Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Theses

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    Culturally different and successful?: case studies of gifted Vietnamese secondary students
    Koutoulogenis, Helen ( 1993-01)
    There is concern in the literature that gifted children from ‘culturally different’ populations, such as Hispanics and Blacks, are underrepresented in special programs due, in part, to the often insensitive traditional methods of identification used that do not detect particular abilities that are valued and promoted within that particular culture. Contrary to these findings, studies indicate that gifted Asians are in profusion. They present themselves as excellent, motivated students and it is almost expected that they will achieve highly in the areas of mathematics and science. The focus of this paper is a study of seven highly capable secondary school boys of Vietnamese background. In several of these cases the children have had huge hurdles to overcome including the death of a mother, escape by boat, life in a refugee camp, parents whose skills are not being utilised as well as being ‘different’. Despite this they have been successful. A case study approach was adopted to look at the nature of these students, the role of the parents and the attitudes towards giftedness. The aim is to present a holistic view of the child rather than obscure their unique characteristics in a muddle of statistics of a large scale study. This paper takes the position that it is dangerous to make such generalisations and that although gifted from the same cultural group will have certain similar traits, the assumption that common values will automatically apply to them should be curtailed as the particular circumstances of the individual child leads to different manifestations in each.
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    The influence of parental anxiety and child rearing factors on the outcome of the treatment of children with anxiety disorders in a mental health clinic
    Swinburne, Georgina ( 2003)
    The aims of the current study were to identify family characteristics unique to families with children who presented to a community mental health service with an anxiety disorder, and to determine whether any such factors were predictive of the treatment outcome for these children. Parents of children with an anxiety disorder (N=28) were compared on measures of parental anxiety and depression, and parental child-rearing and disciplinary styles, to parents of children with significant learning difficulties that were non-anxiety based (N=30) and to parents of children without any apparent psychological difficulties (N=31). Parents of anxious children reported higher rates of anxiety and depression than parents of children without psychological difficulties, however, their reports did not significantly differ from parents of children with other non-anxiety related difficulties. Treatment outcome measures consisted of clinician and parent ratings at both 3-months, and 12-months following the commencement of treatment. Results generally indicated that parental difficulties with separation predicted poor treatment outcome for children at 3-month and parental anxiety predicted poor treatment outcome at the one year follow-up. This suggested that the presence of an anxious parent may, over time, increase the child’s vulnerability to relapse, and supports the need to involve parents in treatment programs.