIV/AIDS Prevention: Current Issues in Community Practice covers everything from the likelihood of condom usage by college women to the psychological effects on minority men infected with the HIV/AIDS virus. Essential reading for psychologists, research scientists who work with communities or who are involved in AIDS prevention programs, and for care takers of people with HIV/AIDS, Contemporary Topics in HIV/AIDS Prevention covers the necessary collaborative steps needed to create a positive researcher/community based organization (COB) partnership that will benefit researchers and those affected by the disease. In HIV/AIDS Prevention, you will examine many different models designed to effectively foster a positive researcher/CBO relationship while learning how to overcome problems you may encounter when researching a social issue or working with a researcher. This book also explains how and why many HIV prevention programs have been poorly evaluated due to a lack of funds and social politics. In addition, you will discover how you can obtain and/or perform a true evaluation of an HIV prevention program. In HIV/AIDS Prevention, you will explore many important issues and factors that help create successful programs, including: factors necessary for valid HIV/AIDS prevention program evaluations assessments of coping strategies, psychological variables, and the physical well-being of African- American and Latino men living with HIV/AIDS steps for the collaborative process between researchers and community groups making a good match between community-based organizations and researchers HIV/AIDS Prevention gives you pertinent information and guidelines for selecting a community-based organization to work with and the steps to creating a successful relationship. This book will give you the strategies and information you need in order to give pastoral support and prevention education to at-risk individuals. You will discover what is necessary for a true HIV/AIDS prevention program evaluation.

How well do you understand the sweeping welfare reforms of the mid-1990s? The Transition from Welfare to Work: Processes, Challenges, and Outcomes provides a comprehensive examination of the welfare-to-work initiatives that were undertaken just prior to and following the major reform of United States welfare legislation in 1996. It will familiarize you with the intent of those reforms and show you how those interventions have been implemented. It also explores the barriers to employment that must be overcome by welfare-to-work clients, and the impact of these changes on clients, employers, and society. From the editors: “Although the numbers enrolled in welfare programs dropped dramatically in the last few years of the economic expansion of the 1990s, until recently we have known very little about the conditions of families affected by welfare-to-work policies. How did welfare-to-work interventions change the lives of participants and their families? What factors helped or hindered the transition to paid work? Are welfare-to-work policies likely to have actually improved the earnings or income of former AFDC recipients? This book studies all these questions.” The Transition from Welfare to Work: Processes, Challenges, and Outcomes presents qualitative, quantitative, and econometric analyses as well as panel studies, longitudinal, and quasi-experimental designs. Beginning with a brief description of the goals and structure of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, this book examines all of the phases of the welfare-to-work process. Use it to increase your understanding of: the implementation of interventions designed to place TANF recipients in jobs the factors that impact the readiness of low-income women to enter the job market the outcomes of current and earlier welfare-to-work interventions the steps we need to take to know how these citizens are faring in the welfare-to-work environment and more!

Do all you can to minimize dangerous behaviors to benefit communities, employees, and organizations! Safety is a “real world” problem that community psychologists, industrial/organizational psychologists, industrial hygenists, human resources professionals, and corporate insurance groups must deal with on a day-to-day basis. In Workplace Safety: Individual Differences in Behavior you will examine safety behavior and discover practical interventions to help increase the safety awareness of the people in your life. This book takes a look at ways of defining and measuring safety as well as a variety of individual differences like gender, job knowledge, conscientiousness, self-efficacy, risk avoidance, and stress tolerance that are important in creating safety interventions and improving the selection and training of employees. Workplace safety is of prime importance in today's increasingly litigious society. It has been estimated that each year in the United States, there are 100,000 work-related accident or disease fatalities, 400,000 workers who become disabled, and 6 million workplace injuries. Of equal importance are driver safety and safety hazards in public spaces such as malls and individual stores. Workplace Safety: Individual Differences in Behavior examines: the importance of measurement in understanding worker abilities and defining safety behaviors the often-neglected issue of gender differences in safety definitions and research the relationship between personality variables, job, knowledge, and accident involvement the five-factor personality model for predicting safety behavior a model of safety consciousness types of safety hazards in public spaces monetary costs of accidents in malls and stores a practitioner's perspective on individual differences in safety behavior Workplace Safety: Individual Differences in Behavior takes an incisive look at these issues with a unique focus on the way individual differences in people impact safety behavior in the real world.

Educating Students to Make-a-Difference covers a range of issues related to service learning, addressing the “who,” “why,” and “so what” of service-learning experiences. It provides information that will aid in the development of service-learning programs and courses. The in-depth studies on student volunteerism found in this book will show you how incorporating student service objectives into your curriculum can improve your students’self-esteem and school involvement, as well as alleviate depression and problem behavior. Educating Students to Make-a- Difference will enhance your knowledge and understanding of volunteerism and its many benefits, showing you how to ignite the volunteer in each of your students. By encouraging volunteerism, you’ll increase your students’problem-solving and leadership skills, as well as their awareness of social issues, and see the positive impact service learning has on students, faculty and the community. Educating Students to Make-a-Difference gives qualitative and quantitative assessments of attributes that predict volunteerism in student populations and the social values that are developed or enhanced as a consequence of service-learning experiences. You’ll learn about student predispositions and motivations for community service across a variety of student populations. In addition to promoting moral and social values, service-learning opportunities present educational benefits as well as benefits to personal and professional growth. You will see this as the book explores: the “who”, “why”, and “so what” of service learning educational benefits of service-learning opportunities self-esteem and self-efficacy faculty benefits comparisons between volunteers and nonvolunteers motivations and predispositions for student volunteerism selection and retention of student volunteers Your colleagues will want to borrow your syllabus after seeing the results of your new community service incorporated class material. Educating Students to Make-a-Difference gives you the insight on student patterns and volunteerism and data to service learning activities that enhance your students’educational experiences.

Are you prepared to deliver effective services to a wide range of families and family situations?Diverse Families, Competent Families provides human service professionals with a portrait of the real lives and practical challenges of our nation's families as they face a new millennium. It examines family adaptation and competence in a variety of contexts and situations such as, day-to-day issues of coping and survival, as well as major milestones such as sending children off to school and becoming a caregiver for a family member. This unique book also spans multiple levels of families’existence, examining home, school, and the larger community to provide you with an understanding of the societal dynamics that can have an influence on families. With Diverse Families, Competent Families, you'll explore: the need to reexamine the ways that single parent families are viewed, and the risks inherent in over-generalizing about this type of family ways that men can make the most of their experience as fathers the relationship between parents’perceptions of teacher behavior and how willing they are to become involved at school the ways in which changes or disruptions in a family's functioning can influence their children's academic skills the results of an innovative intervention for “sandwiched” generation mothers who must simultaneously care for an older family member and attend to the needs of their own children ways to help Mexican immigrant parents feel more effective in their parenting rolesIn Diverse Families, Competent Families, you will discover new, and positive ways to view families, particularly ethnic minority families, low-income families, immigrant families, and families who are coping with specific life stressors such as financial loss, unemployment, divorce, and death.