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Abandoned : America's lost youth and the crisis of disconnection
\"A deeply affecting exposâe of America's hidden crisis of disconnected youth, in the tradition of Matthew Desmond and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Participants' experiences and impressions of a group-based positive psychology intervention programme for rural adults in Ghana
Introduction: There is growing evidence that group-based mental health intervention programmes can encourage the development of peer support, psychosocial skills, and collaborative therapeutic relationships with longer lasting effects. This study explored participants' experiences of, perceived benefits of, and recommendations to improve a 10-session group-based multicomponent positive psychology intervention (mPPI)-the Inspired Life Programme (ILP)-designed to promote positive mental health and reduce symptoms of depression and negative affect in a sample of rural Ghanaian adults.
Method: Face-to-face semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with 18 randomly selected programme participants three months after their participation in the ILP. Data were analysed thematically with an inductive approach.
Results: Participants described their experience of the ILP as a forum for growth that granted them the opportunity to introspect, practicalise and situate everyday life challenges, connect with others, and to develop a sense of mutual accountability. Results indicate that the ILP led participants to develop a stronger sense of positivity and well-being, fructify their ideas, and to cultivate stronger social networks and relationships that led to increased vocational productiveness. Participants recommended that researchers include facets of physical health promotion in the programme and invite close relations of participants to participate in the programme.
Conclusion: This study provides the first insight into participants' experiences of a group-based mPPI in Ghana. These findings may provide useful information to inform the design of context-appropriate community-based mental health interventions to fit participants' specific needs, capacities, and circumstances.
Journal Article
The urban poor in Latin America
The urbanization of Latin America has also lead to the urbanization of its poor. Today about half of the regions poor live in cities. Yet the phenomenon of urban poverty is not one that is well studied or well understood and policy makers across Latin America are increasingly interested in policy advice on how to design programs and policies to tackle poverty. Urban Poor in Latin America argues that the causes of poverty, the nature of deprivation, and the policy levers to fight poverty are to a large extent site-specific. As such, the book looks at strategies to assist the urban poor in making the most of the opportunities offered by cities (deeper labor markets, better amenities and services, greater freedom, and possibly less discrimination) while helping them cope with the negative externalities (high cost of housing and difficulty of obtaining shelter; risks to physical safety associated with pollution and environmental contamination, but also crime and violence; other congestion costs, more isolation and possibly less social capital).
eBook
Reducing poverty through growth and social policy reform in Russia
Following the 1998 financial crisis, four out of every ten people slipped into poverty, not able to meet basic needs. Luckily, post-crisis economic rebound was impressive and broad-based ? albeit uneven ? across sectors and regions. This title explores the nature of poverty, both nationally and regionally, to identify the groups with a high poverty risk. It then examines growth-poverty linkages through the labor market, as well as the contribution of growth and inequality to the recent poverty reduction. It also considers the expected impact of WTO accession on overall growth and poverty. Finally, it focuses on the scope for improving social policy in ways that will have a direct impact on the poor.
eBook
When are poor reading skills a threat to educational achievement?
The cut-off levels of insufficient literacy skills used in national and international literacy studies have not been validated. Thus, it remains uncertain whether adult poor readers are handicapped by insufficient reading skills in everyday life, i.e. in job-related or educational activities. The primary purpose of the study was to identify a minimum level below which insufficient reading skills proved a handicap to adults in their educational efforts. One hundred and eighty-nine adults in formal adult education participated in the study. The adults' reading comprehension, decoding skills, primary language, level of exam, student and teacher ratings of the adults' reading skills, and the adults' exam grades for courses in formal adult education were obtained. Exam grades below the mean were taken as documentation of educational failure. Adults in the lowest percentile in reading skills only managed to obtain exam grades below the mean in courses placing heavy demands on their reading skills, indicating that poor reading skills were in fact a threat to the adults' educational achievements. Possible causes of insufficient reading skills were further examined. Adults in the lowest 10th percentile suffered from very poor decoding skills. Even though a larger variation was seen in the exam grades for adults in the 10-25th percentile, they too, were handicapped by poor reading comprehension. The decoding skills and socio-economic data of these adults indicated that improved reading skills might increase their chances of getting an education.
Journal Article
Dyslexia in Adults: Evidence for Deficits in Non-word Reading and in the Phonological Representation of Lexical Items
Difficulties in reading and language skills which persist from childhood into adult life are the concerns of this article. The aims were twofold: (1) to find measures of adult reading processes that validate adults' retrospective reports of difficulties in learning to read during the school years, and (2) to search for indications of basic deficits in phonological processing that may point toward underlying causes of reading difficulties. Adults who reported a history of difficulties in learning to read (n = 102) were distinctly disabled in phonological coding in reading, compared to adults without similar histories (n = 56). They were less disabled in the comprehension of written passages, and the comprehension disability was explained by the phonological difficulties. A number of indications were found that adults with poor phonological coding skills in reading (i.e., dyslexia) have basic deficits in phonological representations of spoken words, even when semantic word knowledge, phonemic awareness, educational level, and daily reading habits are taken into account. It is suggested that dyslexics possess less distinct phonological representations of spoken words.
Journal Article
Poverty and regional development in Eastern Europe and Central Asia
Regional economic development is an interest of policymakers throughout the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region. One of its principal aims is to reduce poverty in lagging regions by stimulating local economic growth. However, problems exist with this approach. First, it may miss the target. Although geographical concentrations of poverty exist, poor people also live in regions that areon averagerich. Second, the sources of the problem may be misdiagnosed. Poverty is not only related to where people are, but to who people are. In ECA, poverty is associated with low levels of education and people who are too young or too old to participate in the labor force. Under these circumstances, efforts to bring higher wage employment opportunities to poor regions may have little immediate benefit for the people who live there. Third, relying on regional economic development to address poverty in lagging regions ignores the potential role of migration. The emigration of labor, rather than the immigration of capital, may be a more effective means of reducing the poverty of individuals in lagging regions, though this is unlikely to eliminate pockets of poverty quickly.Development opportunities may exist in poor regions that markets have overlooked. Interventions must be assessed carefully. Some of the traditional instruments used to stimulate regional economic growth have mixed track records. Comprehensive, custom-tailored approaches appear to be a promising alternative. However, governments should be modest in using regional development as a tool of poverty reduction. Policies aimed at stimulating growth in poor regions should be complemented by more direct anti-poverty measures, including targeted transfers and investments in education, and efforts to remove barriers to emigration.
eBook
Adults Who Learn Differently: Help Through a Volunteer Literacy Program
In adult literacy programs today, well-intentioned but inadequately prepared volunteer tutors are being matched with learning disabled adult students without the benefit of receiving training from experts in the field of language/learning disabilities. The collaboration of adult literacy providers and learning specialists is obviously the most resourceful, yet most untried, solution to a problem that is plaguing volunteer-based programs across the country: meeting the needs of learning disabled adults. One adult literacy program—READ/San Diego of the San Diego Public Library—recognized that its volunteer tutors needed training in special instructional methods to teach adults who evidence learning disabilities. Accordingly, the program's administrator obtained the services of specialists to develop a learning disabilities tutor-training module. This article (1) presents an overview of preservice volunteer training at READ/San Diego; (2) discusses informal assessment procedures that help identify possible language/learning disabilities in adults and provide valuable information for instructional planning; and (3) describes selected multisensory teaching techniques designed especially for adults who \"learn differently.\"
Journal Article
How do Illiterate Adults React to Metalinguistic Training?
The present study focuses on the capacity of illiterate adults to master three different metalinguistic tasks: judgment of phonological length of words, initial consonant deletion, and lexical segmentation of sentences. Illiterates' performance, during a pre-test and after training, was compared with that of literates and partial illiterates (adults at the beginning of the process of acquiring literacy) who received the same training. In the pre-test, illiterates were lower than literates in the three tasks; and partial-illiterates were at an intermediate level in two of the tasks. The three groups profited from the training, especially illiterates and partial-illiterates for whom improvement was dramatic across all three tasks. Finally, the results revealed a hierarchy of difficulty across the tasks. The capacity to focus on the phonological dimension seemed to be a prerequisite for the phoneme deletion ability. The task of lexical segmentation seemed to be more a measure of syntactic awareness than a measure of phonological awareness.
Journal Article