Sociocultural influences on disability status in Puerto Rican children.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: This article describes culturally defined meanings of childhood function and disability in Puerto Rico to provide a context for the interpretation of test scores from the Spanish translation of the Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory (PEDI). SUBJECTS AND METHODS: More than 600 Puerto Rican teachers, parents and caregivers of children with and without disabilities, and members of the general community participated in ethnographic interviews, which were designed to describe their beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge about childhood function and disability. RESULTS: Qualitative and quantitative data analysis confirmed that differences exist between Puerto Ricans and the norms established in the United States for the performance of functional skills by children, and the analysis also described Puerto Rican beliefs and attitudes toward disability. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Puerto Rican values of interdependence, añoñar (pampering or nurturing behaviors), and sobre protectiva (overprotectiveness) influence parental expectations for the capability of children with disabilities and should be considered when interpreting scores from the PEDI and establishing plans of care. Additional research is needed on the influence of contextual variables on child development and behavioral adaptations to disability.

Child abuse and the balance of power in parental relationships: an evolved domain-independent mental mechanism that accounts for behavioral variation.

Previous studies use zero-order analyses to show a link between child abuse and exposure to "stepfathers." These studies rest on a proposed evolved, domain-specific cognitive mechanism that induces adult males to abuse or kill offspring not their own and, so, contribute directly to reproductive success. However, child abuse may reflect an evolved neurological mechanism that creates behavioral plasticity and adaptability by assigning emotional weights (which in consciousness appear rationalized as costs and benefits) to choice alternatives in all behavioral domains. This mechanism should act as a selective mechanism to create enhanced ability to avoid predation (social exploitation) and to obtain access to resources, given the properties of specific ecosystems, and should control behavioral responses to variation in the balance of power in social relationships. Power equalities should elicit good treatment for both parties; power inequalities, by contrast, should elicit exploitative and coercive behavior on the part of those who hold the balance of power. This paper reports a test of both hypotheses simultaneously, controlling for a standard social science risk factor (growing up in poverty). Once we control for the balance of power in parental relationships, exposure to a stepfather and growing up in poverty show no effect on the intensity of child abuse. Powerful women negotiated affectionate behavior from their partners for both themselves and their children; powerless women's negotiations with partners usually left both themselves and their children open to violence.

Childhood origins of depression: evidence from native and nonnative women in Alaska and the Russian Far East.

Explanations for depression usually implicate contemporaneous stressors, although biologic predispositions and childhood violence may also serve as precursors. This study evaluates the relative influence of contemporaneous stressors and both intrafamilial and interethnic violence experienced in childhood. Logistic regression is applied to data collected from a random sample of 355 women aged 20-89 in 1993 who lived in Chukotka and Kamchatka in the Russian Far East and in the Aleutians and the Northwest Alaskan Native Association region of Alaska. Although two contemporaneous stressors influence the likelihood of depression, intrafamilial violence experienced in childhood and, for natives of both Alaska and the Russian Far East, childhood emotional abuse by nonnatives exhibit dramatically more important effects that do not decay with time. These findings point to a violence-induced biologic mechanism for depression in adulthood. They also warrant interventions that extend their focus to the subtle forms of emotional violence that members of one ethnic group may inflict on another and to the social power relationships that may give these forms of violence a lifelong impact.

Cultural diversity, stress, and depression: working women in the Americas.

Social support lengthens life, and stressors induce morbidity early in life and death later. Social supports and stressors, however, particularly those embedded in daily social interactions, exhibit important forms of cultural variation not yet incorporated into stress measurements. This article reports a clinically useful measure of stress applicable to culturally diverse populations. Ninety working women with a wide range of ages, educational attainments, class backgrounds, and historical origins (Africa, northwest Europe, Hispanic, and Native Americans) provided cultural data on the meaning of stress. Consensus analysis, principal components analysis and Cronbach's alpha, and logistic regression document content validity of the stress scale items and the reliability and construct validity of the stress scale. The meaning of social supports (words or acts that imply respect, equality, or help or otherwise lead one to feel special and important) and stressors (words or acts that demean, imply inferiority, impede achievement, or otherwise lead one to feel bad about oneself) experienced in the course of daily social interaction cuts across cultural differences in other realms of life. Informants with a recent history of stress experienced a risk of depressive symptoms 85 times higher than informants without such a history. Standardized cultural research methods yield an instrument based on potential cultural universals that can facilitate clinical assessment and management of stress and health outcomes, such as depression, in culturally diverse populations.

Power and gender: violence and affection experienced by children in Barbados, West Indies.

Discourses on violence conceptualize the phenomenon as a property of (1) individuals, (2) social circumstances, and (3) social relationships. Rigorous comparative tests fail to support the first and second hypotheses. Survey data collected in 1990 from a national random sample of 407 men and women aged twenty to forty-five from the West Indian island of Barbados indicate that one of four experienced physical and emotional violence as children. Boys and girls were equally likely to be abused by both mothers (or other female caregivers) and fathers (or other male caregivers); stepparents were no more likely to treat children violently than were biological parents. However, the presence of a stepfather increased the likelihood that women battered their daughters and decreased the likelihood that women battered their sons. In general, powerful women protected their children from violence, treated them affectionately, and elicited affection for them from their men. The probability that a son experienced an affectionate relationship with a biological father rose with the length of time the two lived together, but only for sons with powerful mothers. By contrast, men battered powerless women and the children of powerless women. Powerless women battered their own children.

West Indian gender relations, family planning programs and fertility decline.

Nearly all West Indian islands initiated marked fertility declines sometime between 1960 and 1970. Family planning programs have not played an important role in these declines. Neither have other variables that conventional social theory tells us should promote reduced family sizes, like education and rising standards of living. The historical experience of Barbados and Antigua, which reached replacement-level fertility in the 1980s, suggests that West Indian fertility declines reflect structural changes in national economies that created job opportunities for women. Family planning programs need to be evaluated with reference to the distinctive health and human rights goals other than fertility transition that they can effectively reach.