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This article presents the results of a study of six low-income women, each of whom is raising a child with a suspected or diagnosed disability while also serving as an active member of the armed forces. Their experiences as they attempt to strike a balance between the highly demanding work role of the military and their role as a mother of a child with disabilities are examined. This article also discusses the personal strengths these women display, the barriers they confront, the strategies they use to negotiate competing demands, and the impact of this effort on their personal and professional lives. Practice and policy implications are drawn for early intervention and family support programs.

This quantitative research examines interrelationships among immigration stressors, resettlement challenges, and protective factors of resilience and spirituality of 56 economically disadvantaged young immigrant women in order to understand how these risk and protective factors influence their resettlement and roles as resources for family well-being. The findings highlight resilience, cultural connectedness, spirituality, and hope for the future as mediating protective factors for economically disadvantaged immigrant women as they cope with the stressors and challenges inherent in immigration and resettlement.

This field study identified the characteristics, needs, and goals of 85 applicants for a new, suburban Early Head Start program, a recent federal initiative designed to address the needs of economically disadvantaged infants and toddlers and their families. Most applicants were working-poor, two-parent families with inadequate resources for meeting their basic needs, child-care needs, and personal wants; they had goals for becoming economically self-sufficient through more education, better jobs, and more income. Yet these applicants clearly were not a monolithic group. That the three distinct sociocultural subgroups identified within the sample differed significantly in characteristics, needs, and goals highlighted the critical importance of subgroup profiles for individualized family program planning. This also indicated the need for building coordinated and culturally sensitive community service systems and for developing and implementing individualized family service agreements to facilitate child well-being and family economic self-sufficiency.

The informational inputs of teachers, educational psychologists, and school social workers to the decisions made in special educational placement were first studied separately in order to discover what variables played a part in group decisions about handicapped children. Next, stepwise multiple regression of classroom behavior items, school performance items, child characteristics, and family characteristics yielded 11 items which contributed most to the variance accounted for (r2 = .462). The findings about educational classification of handicapped children supported a multidisciplinary approach to the service delivery issues raised by PL 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act.

This exploratory survey of 723 kindergarten and first grade children in eight inner-city and five more affluent urban Catholic elementary schools presents demographic characteristics, information about assets and vulnerabilities of children's psychosocial coping in the classroom, and comparisons of these items by school grouping. Chi square and analyses of variance yielded statistically significant differences in that schools located in the lower income neighborhoods were found to have more children who were younger, African-American, and living with one parent and fewer who were Catholic. Children in inner city schools demonstrated more classroom behavioral assets supporting learning and fewer behavioral vulnerabilities inhibiting the process. Fewer inner-city children were identified as having many behavior problems. The implications of this study are considered for future program development in school social work service provision.