Richard K. Caputo

The Effects of Education on Business Ownership: A Longitudinal Study of Women.

This study uses a national longitudinal sample of women to examine variations in the likelihood of entering, staying, and reentering self-employment by level of educational attainment. The study found that each likelihood increased with increasing levels of education. This finding supports the notion that less-educated women may face financial or human capital constraints which limit their business pursuits. The study also identified to what extent differences in each likelihood contributed to the overall difference in the likelihood of being self-employed between more- and less-educated women. Of the three, differences in the likelihood of entry accounted for most of the overall difference in the likelihood of being self-employed between the more and less educated.

Police Response to Domestic Violence

The author analyzes the impact of the Family Options project in two Chicago police districts wherein police classified more than 67,000 emergency calls over a thirty-month period. The relationship between these calls and approximately 2,000 referrals made to the Family Options project are examined.

Patterns of Work and Poverty: Exploratory Profiles of Working-Poor Households

This study uses Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data to test one of the assumptions of the welfare reform efforts that produced the Family Support Act of 1988. Those efforts assumed that sustained labor-force participation enables the working poor to escape poverty. The results of the study question that assumption, indicating that most of those in a select group of working-poor households who were poor all the time or some of the time worked throughout the entire study period. Only some subgroups could benefit from increased labor-force participation. Expanding the use of the Earned Income Tax Credit is discussed in light of these findings.

Limits of Welfare Reform

BETWEEN THE EARLY 1950s and mid-l980s, American urban economies shifted from being centers of producing goods to centers for information processing. This shift was accompanied by corresponding changes in the size and composition of the urban employment base. Manufacturing activities were dispersed to the suburbs, exurbs, nonmetropolitan areas, and abroad; the exodus of the middle class from urban centers decreased the number of bluecollar service jobs such as maids, gas station attendants, and delivery personnel. During this “employment base hemorrhage” of blue-collar manufacturing and service jobs, the servicedriven economy helped create numerous whitecollar employment opportunities for executives, managers, professionals, and clerical employees in the inner cities as well as low-skilled service jobs such as fast-food workers and retail clerks in both urban and suburban areas.’

Family Poverty, Unemployment Rates, and AFDC Payments: Trends among Blacks and Whites

The author examines the relationships among the value of AFDC payments, unemployment rates, and family relationships in black and white poor families between 1973 and 1988. The study found that more American families became poor while AFDC payments were reduced in value, suggesting that reducing AFDC had little effect as a prod to remove American families from poverty. The study also showed that declines in poverty accompanied decreasing unemployment rates throughout the 1980s. The author argues that a more productive approach to addressing poverty revolves less around manipulating AFDC incentives as a means of welfare reform and more around reaffirming governments role in the economy. Industrial policy and welfare reform are discussed.

Managing Domestic Violence in Two Urban Police Districts

The author presents findings of a study concerning referrals from two police districts to a demonstration project called Family Options. Demographic characteristics of 1,941 referrals are presented, and the results of one hundred initial and thirty-four follow-up interviews are analyzed.

The Role of Research in the Family Service Agency

This article explores six major roles research can play. It examines some of the organizational influences that shape the nature of this research and calls for a change from the current focus on program and evaluation to the family constellation as the unit of analysis for study and action.

Family Options: A Practice/Research Model in Family Violence

A practice/research model in the area of family violence is described. Special attention is focused on how this intervention strategy targets and influences families that experience violence and the judicial and law-enforcement agencies responsible for implementing Illinoiss Domestic Violence Act.

Book ReviewHomeless Children and Youth: A New American Dilemma. Edited by Kryder-CoeJulee H., SalamonLester M., and MolnarJanice M.New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991. 324 pp.

marital therapy and (with Budman) further elucidation of the interpersonal-developmental-existential approach with individuals, and Friedman’s chapter on solution-focused therapy. Last but not least, Hoyt, Robert Rosenbaum, and Moshe Talmon offer a continued explication of single-session psychotherapy. All of these chapters are rich with clinical detail, both through the transcribed excerpts from client interviews as well as in the discussion and commentary by the contributors. The book also contains similarly structured chapters on neurolinguistic programming; rational-emotive therapy (written by Albert Ellis); a time-limited psychodynamic approach by Stephen Butler, Hans Strupp, and Jeffrey Binder; and an Erickson-influenced approach by Michael Yapko. Several chapters treat family and couple therapies, including Harry Aponte on structural family therapy and John Weakland and Richard Fisch on the MRI (Mental Research Institute, Palo Alto, California) model. Points of clinical importance are found in all of these chapters, although I am dismayed by the weak empirical base of the psychodynamic methodology espoused by Butler, Strupp, and Binder, especially in light of Strupp’s prominence in psychotherapy research. They developed their methodology from cases treated in the Vanderbilt Psychotherapy Project (Strupp & Hadley, 1978), a study in which the professional therapists were able to attain outcomes only equivalent to the nonprofessional control group. It seems to me that it is better to have no empirical base, as do most psychodynamic approaches, than to have a shaky foundation. Finally, the editors’ own opening and concluding chapters help pull together the mass of material contained in the book. For example, in their concluding chapter, “Last Words on First Sessions,” Budman, Friedman, and Hoyt postulate that a key factor in the rapid change often induced by brief psychotherapy is the therapist’s early introduction of an element of novelty:

34.95.Runaway and Homeless Youth: Strengthening Services to Families and Children. By RothmanJackWhite Plains, NY: Longman, 1991. 164 pp.

The primary drawbacks of this study have to do with the inadequacy of the research design. For instance, the study obviously lacks data in the supplemental survey of the adoption agency, a point that the author herself mentions. The selection of the sample for the author’s interview survey is too small. It is biased by the self-selected and class-recruited character-primarily middle-middle class-of the discussion circles. However, the subject-selected adoptive parents were chosen on the basis of characteristic criteria not met in the first author-selected sample, such as being adoptive parents of older children, parents who experienced a longer period of waiting before the adoption, and members who are of lower or lower-middle socioeconomic status. This book was originally published in German and translated into English. Although the translator accomplished a difficult task, the English is still confusing to an American reader because of awkward phrasing and terminology. However, despite its conventional perspective and some problematic aspects of research design, it may be useful as a view of another country’s adoption reality. American readers might have some new ideas for solving adoption problems as a result. This book may also be used as a reference for people who are considering adopting a child or who are already applicants for adoption. On the other hand, although the author explored the detailed process of the adoptive families’ constitution, the book would not be exciting reading for professionals or people who already have some knowledge of adoptive families.