Jeanette Lawrence

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Hon Associate professor at University of Melbourne

Refugee crises present intractable policy problems at international, national and local levels. Refugee policy issues are misunderstood, misrepresented or inadequately processed and unresolved in the tensions of ambivalence to refugees and asylum-seekers. In this chapter, we examine whether refugee migration problems can be characterised as wicked...

In this paper, we examine relational interactions between refugee children and social institutions, building the case for the recognition of the co-occurrence and intertwining of vulnerability and agency in children’s experiences in diverse refugee situations. This developmental relational approach offers refinement of a general relational worldvie...

This chapter focuses on the processes of recognising and respecting the distinctiveness and wisdom residing in refugee communities. Recognising the distinctiveness and equality of refugees facilitates their movement from the margins of society and their social inclusion. Professional workers with experience in trauma recovery are well placed to rec...

Refugee children's experiences are situated in specific places where they interact with significant people. They are not usually asked about their perspectives although they are social agents with distinctive perspectives and feelings about relationships and events. We investigated the perspectives of refugee children on their experiences of places...

In this paper we analyze the contemporary ambivalence to child migration identified by Jacqueline Bhabha and propose a developmental relational approach that repositions child refugees as active participants and rights-bearers in society. Ambivalence involves tensions between protection of refugee children and protection of national borders, public...

Refugee children are identified as rights-bearers by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), but their rights are not uniformly honored in the policies and practices of contemporary states. How the CRC’s safeguards for refugee children’s rights are honored depends partly on what it means to be ‘a refugee child’ and partly on...

Indicators of the well-being of refugee children are under explored, especially from children’s perspectives. We used a child-friendly computer-assisted interview (CAI) to investigate patterns in refugee children’s positive and negative indicators of well-being as they resettled in Australia. Thirty-seven children aged 7 to 13 years were clients of...

Understanding the perspectives of refugee children on their lives is important for acknowledging children's rights, competence, and contributions to practice and policy. Children's perspectives are the views they construct for framing events, relationships and images, and the meanings they convey in relational coactions with other people and instit...

Digital media are beneficial for research of complex refugee issues, as they allow refugees to express their personal experiences of complex issues in ways that are not restricted by language barriers or limited in authenticity, while also offering researchers a way to systematically compare refugees’ varied experiences. We used a computerised conc...

Scholarly investigations of the first year experience identify various difficulties for students, yet few studies investigate how those difficulties relate to each other or how students� appraisals help to overcome them. We asked two cohorts of first-year students (109 in 2013, and 98 in 2014) about their experiences with 11 commonly-cited difficul...

Children from refugee backgrounds have the right and the ability to contribute to research knowledge. But they need researchers to develop methods that enact respect and are theoretically appropriate. This chapter describes a methodological approach to understanding the well-being of children from refugee backgrounds from their own perspective. Two...

In this commentary on intervention studies in times and situations of war, violence and cultural conflict, I focus on the need to appropriately position children in specific situations. This involves acknowledging their presence and their rights, recognizing their participation, and incorporating their activities with the sociocultural and ecologic...

This article reports analyses of the perspectives on their wellbeing expressed by four unaccompanied minor refugees resettling in Australia. We used a computer-assisted interview (CAI) to set up a research environment to facilitate young people's expressions and to treat them and their expressed perspectives with respect and integrity. Participants...

Children have the right to express themselves and to be involved in the construction of knowledge. In this article, we argue for the right of refugee children to express their thoughts and feelings in research, and for the obligation of researchers to enable their self-expression. We propose respect as the driving force for enabling children's righ...

We report the relationship between the cultural and educational challenges of immigrant adult students. Thirty-five recently arrived adults in a bridging course completed a self-administered, online computer interview to rate their exploration and commitment to their heritage and Australian cultures, and express their experiences with their own cha...

In this article we present a framework for the development of psychosocial indicators of wellbeing for refugee children and young people which can be used to assess outcomes of interventions in the settlement context. While some experiences of refugee children and young people overlap with the general population of children and young people, many o...

In this paper, we take forward Schwarz's (2009) disjunction between measurement-apparatus-questionnaire and measurement-apparatus-man to examine how the crisis in contemporary psychology is related to assumptions about two sets of connections in research: connections between research tools, research behaviours, and psychological phenomena; and conn...

We examined self-descriptions of children of Somali refugee families in Australian primary schools, focusing on how children’s school-related skills and needs relate to the interpretive frames of mainstream and ethnic cultures. Three groups of Grade 5 and 6 children (Somali, Disadvantaged, Advantaged) made choices among school-related skills, and r...

Inheritance events provide a window onto family relationships, especially across generations. This review brings together analyses of the expected distribution of money, land, and personal possessions, outlining for each the choices faced, the competing norms that come into play, and the concerns that may tip the balance between these. Brought out...

The purpose of this research was to document the postoperative experiences of a group of cardiac surgery patients with a view to identifying factors relevant to postsurgical mood and adjustment. Forty-six cardiac surgery patients (mean age = 63.6 years, SD = 11.0) were recruited through a cardiac rehabilitation program at a large teaching hospital...

Nurses ‘representations of their work are defined as their cognitive ‘work spaces’, a theoretical concept derived from Newell & Simon's (1977) problem-solving model and Lewin's (1935) concept of interacting positive and negative valences Using a structural equation modelling technique, a network of positive and negative features in nurses ‘work spa...

To check proposals about differences in what people think should occur in inheritance situations, two groups (mean ages 18 and 75 years) judged several actions involving inheritable things (e.g., a son sells his father's war medals; a grandfather sends all his possessions to auction). Cluster analysis confirmed that (1) differences took the form of...

To explore perceptions of inheritance events, people were asked to describe arrangements they regarded as having "worked well" or not. This approach was productive. It yielded narratives that covered positive and negative arrangements, contributed by younger and older adults (mean ages 18 and 45 with few signs of age differences). Selected for clos...

No previous research has examined the psychosocial adjustment of chronic narcolepsy patients following efficacious pharmacotherapy. In contrast, considerable research has examined the process of psychosocial adjustment following surgical relief of chronic epilepsy. This process can manifest as a clinical syndrome, the 'burden of normality', compris...

To bring out Giyoo Hatano's contributions to the understanding of culture and cognitive development, we note first his special style-thoughtful, inventive, and always focused on central issues and on combining theory with data-and then, for three areas, some of the conceptual advances he proposed. The areas have to do with ties between cognitive an...

In this article I focus on the meaning of the pathways imagery from a contemporary developmental perspective and examine the contribution of a developmental pathways approach to understanding how young people become involved in crime. From a developmental perspective a ‘pathway’ focuses attention on people's experiences. As a heuristic devise for i...

This research examines the way that judges and magistrates sentence mentally disordered people. It identifies case, court and offender factors that predict whether a sentencer imposes a treatment requirement on an offender. An archival data set of 6800 community corrections orders made by Victorian courts was analysed used CHAID multivariate analys...

We used a developmental framework to structure and analyze 24 women's personal accounts of the impact of type1 diabetes on their lives. The developmental framework draws on RIEGEL's (1979) dialectical model of how disruption leads to developmental change as the person works to regain a lost equilibrium. Our questions focused on participants' qualit...

We address the issue of how cultural psychologies relate to human everyday life-worlds. Everyday life entails the extraordinary within the ordinary, and vice versa— often described as cultural practices. We present the case of an involuntary event—breaking a leg—with all its temporarily debilitating experiences. The person became involved in a seri...

We investigated the importance of procedural safeguards for young offenders, identified by adolescents and legal professionals. Comparisons were made of the ratings of 17 individual procedural safeguards related to the story of a hypothetical young person brought before the court for stealing $50. Procedural safeguards were rated by 362 students fr...

This paper presents an account of basic internalization/externalization processes as the vehicle by which socio-cultural meanings are turned into personal sense systems. Such systems guide persons’ actions in respect to their environments. Social and personal worlds constantly mutually constrain each other in ways that lead to transformations in bo...

Intergerenerational Programs: Understanding What We Have Created. Valerie S. Kuehne (Ed.). Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 1999, 230 pp. with index, $US 49.95 (hardcover). - - Volume 15 Issue 2 - Jeanette A. Lawrence, Sarity Dodson

To extend family-oriented approaches to caregiving, participants in 2 studies were asked to distribute tasks among a set of adult children, first with information only about gender and then with systematically varied information about commitments to paid work, marriage, and/or parenting. Making the distributions, using a computer-based program, wer...

To extend family-oriented approaches to caregiving, participants in 2 studies were asked to distribute tasks among a set of adult children, first with information only about gender and then with systematically varied information about commitments to paid work, marriage, and/or parenting. Making the distributions, using a computer-based program, wer...

Care giving situations contain several features that offer opportunities for expanding the way that collaborative cognition is conceptualised and explored. These features are the presence of several possible contributors, more than one kind of change in participation, distinctions drawn among parts of a task, and differences in understanding based...

This paper presents' an overview of the development of the Personal Learning Planner (PLP). The PLP is a software based support tool developed to assist students' with their self directed learning. The educational context indicating the need for such a tool is described and the conceptual underpinnings of the three sections of the PLP are presented...

This chapter proposes ways to enrich our descriptions of work, bring out the impact of various circumstances, and link work contributions to ideas and feelings about family membership and family relationships.

Surgical alleviation of chronic epilepsy can give rise to a process of adjustment as the chronically ill patient learns to become well. This process can manifest clinically as an array of symptoms which we have previously described as the 'burden of normality'. The aim of this study was to explore the longitudinal course of post-operative adjustmen...

Inheritance distributions in families involve people in deciding about the meaning and application of equality. Using a distributive justice perspective, this study used hypothetical vignettes to examine 89 older adults' judgements about inheritance distributions to children under systematically varied conditions related to a child's relative deser...

Restorying Our Lives: Personal Growth Through Autobiographical Reflection Gary M. Kenyon and William L. Randall. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997, 191 pp., price not stated. - - Volume 12 Issue 2 - Jeanette A. Lawrence, Kellie M. Zahra

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Contemporary sociocultural theories of the development of the self in society need to explain how the social becomes personal and how development can occur in each domain. George Herbert Mead' s concept of the `Generalized Other' gives an account of the social origin of self-consciousness while retaining the transforming function of the personal. C...

This important volume deals with the issue of how to make comparisons in the field of human development. In their comparisons of various social groups, social scientists generally focus on what the differences are, rather than elucidating how and why the groups differ. Comparisons in Human Development examines ways in which different disciplines ha...

This important volume deals with the issue of how to make comparisons in the field of human development. In their comparisons of various social groups, social scientists generally focus on what the differences are, rather than elucidating how and why the groups differ. Comparisons in Human Development examines ways in which different disciplines ha...

Nurses' representations of their work are defined as their cognitive 'work spaces', a theoretical concept derived from Newell & Simon's (1977) problem-solving model and Lewin's (1935) concept of interacting positive and negative valences. Using a structural equation modelling technique, a network of positive and negative features in nurses' work sp...

The executive skills of adolescents with mild to moderate head injuries were investigated on average more than two years post accident and compared with the skills of uninjured adolescents. Subjects were 18 head-injured adolescents and 18 matched controls aged between 12 and 16. The study aimed to investigate the relative effects of head injury, ag...

This study adopted a self-presentation perspective to examine cognitive factors involved in maintaining social anxiety in men in heterosexual situations. The self-regulatory appraisals of 25 socially anxious and 25 nonanxious men were compared using a modified version of the Articulated Thoughts in Simulated Situations (ATSS) procedure (Davison, Ro...

Wassmann's (1995) analysis is complemented by questioning the adequacy of supposed omniscient and expert knowledge of the ideal type who traditionally informed investigators about how 'order is made out of chaos' in his or her culture. Stratification of societies by any criterion-age sets, gender groups or differentiation of 'experts' from 'novices...

A Procedural Justice Scale for Young People was developed to examine the criteria that Grades 7 and 9 students thought were important in judging the fairness of the procedures used to judge a case of a hypothetical young thief. A 10-item scale was developed using unidimensional scaling and factor-analytic techniques. The study supports the earlier...

Adolescents and adults planned a hypothetical unexpected party for a teenager, with and without planning aids in two studies. Errors were computed for subjects' planning of the given party task, and for their transformations of the task into one of their own. In Study 1, when planning aids were provided for all subjects, adolescents produced plans...

In many cases of unexpected infant death the cause of death cannot be ascertained. It has become convention to call such cases ‘SIDS’ (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). A simulation study of pathologists' decision-making found that there were significant differences in the procedure adopted and the diagnosis of cause of death in such cases. It was fou...

Adolescents and university students processed comprehension packages designed to induce them to adopt schemas for categorising shoplifters as either “greedy”, “needy” or “troubled” persons. Adolescents' subsequent views of shoplifters, measured on a Shop Stealing Attitude Questionnaire (SSAQ) were related to schema conditions in expected ways, demo...

A multidisciplinary team has designed a new study program for a Biology unit on the Australian Fauna and Flora. Interactive computer programs, videos, printed materials and tutorials provide students with varied learning activities, with assessment exercises feeding back to students on their progress through the material. Self-study materials in th...

We describe work in progress on the development of a model of cognitive processing for disturbance management in anesthesia. A computer simulation of a realistic and rapidly evolving disturbance has been constructed and used in an initial study with anesthesiologists. Our objective is to capture the complexities of the temporally constrained intera...

This study examined the contributions of sentencer and case (legal and extralegal) factors to magistrates' sentences for 678 drink-drivers at 2 courts. Qualitative codings of magistrates' sentencing orientations were incorporated with case factors in a multivariate statistical model of differences in fines and disqualifications. Discriminations in...

Qualitative measures of magistrates' sentencing orientations were incorporated with archival case data into a multivariate statistical model to examine the contribution of orientation–case variable interactions to penalties imposed on 688 drunk drivers by 8 magistrates in 2 Australian courts. Sentencing orientations included severity, emphasis on d...

A sociogenetic theoretical framework is applied to Berger, Berger, and Kellner's (1973) concept of cultural homelessness, extending its use beyond the sociological effects of modernity to the psychological development of persons who are closely tied to their collective-cultural contexts. The theory is grounded in the bidirectionality of cultural tr...

Australian university students' views of the nuclear arms race were analysed in two studies. A sample comparison study used Nuclear Arms Race Questionnaire (NARQ) and Position on Nuclear Weapons (PNW) scales to compare university students' views with those of high school students and community groups. University students' views were more strongly a...

In this chapter, we discuss the significance of goals as one traditional source of human actions and report analyses of university students’ goals-directed study. As a domain of interest, students’ academic work is complex enough to encompass the dynamic conditions under which goals are generated and developed and constrained enough to allow us to...

Australian students' attitudes to nuclear weapons were considered in relation to sex-role identification and political orientations. By including a measure of sex-role orientation, we hoped to clarify earlier confusion surrounding gender as a predictor of nuclear views. Our hypothesis was that men and women with feminine sex-role orientations would...

This study compared the problem-solving performance of university genetics professors and genetics students, and therefore fits the expert versus novice paradigm. The subjects solved three genetic pedigree problems. Data were gathered using standard think-aloud protocol procedures. Although the experts did not differ from the novices in terms of th...

Five women university students' representations of their learning were analysed and related to their on-going adaptations to course demands. Representations involved their goals, working plans and perceptions of difficulties. Qualitative data from students' accounts of their study in three interviews over five weeks were tabulated schematically in...

Professional magistrates' sentencing procedures were examined as prototypic cases of expert processes involved in making just decisions, with analysis of their attention to information and the inferences they drew from case details and their own patterned knowledge. Magistrates' sorting and verbalized sentencing of six shoplifting cases revealed th...

Inconsistencies in individual nurses’ decisions about ethical situations and their justifications are examined in the light of changes due to contemporary feminism and professionalization of the nursing role. Empirical identification of ambiguities identified by practitioners is suggested as a component of professional education.

Administered 6 principled and 6 nonprincipled items from the Defining Issues Test (DIT) by J. R. Rest (1979) to 3 groups of Ss selected on the basis of age, education, and high and low pretest DIT scores. Ss were 13 male and 10 female philosophy graduate students; 16 male graduate students from a conservative fundamentalist seminary (mean age 27.4...

Fifty-three external university students and a comparison group of 51 on-campus social and political theory students responded to a written questionnaire on their perceptions of the factors influencing their external studies. Responses were obtained to objective questions and by written open-ended advice to two hypothetical prospective external stu...

A model was developed at Murdoch University, Western Australia, to describe distance students’ perceptions of their aims and plans for studying a course. The model follows Polya's Heuristic and Newell & Simon's General Problem Solver of students’ plans and sub-goals for achieving those plans. Verbal reports of four students were described using the...

A hypothetical dilemma on resuscitation of an intensive care patient was presented to nurses at a workshop on ethics of critical care nursing. Nurses responded to separate questionnaires about what a charge nurse should do , and what they themselves would do in relation to ten considerations arising from the dilemma. Nurses were agreed that legal c...

This report describes the cognitive procedures which a group of Australian stipendiary utilize in court to make decisions. The study was based on an assumption that magistrates represent a group of professionals whose work involves making decisions of human significance, and on an assumption that the magistrates' own perceptions of their ways of ma...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Minnesota, 1979. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 116-122). Photocopy.

Fourteen moral judgment intervention studies, representing all those presently known to the author, were reviewed and evaluated. All used Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT) to evaluate Kolhberg's stage theory of moral development. The DIT had been administered in programs for social studies and civics, general psychological development, and moral ed...

Traces the concept of internalization through 2 lines of theorizing that include Freudian and social-learning accounts of socialization and the sociogenetic theories of general mental functions and development held by P. Janet (e.g., 1901, 1921), J. M. Baldwin (e.g., 1892, 1895), and Vygotsky. Internalization is suggested to be a process involving...