All-In-One Motion

Abstract

In this essay, I recall a moment in my development as a clinician that serves as a marker, transforming my understanding of psychoanalytically informed clinical work from that of an intellectual encounter to one filled with the unconscious momentum, uncertainty, and rich symbolism that are intrinsic to therapeutic work.     

Personal prelude to pandemic 2020

ABSTRACT

This essay is a personal story, that also serves as my prelude to pandemic 2020, as well as my decision to issue a June 2020 Call for Papers on Group Work Stories About Pandemic 2020, that this Issue of the Journal launches.     

John Coltrane and Me

Abstract

In this essay, I consider the role that cultural objects play in one's personal development by taking a closer look at the relationship between people and the creative products of their fellows. As a launching point to this study, I examine my own relationship with the music of two jazz icons, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, viewing the differences in my reactions to, and uses of, their musical offerings over times as a reflection of my own personal growth. My contention is that under the right conditions people can use cultural objects to reconnect with disavowed aspects of their experiences.     

Coming of age in Samoa…in 1997

Abstract

A psychodynamically trained clinical social worker living in Samoa since 1995 examines some of the questions that the situation of rapid cultural change exposes. What effects does culture have on individual adolescent development? How are “healthy"/"adaptive” developmental outcomes shaped by the historical moment in which an adolescent lives? What does it mean for a clinician to be an “outsider” in a dominant culture of “insiders”? This paper attempts to address some of these questions from a very personal perspective.     

Metamorphosis of a Gerontological Social Work Scholar

ABSTRACT

My participation in the Pre-Dissertation Fellows Program (PDFP) was a defining moment in the development of my career. This commentary focuses on how my participation helped me transition from mentee to mentor and from PhD student to faculty member and scholar in gerontological social work and end-of-life care. While many students have limited mentorship from gerontological faculty in their own program, the PDFP offers a bridge to gerontological scholars and peer support across the US. Beyond that, opportunities are readily available for participation with the Association for Gerontology Education in Social Work (AGESW) and for collaboration across this network. Like myself, many awardees move into faculty positions and their accomplishments are varied and impressive. It is difficult to fully separate these from the connections, mentorship, and support received from the AGESW network and through participation in this program.     

Personal reflections on 30 years of social work development in China

ABSTRACT

China has developed modern social work over the past 30 years, introducing new theories and models of good practice that have been drawn from diverse parts of globe. It has also made extensive contributions to disaster interventions based on its engagement in numerous calamities that have affected the population in China, including the devastating Wenchuan earthquake of 2008. More recently, its dynamic leaders have supported the development of social work in other Asian countries. I have been privileged to have developed a long-standing relationship with China, its culture and its history for many decades, even before I became a social worker. My social work colleagues have honoured me by strengthening this interest by providing many opportunities to walk alongside them. This article considers my personal reflections on a profession’s development through momentous world events, and China rightly deserves to celebrate its 30 years of growth and development.     

A Worker's Personal Grief and Its Impact on Processing a Group's Termination

SUMMARY

This article deals with a worker struggling with a personal loss while simultaneously helping her group with the termination of a valued long term member. The focus is on the parallel grieving process and the resistance to mourning.     

Domestication and regulation of online gambling and pornography

Abstract

This paper explores aspects of the dynamic relationship between households and the internet, particularly the accessing of online gambling and pornography. Attention is focused on two areas: domestication and regulation. In terms of the latter, the State is portrayed as having difficulty in keeping pace with technological change. Domestication refers to the process by which objects are incorporated by households. The final moment in the process of domestication is that of conversion whereby households make claims for themselves around the routines and usage of technologies for accessing online gambling and pornography beyond the domestic space. It is suggested that the rise of non‐commodity or gift‐based forms of exchange, predicated on file sharing, is significant. That is, the internet impacts on the moral economy of households in important ways, but of potentially greater significance are the ways households stand to make over the generalised system of equivalence and exchange expressed within the internet.     

Transformation and the Woman in Stiletto Pumps

Abstract

This essay uses memoir to discuss transformative experience in the context of ongoing development. The relationship with an idealized teacher laid a foundation to observe and understand the world in a reflective stance influenced by Freud's theories. This beginning personal worldview evolved, through decades of intentional study and clinical training, into a consolidated psychoanalytically informed theory of practice.     

Factors Associated with Employee Stress in Psychiatric Rehabilitation: Identifying Vulnerability and Resilience

ABSTRACT

Use of sick days related to mental stress and burnout is a growing problem in Germany. Since stress is related to work demands, there is a substantial need for suitable workplace health promotion programs. This study identifies several organizational and personal stress predictors and presents a predictive model for workers in the field of psychiatric rehabilitation. A cross-sectional design was utilized to collect the self-ratings of employees (n = 243) who typically work with patients. Univariate analyses show, overall, above average stress scores, below average scores in occupational self-efficacy, and a much higher proportion of a gratification crisis (that is, insufficient reward for work performance) compared to other people employed in health care. A multivariate model for predicting the heightened stress indicates the supposed pathogenetic and salutogenetic main effects for organizational variables, such as gratification crisis, and personal variables, such as occupational self-efficacy as well as an interaction of both types of variables. High occupational self-efficacy can attenuate the effect of an existing gratification crisis. Workplace health promotion programs in this field should address organizational and personal variables, in particular occupational self-efficacy and gratification crisis. Future research should focus on interaction effects based on a person-environment-interaction model.     

Wrestling with Legacy

Abstract

Those of us who are children of Holocaust refugees and survivors inherit a complex, multi-faceted legacy that manifests itself in various conscious and unconscious ways at different stages of our lives. In the following pages, I share my journey toward a better understanding and integration of my parents' Holocaust experiences, and of the losses they and their extended families suffered under Nazi rule. That understanding necessitated traveling to my father's place of birth, developing relationships with Germans currently residing there, and immersing myself in the details of the demise of the Jewish community of the small rural village of Roth, Germany.

Immersing myself in my father's Holocaust history was both daunting and healing. It provided me with an opportunity to wrestle with my legacy in a way that interrupted the cycle of intergenerational prejudice that I was passing on to my own children. It inspired me to create an educational exhibit that could teach the lessons of the Holocaust in a way that is personal and relevant to students, with the intent of helping visitors to understand their civic responsibility to actively protest against prejudice and social injustice.     

Men's things: Masculine possession in the consumer revolution

This article uses the diaries of the Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner, the Reverends James Woodforde of Norfolk and William Holland of Somerset, and the Yorkshire schoolmaster Robert Sharp to explore men's multiple relations to the consumer market in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Arguing that historians have unduly discounted male participation in household provisioning and personal purchasing, it documents these diarists' engagement with a host of quotidian exchange activities. Avid purchasers and consumers of fish, potatoes, lace, buttons,china and clocks,these men were also active in promoting extended gift relations among neighbours, friends and kin. Their strategic deployment of gifts fostered sociability and commerce while bolstering hierarchical distinctions within the community and the state. Helping to constitute a broad-based moral economy of exchange, these masculine gifting behaviours meshed easily with the men's identities as acquisitive purchasers of consumer goods but undercut their ability to act as economic free agents. An understanding of men's shifting relations to the world of things in this period helps to explain the broader changes in English market moralities that underpinned the transition from custom to contract in the nineteenth century.     

Manchester through the Ears

ABSTRACT

As part of a wider sensory ethnography on the development of place attachments and situated knowledge amongst international newcomers to a city (Manchester, England), this article tells the story of my collaboration with Phoebe, a student of acoustics from bandung, Indonesia. Using a participatory sensory ethnographic method, Phoebe was encouraged to devise her own contribution to my project, which was modeled around her own sensory preferences and technological expertise. Our work together took place over a period of 4–5 months and yielded a series of soundscape compositions and accompanying narrative texts, all of which conveyed Phoebe's newly acquired sound-based knowledge, or acoustemology, of Manchester. Using narrative textual accompaniments to her recordings, Phoebe ascribes qualities to her surroundings that overlap with her own personal qualities, in effect showing how much she blends with her new city. As Phoebe and I subsequently listened to and “talked over” her soundscape compositions, they evoked sound marks, or sensory memories, of the landscape, sounds and music that Phoebe left behind in Indonesia. these sound-elicited interviews added further layers of emplaced knowledge to both of our constructions of the city.     

Perceptions of Caregiving Role by Son's Caring for a Parent with Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

In this qualitative study, 18 sons were interviewed about the factors that led them to assume the role of primary caregiver for a parent with progressive memory loss, such as Alzheimer's disease, as well as the personal challenge that they experienced in this role. The analysis demonstrated that sons experience a range of emotional reactions, personal and professional conflict, as well as learn about new roles and responsibilities as they attempt to access the needed services for their parent. Clinical recommendations for geriatric social workers are discussed.     

Social Worker Supervision with Novice and Experienced Workers

ABSTRACT

This empirical study compares the perceptions of social work supervisors about the needs of novice and experienced social work supervisees. The respondents, 211 supervisors in public welfare agencies in Israel, provided novice workers more supervisory time in 6 of the 8 content areas examined: administrative matters; inspection and control; inter-organizational communication; client issues; job-related tensions; and personal tensions. Projects in the community were given priority to experienced rather than novice supervisees, and professional development was regarded by the supervisors as equally important for novice and experienced workers. Comparisons were also made between the actual and preferred supervisory time allotment.     

Attitudes towards reproductive technologies for humans

Abstract

The aim of this exploratory study was to measure attitudes towards various applications of real and hypothetical reproductive technologies for humans, including prenatal gender selection. A total of 121 undergraduate university students completed a questionnaire measuring knowledge, interest, trust, risks and benefits, and attitudes towards reproductive technologies for humans. An exploratory factor analysis showed that participants rated the use of these technologies as unacceptable if it was for personal enhancement but acceptable for “medically useful” applications. Participants also reported not having a gender preference for their (hypothetical) unborn child, were they to use prenatal gender selection, an application very few approved of. Results failed to support a general desire to use prenatal gender selection or to hypothetically favour one gender over the other. Attitudes towards reproductive technologies cannot be simply summarised in a “pro or against” manner as they heavily depend on the context.     

The Family Law Act, 1975: One Consumer's Viewpoint

This is a paper about some of my experiences as a consumer of the Family Law Act, 1975. I decided to write about these experiences because few other consumers have done so. The literature in this area is dominated by the experts — the lawyers, the court counsellors, the social scientists. There is no formal provision for consumers' opinion to be considered. My personal experiences highlighted how different it was to be on the receiving end as a consumer in contrast to my academic understanding of the Family Law Act as a university educator. Unless consumers begin to voice their opinions loudly and clearly, we are not going to see further reforms to this legislation, and indeed the high expectations of the people who created the Family Law Act will not be realized. I believe my professional background, personal experiences and the time lapse since my case, afford me the opportunity to evaluate the effects of the Family Court upon me. In attempting to take a dispassionate view of this process, I hope others will take heart and write about their experiences too.     

Perspective‐taking and gift‐giving in Chinese preschool children

This study explored Chinese preschool children's perspective‐taking via a gift‐giving paradigm. Unlike findings with North American children (Atance et al. in, Dev Psychol 46:1505–1513, 2010), the results from two experiments (N_{Exp. 1} = 329; N_{Exp. 2} = 112) showed that allowing Chinese children to first choose a desired object for themselves did not enhance their subsequent perspective‐taking performance in gift selection or gift justifications. This was true regardless of gift type (consumable or recreational items) or of recipient (mom, teacher, experimenter, or friend). In addition, children's perspective‐taking did not correlate with their performances in behavioral inhibition and delay of gratification tasks. These results suggest the possibility that the prior desire fulfillment effect varies with children's socio‐cultural experiences. Finally, Chinese children showed better perspective‐taking in choosing consumable gifts (e.g., drinks, snacks) than recreational gifts (e.g., toys, magazines), although this effect was not found for gift selection in Experiment 2. One interpretation of these results is that children's capacity for prosocial perspective‐taking is influenced by socio‐cultural experiences and social knowledge about individuals' preferences for different kinds of objects.     

A Qualitative Case Study on Recovery and Personal Growth in Korean Drug Addicts

ABSTRACT

In recent years, crimes related to drug smuggling and production have gradually increased in Korea. This qualitative case study explores the experiences of Koreans recovering from drug addiction and identifies specific details and mechanisms of recovery. For this purpose, participants were selected based on criteria such as engaging in social activities after recovery from addiction for 3 years or more. Next, one-on-one in-depth interviews were conducted with five voluntarily consenting participants. Data were analyzed using the within-/cross-case analysis suggested by Creswell. Substantial personal growth took place in the recovery process for drug addicts. Nineteen themes were identified as manifestations of personal growth through within-case analysis. Four common themes were then derived through cross-case analysis. These four common themes were “reconnection with reality,” “embracing the essence of one's own existence,” “reconstructing oneself in social relations,” and “self-love.” The study's results suggest that a recovery program needs to be developed wherein the program not only enables drug addicts to reflect on their current existence but also allows them to develop their specific coping skills. Future research should be broadened to consider the social support mechanism and viewpoints of people including family and local community members in close contact with drug addicts.