Janet Johnston - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Janet Johnston

Family Court Review

Parent–child contact problems (PCCP) after separation and divorce are the focus of heated debate ... more Parent–child contact problems (PCCP) after separation and divorce are the focus of heated debate in academia and the popular media as to how best to identify, assess and respond to children who resist or refuse time with a parent. Practitioners disagree about the extent to which parental alienation (PA) is a valid and widespread phenomenon versus a legal strategy to counter IPV and child abuse allegations. This study sheds light on prevailing attitudes by surveying the opinions and beliefs of 1049 interdisciplinary family law professionals who deal directly with these matters in practice. These experienced practitioners were confident about their understanding of PCCPs despite little formal instruction on relevant issues. They were less clear about the differentiation between similarly used terms, research evidence, and interventions to address the problems. Emergent themes provide insight into practitioners' beliefs about the harm caused by a parent's alienating behaviors, ...

Guilford Publications, 2004

The American journal of forensic psychology, 2005

Family Court Review, 2020

The concept of parental alienation (PA) has expanded in popular usage at the same time that it re... more The concept of parental alienation (PA) has expanded in popular usage at the same time that it remains mired in controversy about its scientific integrity and its use as a legal strategy in response to an increasing range of issues in family court. In this paper we describe how competing advocacy movements (for mothers, fathers and children) in the family justice field have, over time, helped shape the shifting definitions and widening focal concerns of PA-from children who make false allegations of abuse, to those who resist or refuse contact with a parent, to parent relocation, and to the emotional abuse wrecked upon children who are victims of a manipulative parent. In search of common ground for a sound approach to using PA concepts, we argue that the Single Factor model of PA (asserting that an alienating preferred parent is primarily the source of the problem) is inadequate, overly simplistic and misleading. A Single Factor model rests on the fallacy that abuse or poor parenting on the part of either parent have been, or are able to be, ruled out as sufficient reason for the child's rejecting stance. By contrast, multi-factor models of PA make more useful, valid, differentiated clinical predictions of children's rejection of a parent, informed by basic and applied research on children and families. However, multi-factor models are complex and difficult to argue in court and to use in assessment and interventions. Suggestions are made for developing intervention-focused prediction models that reduce the number of factors involved and are applicable across different types of interventions. Key Points for the Family Court Community: Several socio-cultural-legal movements in the last 30 years have contributed to the prevalence, focal concerns and ongoing controversies about Parental Alienation. Persistent erroneous assumption that an alienating parent is primarily the source of a child's resistance/rejection of a parent (called the dominant Single-Factor theory of PA) is problematic in applying PA constructs in research and practice. Four principal factors (illustrating a refined multi-factorial predictive model of PA) are identified as goals for preventive-interventions and are proposed as measures for evaluating outcomes across different kinds of interventions resist/refuse cases in practice.

Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, 1990

Journal of Child Custody, 2005

Family Court Review, 2005

Developmental Psychology, 1989

Examined patterns of custody and their relationship to the behavioral–emotional and social adjust... more Examined patterns of custody and their relationship to the behavioral–emotional and social adjustment of 93 children, ages 3–14, in divorcing families. Assessed children and their parents within 1 year after parents filed for divorce, and again 1 and 2 years later. Children in joint ...

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 1989

Family Court Review, 2016

This is the second of two articles on the risks of advocacy bias in the reporting of research fin... more This is the second of two articles on the risks of advocacy bias in the reporting of research findings when boundaries are blurred between social science research and advocacy in the pursuit of public policy. In the first article we identify common ways in which social science researchers and reviewers of research-wittingly or unwittingly-can become advocates for ideological positions and social policies at the expense of being balanced reporters of research evidence. The first article discusses the difference between truth in social science and truth in law and identifies a range of scholar-advocacy strategies that bias research evidence, illustrated by recent debates about overnight parenting of infants and toddlers. In this second article we show how biased research evidence by scholar advocates results in increased confusion and controversy that diminishes the credibility of all parties and stalemates progress in the field, using a case illustration of intimate partner violence in family court. We also show how adherence to scientific methods prevents the misuse of research and suggest a number of collaborative, integrative measures that can help transcend the adversarial stalemate. In a look to the future we consider some unbiased, standardized ways of assessing the strength and generalizability of research evidence. Key Points for the Family Court Community: Scholar-advocacy bias, the intentional or unintentional use of social science research to legitimize advocacy claims, is a problem that practitioners and policy makers must recognize and guard against in family law. Because of different methods of pursuing and establishing truth in science and the law, ironically, the less rhetorically convincing argument often represents science most faithfully. Practitioners-and scientists-must guard against using various rhetorical tactics that bend research evidence, for example, the rules of science dictate that we must prove our hypotheses; others need not disprove them.

The findings provide information regarding the risk factors associated with parental kidnaping an... more The findings provide information regarding the risk factors associated with parental kidnaping and strategies that can be used to intervene with families at greatest risk. They address such critical factors as the characteristics of parents who abduct their own children, the role family violence plays in increasing the likelihood of parental abduction, ways of identifying children at risk of being abducted by a parent or other family member, and steps that can be taken to protect children from family abduction.

Byzantine Childhood

Read more and get great! That's what the book enPDFd through the eyes of the children will gi... more Read more and get great! That's what the book enPDFd through the eyes of the children will give for every reader to read this book. This is an on-line book provided in this website. Even this book becomes a choice of someone to read, many in the world also loves it so much. As what we talk, when you read more every page of this through the eyes of the children, what you will obtain is something great.

The journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 2003

This study of family relationships after divorce examined the frequency and extent of child-paren... more This study of family relationships after divorce examined the frequency and extent of child-parent alignments and correlates of children's rejection of a parent, these being basic components of the controversial idea of "parental alienation syndrome." The sample consisted of 215 children from the family courts and general community two to three years after parental separation. The findings indicate that children's attitudes toward their parents range from positive to negative, with relatively few being extremely aligned or rejecting. Rejection of a parent has multiple determinants, with both the aligned and rejected parents contributing to the problem, in addition to vulnerabilities within children themselves.

Applied Research for the Family Court, 2012