Moving communities: A process of negotiation with a Gypsy minority for empowerment

This paper describes the process by which the relationship between university workers and members of a Gypsy community evolved. Transformation in the relationships between the two, in terms of knowledge, trust, and affect, in turn transformed the nature of the work undertaken. What started as research on the community changed into research within and of the community. The process is discussed in terms of empowerment, community psychological practice and participatory action research. Este artículo describe el proceso de cambio de la relación establecida entre miembros de una universidad y miembros de una comunidad gitana. Las transformaciones que dicha relación experimentó, en términos de conocimiento, confianza y afecto, acabaron alterando la naturaleza del propio proyecto. Lo que empezó siendo una investigación sobre una comunidad, fue transformándose en una investigación en la comunidad, con la colaboración de la comunidad. El artículo discute este proceso se discute en términos de 'empowerment', psicología comunitaria, e investigación-acción.     

Revisiting “money illusion”: Replication and extension of Shafir,Diamond, and Tversky (1997)

Shafir et al. (1997) described money illusion as people’s inclination to think of money without taking inflation sufficiently into account, i.e., in nominal terms rather than in real terms. We successfully replicated Problems 1 to 4 of Shafir, Diamond, and Tversky’s study (1997) on money illusion (MTurk; N = 604). We found effect sizes in line with the original ones for assessments of income (Problem 1; original: Cramer’s V = 0.26, 95% CI [0.17, 0.37]; replication: V = 0.28 [0.21, 0.36]), transactions (Problem 2; original: 48% [42%, 52%]; replication: 70% [66%, 73%]), sales and consumption (Problem 3; original buy: 38% [33%, 43%]; replication buy: 47% [43%, 51%]; original sell: 43%% [38%, 48%]; replication sell: 43% [39%, 47%]), and contracts (Problem 4; original: V = 0.25 [0.13, 0.42]; replication: V = 0.17 [0.10, 0.25]). With an added extension, we found no support for the notion that knowing about or correctly estimating the inflation rate affected money illusion. We discuss theoretical implications for the study of money illusion and the psychological meaning of inflation, as well as for the understanding of the antecedents of money illusion. All data, code, and materials are available on https://osf.io/rv9mw/.     

Stakeholder identifying and positioning (SIP) models: From Google's operation in China to a general case-analysis framework

Through examining online search service provider Google's much-talked about business operation in China over the past several years, this research introduced a series of practical stakeholder identifying and positioning (SIP) models that can be used for various PR case analysis, issue management and decision-making process. Stakeholder, though an important concept that is at the epicenter for understanding and practicing public relations, has nonetheless received insufficient scholarly scrutiny from the public relations’ perspective, and has been so loosely defined that it often leads to confusion rather than clarification. This study categorized all stakeholders into three broad “PR” dimensions, namely, (1) Product and Revenue; (2) Policy and Regulation; and (3) Perception and Reputation. The dynamic interactions and interrelations of these stakeholders were further streamlined and illustrated through several commonly applicable models.     

A Response to Commentary on Faust,Bridges, and Ahern's (2009) “Methods for the Identification of Sexually Abused Children”

With every Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that has been published, there has been controversy within controversy; however, what appears to be lacking is the importance of truly understanding what, why, and how the changes impact the community at large. Issues such as homosexuality, the five axial diagnostic system, and transitioning from a medical model to a biopsychosocial model have been hot topics that have led clinicians to challenge the reliability and validity of the manual throughout history. As clinicians and medical professionals, it is important to objectively look at the manual and become educated on how and why these changes exist. With that being said, this commentary aims to challenge the article “Commentary: Problems with the Sexual Disorders Sections of DSM-5” by Colin A. Ross (2015). The structure of this commentary purposefully mirrors the structure of the commentary that it is challenging.     

Towards a theory of organizational storytelling for public relations: An engagement perspective

In this paper, organizational storytelling is defined as planned communication by. organizations that deliberately uses specific forms of content and delivery behavior to. engage audiences (both internal to the organization and outside it) cognitively and. affectively primarily for the achievement of organizational goals and objectives. But. there is little in the literature to show how organizational storytelling fits into the. theoretical lexicon of public relations; or to guide practitioners in how to adapt. storytelling to suit organizational purposes. There is even less discussion from either. perspective on how public relations can contribute to organizational storytelling. Stories are often described as being engaging, but little has been written to explain. why this is. Extant research tends to focus on the significance of engaging of. audiences with stories, rather than understanding how stories engage. This paper. adopts an engagement perspective on storytelling in general to identify the cognitive,. affective, and behavioral aspects of its elements (characters, plots etc.). The same lens. is then applied to organizational stories and shows how they use the elements of. engagement to convey organizational key messages. The paper also highlights. differences between storytelling and organizational storytelling. These findings are. incorporated into a checklist for practitioners to help them identify, create, critique, and. improve organizational storytelling in their work. In addition, the paper suggests ways. in which public relations can bring its uniquely relational perspective to contribute to. organizational storytelling by empowering stakeholder storytelling to organizations and. listening by organizations.     

Empowerment evaluation: An approach that has literally altered the landscape of evaluation

The quest for credible and actionable evidence to improve decision making, foster improvement, enhance self-determination, and promote social betterment is now a global phenomenon. Evaluation theorists and practitioners alike have responded to and overcome the challenges that limited the effectiveness and usefulness of traditional evaluation approaches primarily focused on seeking rigorous scientific knowledge about social programs and policies. No modern evaluation approach has received a more robust welcome from stakeholders across the globe than empowerment evaluation.Empowerment evaluation has been a leader in the development of stakeholder involvement approaches to evaluation, setting a high bar. In addition, empowerment evaluation’s respect for community knowledge and commitment to the people’s right to build their own evaluation capacity has influenced the evaluation mainstream, particularly concerning evaluation capacity building. Empowerment evaluation’s most significant contributions to the field have been to improving evaluation use and knowledge utilization.     

Atos Healthcare withdraws from the Work Capability Assessment: a comment

In March 2014 Atos Healthcare withdrew a year early from its contract to provide the UK’s health assessment – the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) – that is supposed to sort disabled people into administrative categories according to their adjudged capability to do paid work. This move was welcomed by political elites, with, for example, UK Coalition Government Minister for Disabled People Mike Penning using it to criticise previous Labour governments for the contractual arrangements they put in place – although while the Coalition may have been concerned with the contractual arrangements soon after being formed, it extended the contract for five years. For the UK disability movement, the withdrawal of Atos Healthcare early from the WCA contract was a victory and, at least in part, a consequence of disabled activists’ resistance to the Employment and Support Allowance generally, and the WCA in particular.     

Assessing Capacity in the Setting of Self-Neglect: Development of a Novel Screening Tool for Decision-Making Capacity

ABSTRACT

Compared with older adults with disabilities and those who autonomously choose to live in squalor, self-neglect syndrome arises from a predicate state of vulnerability in frail older adults. This state of vulnerability is characteristically associated with a decline in decision-making capacity regarding the ability to care for and protect oneself. We developed the COMP Screen to evaluate vulnerable older adults to identify potential gaps in decision-making capacity using a screening tool. A total of 182 older adults were evaluated and consistent declines in cognitive ability and decision-making processes were present in this population. However, there were no significant differences between elders referred for self-neglect and matched older adults. These findings suggest that declines in decision-making processes are not uncommon in vulnerable older adults but traditional conceptualizations of decision-making capacity may be inadequate for differentiating the capacity for self-care and protection in elders who self-neglect.     

The Lichtenberg Financial Decision Screening Scale (LFDSS): A new tool for assessing financial decision making and preventing financial exploitation

ABSTRACT

One of the challenges in preventing the financial exploitation of older adults is that neither criminal justice nor noncriminal justice professionals are equipped to detect capacity deficits. Because decision-making capacity is a cornerstone assessment in cases of financial exploitation, effective instruments for measuring this capacity are essential. We introduce a new screening scale for financial decision making that can be administered to older adults. To explore the scale’s implementation and assess construct validity, we conducted a pilot study of 29 older adults seen by APS (Adult Protective Services) workers and 79 seen by other professionals. Case examples are included.     

Transnational retirement mobility as processes of identity negotiation: the case of Japanese in South-east Asia

ABSTRACT

The increasing mobility of Japanese retirees to South-east Asia is part of a larger political economy reconfiguration in the region. This article argues that in order to fully appreciate the underlying dynamics of transnational retirement mobility, we should understand the mobility as processes of contestation over the seemingly simple question of ‘who is a retiree migrant?’. The governments of the destination countries and an emerging retirement industry strive to turn the retiree migrants into a particular type of high-value consumer subject. But the retirees see themselves as pragmatic individuals who seek to enjoy low living costs in South-east Asia in a time of economic uncertainty. The article sheds new light on transnational retirement mobility by examining how the retirees explore their sense of self while interacting with various actors. By linking it with the Foucauldian notion of subject making, this article deepens our understanding of identity negotiation in a transnational context.     

Improved decision making about suspected child maltreatment: Results of structuring the decision process

ORBA is a method that aims to improve decision making about suspected child maltreatment in Advice and Reporting Centres of Child Abuse and Neglect (ARCCAN). It structures the process of judging and deciding and makes it explicit by distinguishing separate steps, and by identifying the necessary information to consider and the judgments and decisions to be made in each step. In this study it was investigated whether decision making in ARCANNs has become more systematic and transparent, since the implementation of ORBA. The contents of 100 case records from 2010 were analyzed, after ORBA had been implemented in all agencies, to see to what extent these records contained relevant information, and to what extent process steps and rationales for decisions could be identified. This was compared with the contents of 60 records of three agencies from 2005, before ORBA was implemented. Analyses showed that in 2010 records more often contained relevant information and process steps that ORBA prescribes than in 2005. It was salient however that rationales for judgments and decisions were still often absent in 2010. While after ORBA's introduction the process has clearly become more systematic and more transparent, compared to 2005, more improvements are still called for, specifically in explicitly motivating decisions. Explanations and implications of our results are discussed.     

The Psychological Effects of Considering a Move into Residential Care: An Age-Related Study

This study employed a cross-sectional design to examine the psychological effects of considering a move into supported housing. It sought to explore the wistful “prefactual/counterfactual” evaluation of “if only” scenarios. A Time, Environment, Motivation, Personality, and Outcome (TEMPO) model was applied to investigate whether individuals moving closer in time to a prefactual scenario (a hypothetical vignette about two older adults facing a move toward residential care) expressed increased prefactual/counterfactual statements. Additional hypotheses explored the impact of personality and outcome. Thirty-three older adults (65 and older) and 33 adults (aged 18 to 64) were asked to write what could be better or worse about each scenario. The older-adult group generated a significantly higher number of counterfactual/prefactual statements. Effect sizes were medium-large. The implications of these findings, particularly concerning the emotional impact, were explored.     

Leveling the playing field: Dishonesty in the face of threat

We examined the effects of framing and perceived vulnerability on dishonest behavior in competitive environments. Participants were randomly matched into pairs and took a short multiple-choice test, the relative score of which determined their merit-based payoffs. After learning about the test scores, participants were asked to report them, thus affecting the final payoffs. Framing was varied as participants could either report their own scores or the scores of their counterparts. The presence of threat, or vulnerability to other players’ dishonesty, was varied as either one or both players in a pair could misreport scores. Participants who reported their counterparts’ scores were more likely to report honestly than participants who entered their own score. Participants, whose payoffs were threatened by their opponents’ misreporting, were more likely to cheat to the fullest extent. Furthermore, we found that framing significantly reduced misreporting in the absence, but not in the presence of threat. Results suggest that when actors feel vulnerable to other people’s dishonesty they would often cheat as much as they can in order to “level the playing field”, even when they strongly disapprove of the behavior.     

The Development and Validation of the Couple and Relationship Education Attitudes Index: Results from Two Studies

As relationship educators work to reach more participants for their programs, they often face challenges with recruitment and retention. The theory of planned behavior, along with research, posits that attitudes are often predictive of behavior, and that attitudes toward education and help-seeking can be varied by unique contexts. This paper reports on the development and validation of an index that measures attitudes toward couple relationship education (CRE). The two scales within this index (benefits of CRE & CRE is not a good fit) assess how comfortable individuals are with CRE. The results from two studies support the validation of the index and show how CRE attitudes are linked to relational factors and a measure of intentions to attend CRE, using the scales within the index. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed.     

In defence of psychology: a reply to Goodley and Lawthom (2005)

Goodley & Lawthom discussed the role of a community psychology approach in conducting emancipatory disability research. While their aims are entirely laudable, they portrayed mainstream psychology as 'pathologising, voyeuristic, individualising, [and] impairment-obsessed'. This paper presents a reply to Goodley and Lawthom's somewhat outdated arguments for the dismissal of mainstream psychology and argues that the focus on a single 'best' method of researching disability does not serve the best interests of disabled people within society. It is argued that to create a 'new' psychology distinct from the 'mainstream' is unnecessary, undesirable and counter-productive. Mainstream psychology has much to offer disabled people and to dismiss it is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.     

From Bricolage to Collage: The Making of Decisions at a Weather Forecast Office

This article elaborates the process of decision making in organizational environments characterized by disciplined improvisation. Building on an ethnography of forecasting operations at the National Weather Service, it introduces “collage” as a mediating concept between information bricolage and the forging of a decision. The concept of collage serves to (1) heuristically frame decision making as a process of assembling, appropriating, superimposing, juxtaposing, and blurring of information; and (2) externalize into digital practices of screenwork the cognitive labor of merging and distilling complex data into a provisionally coherent decision.     

Contending masculinities: the gendered (re) negotiation of colonial hierarchy in the United Nations debates on decolonization

The emergence of legal decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, as evidenced by the 1960 United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, is often understood through the lens of race and the disruption of racial hierarchy. If we take seriously the transnational feminist contention that the colonial racial order was also gendered, however, how might this perspective shift our understanding of decolonization? In this article, I explore the debates on decolonization that take place in the UN General Assembly from 1946–1960 that lead to the 1960 Declaration from a transnational feminist perspective to answer this question. Specifically, I use comparative historical and discourse methods of analysis to explore how colonialists and anti-colonialists negotiate the onset of legal decolonization, focusing especially on how colonialist hierarchies of race, culture, and gender are addressed in these debates. I argue that, on the one hand, colonialists rely on a paternalist masculinity to legitimate their rule (i.e., our dependencies require our rule the way a child requires a father). In response, anti-colonialists reply with a resistance masculinity (i.e., “colonialism is emasculating;” “decolonization is necessary for a return of masculine dignity”). I argue that decolonization in the United Nations transpires via contentions among differentially racialized masculinities. Ultimately, a transnational feminist perspective that centers the intersection of race and gender offers a richer analysis than a perspective that examines race alone.     

College students,shared decision making,and the appropriate use of antibiotics for respiratory tract infections: A systematic literature review

ABSTRACT

Objective: This systematic review examines shared decision making to promote the appropriate use of antibiotics for college students with respiratory tract infections. Participants/Methods: CINAL, Cochrane, PubMed, EBSCO, and PsycNET were searched in October 2014 using the following criteria: English language, human subjects, peer-reviewed, shared decision making for respiratory tract infections, adult patients or college students, and antibiotic use for respiratory tract infections. Twelve articles were selected for final review. Results: College students and younger, more educated, adults prefer shared decision making. Shared decision making shows promise for decreasing antibiotic use for respiratory tract infections. Education, understanding, and provider-patient communication are important to the shared decision-making process. Conclusions: Shared decision making shows promise to promote the appropriate use of antibiotics for respiratory tract infections in college students and could be considered for future studies.     

Doing research in a ‘conflict zone’: history writing and archival (im) possibilities in Jammu and Kashmir

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that in conflict zones like Jammu and Kashmir, the embodied stories of Kashmiris punctuate the past, often silenced by dominant Indian narratives. Narratives about certain key political events in the region's past co-exist with other forms of memory. Kashmiris weave these stories to make sense of the present, build connections to the past, and stake claims for the future. They build and nourish an archive based on lived experience, keeping a record of past wrongs. Novels, anecdotes and underground literature form part of this embodied archive, and provide a resource for recovering stories that remain silent in institutional archives which serve the interests of power. These interests are visible through restrictions on access to institutional archives, and demonstrate the effects of power and the overall politics of archives.     

In defence of disability studies: a response to Forshaw (2007) 'In defence of psychology: a reply to Goodley and Lawthom (2005)'

We welcome Forshaw's reply to our paper because it opens up debate about psychology and its relationship with the development of an emancipatory disability studies. In our paper we aimed to: (1) raise possibilities for disability studies researchers' engagement with psychology (rather than psychology colonizing disability studies); (2) trace some of the epistemological journeys we underwent in carrying out disability research and community psychology research; (3) consider these possibilities and journeys in relation to previous literature on emancipatory disability research. Forshaw's reply appears to ignore aims (2) and (3) and instead focuses on the ways in which we (mis)represent psychology. He suggests that we: present an inaccurate account of qualitative research in contemporary psychology; make a divisive argument for a 'breakaway group' of community psychologists; epistemologically contradict ourselves because of our concern with 'reality' and social constructionism; argue for only adopting participatory action research; not least, adopt 'simplistic' and 'outdated' views of psychology. We will respond to these criticisms.