(Mis)Understanding Abortion Regret

The debate about abortion regret rests on competing assumptions about women's attachment to pregnancy. Antiabortion claimants argue women always attach to pregnancy (inevitably regretting abortion), while abortion rights supporters counter that women do not attach to pregnancies they choose to terminate (feeling relief instead). Neither assumption explains women's experience; research shows that attachment is discursively produced. Using interview data from 21 women, this study moves past these political claims to empirically identify three sources of women's emotional difficulty around abortion: social disapproval, romantic relationship loss, and head versus heart conflict. Findings point to the importance of attention to women's lived experience and space for complex feelings around abortion.     

Voluntary Counselling Services in Melbourne: A Survey

The paper reports on a survey of aspects of counselling services provided by 83 voluntary organisations operating in the Melbourne metropolitan area. Information was obtained on the types of counselling services provided, clients making use of the services, and the selection and supervision of counsellors. The findings showed that the voluntary sector of organisations providing counselling services is both highly active and very heterogeneous.     

Same Sex Couples and Counselling:

This paper is about homosexual relationships and the way that clinicians and researchers have conceived them and then attempted to compare them with heterosexual models. When there are problems experienced by one or both people in a relationship the available conceptualizations are inadequate. The need for a different perception of these dyads in counseling is suggested. This paper extends earlier research with men and women who migrated to Australia as part of a same sex couple (Hart, 1990). My aim is to broaden the view of the social and personal dynamics of gay and lesbian couples in general. I conclude that couples, in or out of counseling, should be sited within gay and lesbian multicultural kinship patterns.     

Banning Abortion:

This paper contrasts bimodal and unimodal issues, and identifies abortion as a bimodal issue. While unimodal issues exhibit continuous issue positions, a range of policy options, greater possibility of consensus, and often include financial proposals, bimodal issues are charcterized by dichotomous and mutually exclusive policy options, conflict, use of emotion-laden symbols, and often include civil liberties and soical issues. This paper examined two Senate votes on abortion in 1982 and 1983-the Helms proposal to restrict abortion and the Hatch human life amendment. Social variables were more important than political variables in explaining voting outcomes. When the impacts of constituency and Senators' characteristics were compared, those of constituencies were found to have greater impact. For abortion votes, social and constituency variables outweigh political and Senators' characteristics since public opinion is very intense and the issue is of high salience to constituents.     

Oppression Within the Counselling Room

This paper suggests that the oppression experienced by disabled people in society is sometimes replayed in the counselling room by counsellors who are unaware of their own disablist attitudes and prejudices. Whilst the provision of Disability Equality Training (DET) within counselling courses would ameliorate the problem, I believe that disabled people would be most empowered by a counselling approach which recognises the potential for oppression within the counsellor-client relationship. One solution may be the creation of a new counselling approach, disability counselling, which includes the social model of disability as one of the foundations. An alternative solution may be found within the emerging counselling approaches that treat counselling as a social and political process and place emphasis on developing comprehensive anti-discriminatory practice.     

Couple Counselling Outcomes in an Australian Not for Profit: Evidence for the Effectiveness of Couple Counselling Conducted Within Routine Practice

Over 30 randomised controlled trials have shown the efficacy of couple therapy under controlled conditions. However only four studies explore effectiveness of couple therapy as commonly practised in the community (i.e., routine practice). These studies suggest effectiveness is about half that reported in randomised controlled trials. Further, there are no published couple therapy effectiveness data currently from Australia or New Zealand. This is troubling because (1) couple distress has negative effects on individual adults, couples, and families; (2) funders increasingly want proof of return on financial investment; and (3) clients want hope that their emotional investment in therapy is worthwhile. The first aim of this paper is to report the outcomes of a milestone multi‐centre study of over 1,500 Relationships Australia clients attending couple counselling. It outlines a simple, intuitive method for assessing effectiveness of couple counselling in routine practice that may motivate others to conduct effectiveness studies. The study used a cross‐sectional design and assessed current couple satisfaction and retrospective recall of couple satisfaction before attending counselling. Results revealed a moderate effect size improvement in relationship satisfaction. The results support previous published studies of couple therapy effectiveness in routine practice. The second aim of the paper is to increase interest in others doing similar research by addressing key barriers to the implementation of effectiveness studies within routine practice. These barriers include administrative burden, integration across services, and conceptual buy‐in by practitioners. The use of the retrospective measure of ‘pre counselling’ couple satisfaction measure overcomes these barriers in part. The paper concludes with a discussion of design limitations and suggestions for counselling agencies seeking to conduct their own effectiveness studies.     

Counselling Disabled People: a counsellor's perspective

For many years professionals have assumed that disability is a problem for impaired individuals and that it is the disability that causes emotional or psychological problems. Whether this is true and whether a specific model of counselling is needed to help disabled people to cope with the emotional effects of their disability has not been widely researched and this is examined in this piece of research. The causes of psychological distress are discussed and the ways in which counsellors work are studied. Using a grounded methodological approach, disabled and able bodied counsellors of disabled people were interviewed as this was considered to be the most sensitive way of exploring this area. The findings show that more often than not it is the client's lack of control over their physical and social environment and not the impairment that causes emotional difficulties. Counsellors indicated that, through the facilitation of counselling, a sense of self empowerment in practical, emotional and social areas could be achieved and this was the central theme emerging as the most distinctive aspect of counselling clients with physical impairments.     

Abortion,Partial-Birth Abortion,and Adolescent Access to Abortion: An Overview for Social Workers

Although the U.S Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion in 1973, intense controversy over access, legality, and morality has persisted ever since that landmark decision. National opinion data collected from 1975 to 2007 show that a majority of Americans support a woman's right to an abortion, but this right is increasingly under attack, and recent proposed changes to abortion access are not in line with how most Americans feel. This paper considers public opinion trends in the sharply divided arenas of abortion, partial-birth abortion, and adolescents' rights to access abortion with a critical eye to social work practice. We explore several opportunities for social workers to advocate for clients, including legislative advocacy, reform through litigation, social action, and social policy analysis.     

Imputing Beliefs: a Controversy in the Sociology of Knowledge1

The problem of imputation - how to ascribe ideas and beliefs to groups, or to individuals on the basis of their group membership - has occasionally occupied the attention of those working in the sociology of knowledge. This article offers a critical discussion of this debate. It is argued that the various proposed solutions - idealist, empiricist, and structuralist - do not adequately tackle the problem since each assumes a deterministic model of sociological explanation, and adheres to a dualism of actor versus structure. We suggest that a theory of group formation informed by a social action perspective may offer some pointers towards taking such issues beyond self-sustaining debate between sociological idealism and objectivism.     

Relational Frame Theory: An Overview of the Controversy

Although Skinner''s Verbal Behavior (1957) was published over 50 years ago, behavior-analytic research on human language and cognition has been slow to develop. In recent years, a new behavioral approach to language known as relational frame theory (RFT) has generated considerable attention, research, and debate. The controversy surrounding RFT can be difficult to fully appreciate, partly because of the complexity of the theory itself and partly because the debate has spanned several years and several journals. The current paper aims to provide a concise overview of RFT and a summary of key points of debate and controversy.     

Understanding the mobility chances of children from working-class backgrounds in Britain: How important are cognitive ability and locus of control?

Research in social stratification has shown that children from working-class backgrounds tend to obtain substantially lower levels of educational attainment and lower labor market positions than children from higher social class backgrounds. However, we still know relatively little about the micro-level processes that account for this empirical regularity. Our study examines the roles of two individual-level characteristics—cognitive ability and locus of control—in mediating the effect of individuals’ parental class background on their educational attainment and social class position in Britain. We find that cognitive ability mediates only about 35% of the total parental class effect on educational attainment and only about 20% of the total parental class effect on respondents’ social class position, net of their educational attainment. These findings contradict existing claims that differences in the life chances of children from different social class backgrounds are largely due to differences in cognitive ability. Moreover, we find that although individuals’ locus of control plays some role in mediating the parental class effect, its role is substantially smaller than the mediating role of cognitive ability. We measure individuals’ social class positions at different points in their careers—at labor market entry and at occupational maturity—and find that the mediating roles of cognitive ability and locus of control are remarkably stable across individuals’ working lives.     

Crowded Advocacy: Framing Dynamic in the Fracking Controversy in New York

In the hydrofracturing controversy in New York advocates hotly contested notions of the problem, what should be done, by whom, and how. This controversy can be characterized as “crowded advocacy,” involving intense mobilization and counter-mobilization of advocates with competing perspectives. Extant theories about the expansion of advocacy organizations are unclear about how advocates’ interactions shape the policy arena, particularly when there is competition within and across multiple coalitions. This article contributes by asking: How do advocates’ interactive framing dynamics shape public discourse when advocacy is crowded? It assumes that advocacy in general, and framing in particular, evolves as advocates respond to each other. I find that competing “discourse coalitions” collectively influence public discourse by articulating divergent notions of (1) what constitutes credible knowledge, (2) who can speak with authority on the issues, and (3) what institutional arrangements should be activated to manage risks. The consequence is that advocates have to react to others' framing on these issues—to defend their knowledge, their credibility, and specific institutions, rather than arguing their case on the merits. The implication is that advocacy is not only the means of influence (strategy) but also creates the context of advocacy in particular ways in a crowded field.     

Elder Abuse in Britain:

The problem of elder abuse was first recognized in a formal way in Britain in 1975, yet efforts to confront the problem are only just beginning to emerge. This paper charts the slow development of a professional response to elder abuse in Britain and examines some of the key issues behing the relative inaction of 16 years.     

Counselling for Rural Adjustment: The KRAU Workshop

In recent years increasing attention has been paid to the social and economic problems of rural people in Australia. The reasons for this include: