The behaviour of children in foster care is influenced by a variety of factors including previous experiences of maltreatment and adverse parenting, as well as the impact of separation from birth parents and placement in care. These factors make it difficult for foster parents to accurately interpret the child's behavioural cues, a necessary precursor to sensitive parenting. The relational learning framework introduced in this article, drawing on attachment theory, facilitates the foster parents' access to some features of the child's mental representations, or internal working model, which may be pivotal in understanding the child's behaviour and therefore successfully managing it. Recent studies suggest that parents' ability to understand the child's psychological perspective, or mental state, is related to the child's cognitive and social development. This article presents a method to enhance the foster parents' understanding of the child's psychological perspective. The model is currently being evaluated for use with foster parents, mental health and social work practitioners.
This paper presents an empirical study of sex differences and sex-role stereotyping in clinical psychologists' reports.' The resul ts of numerous analyses showed no significant evidence at any point of sex differences or sex-role stereotyping in the form or the subject matter of the clinical reports.An exploratory study was developed in response to a reported finding that clinicians hold generalized, sex-role stereotyped notions of mental health for women and men (e og. Broverman et al., 1970;Fabr ik ant , 1974), and the questioning of this finding by others not impressed with the supporting research data (e vg, Stricker, 1977; Stoppard &: Ka lin , 1978). We were concerned with sex differences and sex-role stereotyping in clinical psychologists' reports. The issue we addressed was whether sex-role stereotypes enter into clinicians' evaluations of patients in a hospital setting as evidenced by the clinical report 0
METHODThe clinical reports analysed were generally written at the request of a psychiatrist, typically after the psychologist had seen the patient from three to five times and had carried out some testing. The reports included information about the patient's present behaviour and trai ts, the nature of his or her difficulties, the aspects of his or her past history which may have contributed to the difficulties, and test performance. Diagnostic information and treatment suggestions would also be offered 0 The reports were written by psychologists at Sunnyside Hospital, Chr istchurch, in 1976 and 1977. Forty-two reports were randomly selected from the 158 reports available within the categorical constraints necessary to achieve the following groupings: seven female and seven male reports in each of the 0143-3887/81/0103-149 $02.00
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