Academic literature on the topic 'Gay couples – Psychology'

The increased violence in American schools over the past decade has stimulated serious scholarship to determine the major factors underlying such violence and to develop school-based strategies for preventing it. One of the most comprehensive and systematic efforts to make sense of this body of research was presented in a book edited by Delbert S. Elliot, Beatrix A. Hamburg, and Kirk R.Williams in 1998.1 In this book scholars from the fields of social ecology, child and adolescent development, criminology, psychiatry, sociology, educational psychology, and public health presented relevant new perspectives, methodology, and data from their diverse fields. The authors developed an ecological, life course, developmental approach. The ultimate goal was to integrate diverse bodies of knowledge into a comprehensive approach to designing new basic research as well as rigorous program evaluation methods. Five themes emerged within this approach. These are summarized as follows:… 1. The interconnectedness of family, peer group, school, and neighborhood influences 2. The dynamic interaction between the individual and social contexts in influencing developmental patterns 3. Collaboration and comprehensiveness as requirements for effective prevention programs 4. The need for a public health approach to violence prevention 5. Rigorous implementation of evidence-based programs and strategies for preventing violence… This theme speaks to the ecological nature of the approach, which relates not only to the interrelationships among individuals within society but also to the connectedness and interplay across larger spheres of influence such as schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and other social institutions. An important factor in youth violence is that as a result of a cascade of major social changes in family, labor force participation, and neighborhood cohesiveness, the family, and neighborhood social institutions once responsible for youth development have been undermined. This has shifted more responsibility to the schools to fill the gap. Since 1960, urbanization, changed roles of women, and powerful media impacts has converged in a troubling mix. For both married couple families and single parent households, the parental labor force participation has sharply increased. In 1985, 63 percent of all children in the United States had working mothers. By 1998, 71 percent of all school age children ages 6 to 18 had working mothers.