Growing acknowledgement of the importance of the role of kinship carers in caring and supporting children and young people in Scotland has led to a burgeoning of research on this topic. However, most research has tended to focus on the role of kinship carers. A significant gap has been direct studies into the views and experiences of children and young people living with relatives or friends. This paper seeks to address this by drawing on the findings from a small‐scale qualitative collaborative research project with 12 children and young people living in informal and formal kinship care in the Northeast of Scotland. The literature on foster and kinship care is reviewed and key themes identified. The qualitative research data is outlined employing a thematic analysis approach. The key findings are analysed with a view to the potential implications for policy and practice. The paper concludes with proposals for potential future research.

A scale is presented that assesses subjective experiences associated with the test suggestions contained in the Waterloo-Stanford Group C scale (WSGC), a group adaptation of the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale: Form (SHSS:C). This scale, along with the standard behavioral scoring system of the WSGC, was given to 926 students at the University of Connecticut. Normative data from this sample indicate that the experiential scoring scale is both reliable and valid as a measure of suggestibility. It is suggested that it may be useful to supplement behavioral scoring with experiential scoring when the WSGC is used.

No abstract

People sometimes fantasize entire complex scenarios and later define these experiences as memories of actual events rather than as imaginings. This article examines research associated with three such phenomena: past-life experiences, UFO alien contact and abduction, and memory reports of childhood ritual satanic abuse. In each case, elicitation of the fantasy events is frequently associated with hypnotic procedures and structured interviews which provide strong and repeated demands for the requisite experiences, and which then legitimate the experiences as "real memories." Research associated with these phenomena supports the hypothesis that recall is reconstructive and organized in terms of current expectations and beliefs.

Forty college students were taught facilitated communication via a commercially available training videotape. They were then asked to facilitate the communication of a confederate, who was described as developmentally disabled and unable to speak. All 40 participants produced responses that they attributed at least partially to the confederate, and most attributed all of the communication entirely to her. Eighty-nine percent produced responses corresponding to information they had received, most of which was unknown to the confederate. Responding was significantly correlated with simple ideomotor responses with a pendulum and was not affected by information about the controversy surrounding facilitated communication. These data support the hypothesis that facilitated communication is an instance of automatic writing, akin to that observed in hypnosis and with Ouija boards, and that the ability to produce automatic writing is more common than previously thought. 0In an article published in the Harvard Education Review , Biklen (1990) contended that persons with autism and other developmental disabilities are capable of unexpected literacy and advanced communication skills when their efforts are "facilitated" by the provision of physical support to a hand, wrist, or arm held over an alphabetic keyboard or facsimile. Subsequently, research (reviewed in Jacobson, Mulick, & Schwartz, 1995) revealed that the facilitator, rather than the participant, is responsible for the content of the communication. The facilitator's access to information affects the manner and extent to which communication occurs, and when different information is provided to the facilitator than to the person being facilitated, the resulting communication is consistent with the information that was presented to the facilitator (