Reviews for Family Violence: Research and Public Policy Issues

The average rating for Family Violence: Research and Public Policy Issues based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-08 00:00:00 Darren Lyles Do you know that feeling you have when you have enjoyed a book and are about to write a review and think, "God, I hope that not everything I say sounds like a criticism." Well, I did enjoy this book, but I've a horrible feeling that might not come across. If I'd been writing this book I would have started off by calling it, "So You Think You Want to be Sherlock Holmes?" Do you know how the start of every Holmes mystery has him showing off by telling his new client (or the ever corrigible Dr Watson) what he or she has been up by his remarkable ability to connect the dots on a series of clues left on or about their person? And do you know how in some stories Holmes gets Watson to have a go first - and after Watson has invariably grabbed all the red herrings and (in my strangely appropriate pair of mixed clichés) made a meal of whole thing, Holmes then points out the correct interpretation? Well, that is as near as I can get to telling you what this book is about. In Gladwell's Blink - and I don't have a copy of the book, so I can't check that this was actually the guy he was referring to (although, if I was a betting man…) - he talks about how people do remarkably well at judging the personalities of peoplethey have never met just by spending a little time in their room. This guy has made a career out of precisely this stunt. Years ago, when I was working in local government, I did a series of personality tests. My all-time favourite was the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI). I had hoped that this would prove to be a metallic box with two moveable handles on top which one could use to control friends and family. Unfortunately, it proved to be a kind of graph in a circle. The graph was made of four points in four quadrants and each of these had its own colour - green, blue, red and yellow. Now, again, if it was me, I would have made the green quadrant beige. (Sorry, an aside: part of the process of working out what you are like was a series of flash cards that were scattered about on the floor and you had to pick up four that you felt best described you. The cards said things like: Creative, Sexy, Smart, Lively, Porn Star - you know, the sorts of things most of us think we are as a matter of course. Then there were cards I initially thought were put in the mix as a bit of a joke. I nudged my friend over one of these - Punctual. Now, I was working at the time in Strategic Research and we were doing this as a joint exercise with Financial Services. I nudged my friend and said, "Imagine coming here and picking that card. Imagine living a life in which the only positive thing you could say about yourself was that you generally turn up on time to things." We all sat down with the five adjectives we had selected that best described ourselves - I'm not sure if 'empathy' was one of mine or not now. Anyway, we each had to hold up our first - and most important - card and explain why it mattered so much to us. The first guy was from Finance and he said … I kid you not … "Punctual: Well, anyone who knows me knows I like to be on time." And, ladies and gentlemen, I can also report that he said this with real pride. I know, I'm as disturbed by this as you are, but I can only report what actually happened.) Where was I? Oh yes, personality tests. The other part of this process was to guess what your graph would look like prior to them showing the graph specially and scientifically produced on the basis of the questions asked a week before in their terribly scientific survey. What I found most disturbing about this was that the graph I drew in anticipation and the graph they produced from the survey were identical. I'm honestly not telling you this to show how incredibly self aware I am. For this book to be useful - and it is trying to be useful - it has to show you two things. Firstly, that personality types exist and secondly, that personalities are somehow able to be glimpsed via how we organise our stuff. I think the guy who wrote this book really wishes he was much more organised than he actually is. As someone proudly moderately organised - I know basically were my stuff is and don't feel in the least uneasy because in my bookcase Zola is in the top left and Balzac is in the middle of the same shelf. I try to avoid such bourgeois notions as alphabetical order. I'm also not totally sure what to make of personality types. In the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator I'm an INTP. But one day I joined an Internet group of fellow INTPs and found I had nothing in common with them at all. Also, when I got my Herrmann Brain Instrument back I found that my graph was virtually identical to the only person in the office I felt I had nothing in common with. If you were an employer and you wanted to employ someone to fill a particular gap, I'm sure getting either me or this other person would certainly not have been anything like the same experience for you. I'm telling you all this, because whatever personality types are, they definitely don't tell you what someone will be like - and if they don't tell you this, it is a bit hard to know what it is that they do tell you. I'm also a 'shades of grey' kind of guy. Are you introverted or extroverted? Well, you know, that sounds a little black and white for my tastes. So, given that personalities are problematic for me, that is going to make the rest of this book somewhat problematic too. If it is hard to say what a person's personality will be like, and, honestly, the guy who was virtually identical to me in the HBDI couldn't really have been too much more different from me, then it is hard to know what you are learning by learning someone is probably an extrovert because they like to wear loud clothes. The stuff I found most interesting in this book was that we tend to think of neurotics as being hyper-depressive, but actually they tend to be the people with motivational posters on their walls. I really liked the idea that this was the case, in fact, I have extended it to organisations generally - and so accepted this without question. The other thing was one of those nice things that are obvious once they are explained, but that I would never have thought of at all if they hadn't been explained to me. I was in this guy's office this morning. He is a HR manager. We were led into his office and it was very strange. There was nothing in the room that had any personality at all. Not a single photograph. Stuff was neat, but not really ordered. For example, there were bits of electronic equipment on the bookshelves - they weren't untidy, but you wouldn't really say they were in just the right place either. The only 'personal' things in the room were a 'footy fixtures poster' which was in his plain view for him while he was sitting at his desk and a poem of some sort about the Tigers (a local football team). This was on a shelf set so high that he would have had real trouble seeing it while sitting at his desk, but was immediately visible to anyone sitting anywhere in his office. And what did I learn from snooping about is office while he spoke? He is a man who likes to keep his private and professional lives separate. It might be that his private life is a mess (odd how I immediately checked to see if there was a wedding ring - and wasn't at all surprised to see that there wasn't) and that he sees his office as a sanctuary. All the same, he is the HR manager, and so ought to be the human face of the corporation. It was also interesting that there were no corporate symbols about his office either. If you wanted to build a nearly perfectly characterless office, it would be hard to go past this one. Don't pretend the football stuff is a symbol of his personality (although, I suspect he probably would like to be considered a Tiger). Football conversations are the conversations one has when one wants to say as little as possible about themselves. Which is possibly why they are the preferred conversations of men. My very dear friend Ruth makes up entire life stories of people in cafes based on the scantiest of evidence gleaned from half overheard conversations. I always marvel and always love these beautifully constructed factual-fictions. So, although I am not sure what a personality is, I did enjoy this book and do like the idea of becoming a snoop.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-06-23 00:00:00 Michael Cataldi Picked this up after hearing the author on NPR. It's much more theoretical/academic than I'd hoped, and the real-life anecdotes are almost exclusively drawn from the author's academic life -- so unless you are looking for lots of rumination about dorm rooms and admissions interviews, this may not be the book for you. Also, I can't remember the last time I felt an author LOVING himself as much Dr. Gosling does here. He really does think he's the shiz. If I ever discovered a guy texting the contents of my medicine chest to a friend for analysis (as the author proudly admits he did during a date), I'd throw that person out on his tuchus, award-winning professor or no.