Parental abandonment: A unique form of loss and narcissistic injury

This paper presents an overview of the effects of parent loss, looking initially at the voluminous and significant research regarding institutionalized children, and children who have lost a parent by death> In contrast to the considerable literature and information about these child populations, less has been written regarding the abandoned child. Otto Kernberg's and Heinz Kohut's newer theories of the psychology of the self, and narcissistic personality disturbances are viewed as providing useful new insights about the abandoned child population. Two cases are presented, followed by application of Kohut's and Kernberg's treatment approaches. These newer treatment interventions offer more optimism for work with abandoned children, who are an ever increasing population.     

The unique nature of textile and craft home-based workers: A comparison

Using data collected by a nine-state regional research project, textile and craft home-based workers are compared with the rest of the home-based workers in the sample on several selected variables: home-based work and worker characteristics, income, adaptive behaviors to hectic work times, and advantages and disadvantages of home-based work. Significantly more females than males are engaged in textile and craft home-based work. The findings are related to gender; compared with other workers, textile and craft workers spend fewer hours on home-based work, have lower gross business incomes but greater gross family incomes, have more spouses employed outside the home, and are more likely to use personal time than to hire help during hectic work times. Additional research should investigate gender effects and their relationship to the choice and context of home-based work as well as their impact on the household.This article reports results from the Cooperative Regional Research Project, NE-167, entitled,At-Home Income Generation: Impact on Management, Productivity and Stability in Rural and Urban Families, partially supported by Cooperative States Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Experiment Stations at the University of Hawaii, Iowa State University, Lincoln University (Missouri), Michigan State University, Cornell University (New York), The Ohio State University, The Pennsylvania State University, Utah State University, and University of Vermont. The authors are listed alphabetically and have contributed equally to this publication.Her research interests include home-based work, social aspects of clothing, and consumer purchase behavior.Her research interests include farm family financial management, home-based work, and housing expenditures.     

Dementia at the Intersections: A unique case study exploring social location

Research exploring the experiences of persons living with dementia has been criticized for failing to situate individual experience in a broader socio-cultural context. In particular, little attention has been devoted to examining how social location shapes the subjective experiences and responses of persons with dementia. This paper examines how one woman's position as a younger, aboriginal woman of lower socio-economic status living with a same-sex partner, helped construct her experiences with dementia. Data for this unique case study are based on in-depth personal and family interviews and video-taped participant observation. Three themes dominated her story. First, receiving a diagnosis of dementia triggered this woman's desire to connect with her cultural heritage. Through this claiming of her cultural identity as an aboriginal woman, the dementia was reinterpreted as facilitating a closer connection with her ancestors and this released for her a sense of creativity, productivity and peacefulness. Second, the refusal of this woman to adopt a more conventional interpretation of dementia, compounded by her younger age and atypical presentation, resulted in a tendency by others to discount the impact of the dementia in her life. Finally, the lack of recognition afforded to her female partner increased her partner's isolation and created challenges for their relationship. This paper will focus on embedding this woman's lived experience within a broader socio-cultural context in order to demonstrate how aspects of one's identity and social location interact to construct one's subjective experience.     

A comparison of intergovernmental and private agency collection of child support arrears

Child support payments are intended to improve children's wellbeing by securing financial support from noncustodial parents. Payments in arrear are a significant problem, however, particularly when parents live in different states. Using a mixed-methods design, we compared the effectiveness of a private collection agency to a state agency managing intergovernmental child support cases over a 12-month period on: (1) the techniques, strategies, and methods used for child support enforcement, (2) the total amount of arrears collected, (3) the number of total payments collected, and, (4) the percentage of arrears collected. Though interviews revealed that employees working for the private agency and intergovernmental systems differ substantively in their collection philosophies, strategies, and enforcement tools available, quantitative results showed few differences between the agencies in arrears collections.     

Process manipulation in unique implementation

We incorporate social influence into implementation theory, and highlight the manner in which an informed agent feels guilty with regard to disobeying an uninformed principal’s wishes. The degree of this feeling depends on the agent’s expectation of others’ behavioral modes. We demonstrate a method of process manipulation, through which the principal employs psychological tactics for incentivizing agents to announce information in keeping with his/her wishes. We indicate that with a version of incentive compatibility, the principal can implement any alternative that he/she wishes as the unique Nash equilibrium without employing any contractual device. Each agent’s psychological cost would be negligible.     

Handheld computers. A feasible alternative to paper forms for field data collection

Recent advances in handheld computer hardware and software may provide alternatives to paper-based data collection methods. The authors compared data collected with paper forms to data collected with handheld computer-based forms in a field observation study of alcohol purchase attempts at 47 community festivals in a large metropolitan area. Agreement between data collected with paper forms and data collected with handheld computers was greater than 95%. Computer-based forms handled branching patterns better and yielded data that were immediately available for analyses. Paper forms handled written comments better. Handheld computers are a feasible alternative to paper forms for field data collection.     

Some unique properties of eigenvector centrality

Eigenvectors, and the related centrality measure Bonacich's c(β), have advantages over graph-theoretic measures like degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality: they can be used in signed and valued graphs and the beta parameter in c(β) permits the calculation of power measures for a wider variety of types of exchange. Degree, betweenness, and closeness centralities are defined only for classically simple graphs—those with strictly binary relations between vertices. Looking only at these classical graphs, where eigenvectors and graph–theoretic measures are competitors, eigenvector centrality is designed to be distinctively different from mere degree centrality when there are some high degree positions connected to many low degree others or some low degree positions are connected to a few high degree others. Therefore, it will not be distinctively different from degree when positions are all equal in degree (regular graphs) or in core-periphery structures in which high degree positions tend to be connected to each other.     

Why language is unique to human beings

There are some well-known theories about the origin of the language. The origin of the language is very mysterious. The theory of language origin can be divided into two hypotheses: continuity and discontinuity. The basic idea of the continuity hypothesis is that the language can't be suddenly formed, there must be a process from the human ancestors of the early evolution of the language system. The discontinuous hypothesis holds that language has some unique characteristics which come across in a certain period of time and relates to the human gene evolution and mutation. However, What I want to prove is neither of them, I prefer the religious views. In this thesis, I mainly talk about two aspects. Bible records the original history of human society, therefore, I'd like to find the answer of the origin of language from the Bible.     

Summer programming in rural communities: unique challenges

During the past several decades, child poverty rates have been higher in rural than in urban areas, and now 2.5 million children live in deep poverty in rural America. Studies indicate that poor children are most affected by the typical "summer slide." Summer programming has the ability to address the issues of academic loss, nutritional loss, and the lack of safe and constructive enrichment activities. However, poor rural communities face three major challenges in implementing summer programming: community resources, human capital, and accessibility. The success of Energy Express, a statewide award-winning six-week summer reading and nutrition program in West Virginia, documents strategies for overcoming the challenges faced by poor, rural communities in providing summer programs. Energy Express (1) uses community collaboration to augment resources and develop community ownership, (2) builds human capital and reverses the acknowledged brain drain by engaging college students and community volunteers in meaningful service, and (3) increases accessibility through creative transportation strategies. West Virginia University Extension Service, the outreach arm of the land-grant institution, partners with AmeriCorps, a national service program, and various state and local agencies and organizations to implement a program that produces robust results.     

A global overview of major or unique libraries, clearinghouses, and bibliographic databases in social gerontology

Eighty-six major and/or unique information resources in social gerontology, mostly in the form of libraries, clearinghouses and other hybrid resources, and bibliogrphic databases were identified through an international survey. They are practically all located in the more developed countries, and the large majority are in the United States. A growing number are available in electronic format, facilitating direct end-user access. Significant information gaps continue to exist and access to the data resources of the northern hemisphere remains a major problem for developing nations.     

The unique character of involvement in multi-site evaluation settings

As the number of large federal programs increases, so, too, does the need for a more complete understanding of how to conduct evaluations of such complex programs. The research literature has documented the benefits of stakeholder participation in smaller-scale program evaluations. However, given the scope and diversity of projects in multi-site program evaluations, traditional notions of participatory evaluation do not apply. The purpose of this research is to determine the ways in which stakeholders are involved in large-scale, multi-site STEM evaluations. This article describes the findings from a survey of 313 program leaders and evaluators and from follow-up interviews with 12 of these individuals.Findings from this study indicate that attendance at meetings and conferences, planning discussions within the project related to use of the program evaluation, and participation in data collection should be added to the list of activities that foster feelings of evaluation involvement among stakeholders. In addition, perceptions of involvement may vary according to breadth or depth of evaluation activities, but not always both. Overall, this study suggests that despite the contextual challenges of large, multi-site evaluations, it is feasible to build feelings of involvement among stakeholders.     

The Fourie collection of Khoisan ethnographica: forming an archive

In the 1920s, in the course of exercising control over the furthest reaches of South Africa’s recently acquired protectorate, Dr Louis Fourie, Medical Officer for the Administration of the Protectorate of South West Africa, amassed what was to become probably the world’s most extensive collection of Khoisan artefacts. Today the results of this decade of part‐time collecting and anthropologising form a neglected source of knowledge as it rests in the storerooms of Museum Africa in Johannesburg. Fourie and his collection formed an important part of the process of a discourse that created knowledge about the Khoisan over the subsequent decades, both shaping and being shaped by the academic paradigms of his time and the colonial perceptions and imperatives that informed policy and practice in the Administration. This recursive pattern continued as the collection moved in and out of public institutions, reflecting a continuing obsession with the Khoisan in the West, both in public and academic discourses. Examining the collection, its history and its context uncover seldom distinguished characteristics of archives and, particularly of, mixed‐media collections.     

Revisiting the accuracy problem in network analysis using a unique dataset

A series of papers published by Bernard and colleagues in the late 1970s and early 1980s, dubbed the “accuracy studies,” called into the question the validity of self-reported perceived communication in the study of networks, showing that such reports explain only about 20 % of the variance in directly observed communication. Questions remain about how well the kinds of organizations studied reflect typical formal organizations, the studies’ short observation periods, and manual observation methods. This study revisits the accuracy studies using a unique dataset comprising 144 weeks of network surveys and machine classification of 7,000 h of audio recordings to measure observable communication in a software engineering unit employing 54 people. Results show that correlations between perceived and observed communication over the weeks studied have a lower average than that reported in the accuracy studies but vary considerably from week to week. It also replicates results of earlier research showing that participants tend to overreport communication when they perceive a strong structural relationship to the alters they are rating. This study solidifies our knowledge about network self-reports using a stronger data foundation than prior research employed. Its results, along with the previous research, suggest that perceived communication is not so much a flawed measure of observable communication as it is a related, yet distinct phenomenon. This highlights the need for developments in theory and modeling that articulate the relationship between perceived and observed communication, and Network Reticulation Theory is suggested as a viable approach.     

Daily data collection of sexual and other health‐related behaviors

This article documents some findings of a sociological research project which was done in West Germany from 1970 ‐ 1973 (Dannecker/Reiche 1974). 139 contact‐persons, chosen by the authors, distributed 1617 questionnaires to homosexuals. 789 were filled out and sent back and constitute our sample.

The complete research project comprises six themes: coming out; homosexual subculture; homosexual friendships; sexuality of homosexuals; jobs and the employments of homosexuals; the collective neurosis of homosexuals.