Emotional Triggers: Listening Barriers to Effective Interactions in Senior Populations

Given the scarcity of scholarly studies on the impact of effective listening and senior populations, this study sought to explore senior participants' interactions especially as they related to emotional triggers and listening effectiveness. Participants with a mean age of 84 participated in one of four focus groups. Results suggest that emotional reactions inhibiting effective listening can be language or behaviorally based. The four primary language triggers gleaned from the data included words that implied false familiarity, made assumptions, indicated poor topic choice, or demonstrated poor grammar. Behavioral triggers included use of pause fillers, repetition, ineffective vocal cues, and poor turn-taking skills.     

Mindfulness in financial literacy

ABSTRACT

Financial education is becoming imperative in a society that has pitfalls for unwary consumers. To ensure effectiveness, educational strategies must take into consideration the readiness of consumers to learn the curriculum. Behavioral economics highlights the obstacles that educators face in promoting financial efficacy. Such obstacles include envy, fear, greed, and other all too familiar human failings. One innovative model, mindfulness, provides insight into the human dynamics of personal financial behaviors. This article ties together financial education, mindfulness techniques, and transtheoretical stages of readiness. The impact of gradually introduced educational tasks is presented with an eye toward clients’ stages of readiness, and mindfulness addresses the emotional burdens of altering a financially profligate lifestyle.     

Culturally Competent Practice with Bisexual Individuals

Working with lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals requires clinical social workers to demonstrate cultural competency with these populations. Although there are many common issues across these identities, bisexual individuals experience unique challenges that differ from lesbian and gay individuals. Bisexuality is sometimes misunderstood by heterosexual as well as lesbian and gay individuals, leading to experiences of marginalization from multiple sources. Moreover, clinical social workers may incorrectly assume that the treatment needs of bisexual individuals are the same as lesbian and gay individuals. This paper utilizes qualitative interviews with 45 bisexual-identified people to illuminate five prominent issues in clinical practice with bisexual people. They are: (a) biphobia, (b) practitioner attitudes about bisexuality, (c) identity development, (d) social relationships, and (e) sexual health. Findings illuminate clinical practice strategies that will facilitate culturally competent social work practice with this population.     

Gender differences in perceptions of aftercare supports and services

Youth depart residential care with many continued risk factors, unique needs, and challenges as they reintegrate into the home, school, and community settings. Currently, there is limited research on needs and best practices in aftercare services and supports for youth departing from residential settings and even less is known about how these differ by gender. While preliminary studies have explored perceptions of need during reintegration and aftercare by youth and caregivers, little is known about how these may differ by gender or if perceptions change over time after experiencing the initial transition period. One way to address this knowledge gap is to identify how prepared males and females feel for reintegration in critical life domains, their beliefs about aftercare, and preferences regarding potential services or supports to aide in the reintegration at discharge. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore if males and females differ on preparedness for reintegration across critical life domains, beliefs about aftercare, and preferences regarding potential services or supports to aide in the reintegration at departure from a residential treatment facility (N = 132). Overall, very few differences were found between males and females at departure. Implications, limitations, and future research are discussed.     

Dimensions of Structural Disadvantage: A Latent Class Analysis of a Neighborhood Measure in Child Welfare Data

ABSTRACT

Contextual constructs, such as neighborhood structure, may contribute to child welfare involvement. Secondary data analysis is used with the nationally representative, longitudinal National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being-II (N = 5,872). This study employs latent class analysis (LCA) to identify the number of classes needed to explain the distribution of caregiver responses on the Community Environment Scale. LCA is ideal for this study to identify meaningful groups of caregivers involved with child welfare using neighborhood risk factors. Three latent classes are identified: high social order/medium social capital; high social order/low social capital; low social order/low social capital. Multinomial logistic regression tests whether there are significant differences across the classes, partially validating the LCA that poor, minority caregivers live in neighborhoods with lower social order and capital. Understanding neighborhoods as “high” versus “low” risk may not fully illuminate contextual risk factors in order to develop neighborhood-based interventions. This study reveals that there is a third group of caregivers who reside in places with higher social order but lower social capital. Social capital might be an important factor in preventing child maltreatment. Future work is needed to understand additional individual and neighborhood characteristics that predict membership in each class.     

Managing in the Trenches of Consumer Care: The Challenges of Understanding and Initiating the Advance Care Planning Process

To better understand how community-based long-term care providers define advance care planning and their role in the process, we conducted 8 focus groups with 62 care managers (social workers and registered nurses) providing care for Ohio's Medicaid waiver program. Care managers shared that most consumers had little understanding of advance care planning. The care managers defined it broadly, including legal documentation, social aspects, medical considerations, ongoing communication, and consumer education. Care managers saw their roles as information providers, healthcare team members, and educators/coaches. Better education, resources, and coordination are needed to ensure that consumer preferences are realized.     

EPA's 2006 Human-Subjects Rule for Pesticide Experiments

Arguing that the 2006 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) human-subjects rule allows use of unethical third-party research (on pregnant women and children) in setting pesticide regulations, this article first (a) provides a brief history of U.S. pesticide regulation, particularly regarding childhood safety. Next it (b) outlines ethical and scientific loopholes in the 2006 EPA rule; (c) shows how the Human Subjects Review Board, mandated by the 2006 rule, has been implemented in flawed ways; and (d) illustrates that one source of problems with the rule may be influence by those with conflicts of interest.     

Electronic support groups, patient-consumers, and medicalization: the case of contested illness

This article illustrates the role electronic support groups play in consumer-driven medicalization. The analysis is based on an observational study of a year in the life of an electronic support group for sufferers of the contested illness fibromyalgia syndrome. The analysis builds on and extends scholarship concerning the growing influence of lay expertise in the context of medical uncertainty by showing how the dominant beliefs and routine practices of this electronic community simultaneously (and paradoxically) challenge the expertise of physicians and encourage the expansion of medicine's jurisdiction. Drawing on their shared embodied expertise, participants confirm the medical character of their problem and its remedy, and they empower each other to search for physicians who will recognize and treat their condition accordingly. Physician compliance is introduced as a useful concept for understanding the relationship between lay expertise, patient-consumer demand, and contemporary (and future) instances of medicalization.