11-M: a lesson on greedy journalism

Through the analysis of Spanish media coverage of the terrorist attack in Madrid 11 March 2004, and specifically of the so-called ‘conspiracy theory’ sustained by certain media for political or commercial reasons with large public success, this article examines the consolidation in Spain of a kind of journalism that tries to model with Lewis Coser's concept of ‘greedy institution’. The political functions of this ‘greedy journalism’ and its relationship with the so-called ‘neo-populist turn’ of present politics in Western democracies are discussed in brief.     

Families' experience of a single session therapy framework in advanced allied health practice for children with neurodevelopmental and behavioural disabilities: A thematic analysis of qualitative data

Single session therapy (SST) has emerging evidence for facilitating meaningful therapeutic change in a small number of consults, rather than more traditional long-term therapies. This study aimed to explore and describe the parent/caregiver and child experience with advanced allied health practitioners (AAHP) using SST for children with developmental disabilities, by understanding key characteristics of the consultation that led to therapeutic change. Eligible families attending an AAHP outpatient clinic for children with developmental and behavioural concerns participated in one to four SST consultations around their identified areas of need. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 38 parents and 12 children, from 37 different families. Thematic analysis was used to analyse interviews. Demographic information was gathered through parent interviews and by reviewing hospital records. Four key themes emerged relating to the characteristics of the consultation that led to a positive experience for families: (1) the art of mutual presence; (2) the value of time; (3) the power of understanding; and (4) the trust of action. These attributes were influenced by the overarching complexities of the AAHP, the parent's and child's interpersonal skills, and the organisational mechanisms influencing patient care. Parents and children reported clinical change during the consult through increased understanding, and being heard, valued, and respected for their individual decisions on how to manage their child's and family's needs. This study provides preliminary evidence that utilising SST for children and families with developmental and behavioural needs facilitates a positive experience valued by families. SST, with a focus on a family's individual identified areas of concern, was valued and effective when delivered by AAHP. This suggests that SST, when appropriately administered by experienced and trained health practitioners, is useful for families dealing with children with developmental and behavioural challenges.     

Sociology of Humor and a Critical Dramaturgy

Goffman's analytic framework can provide tools useful for a critical theory of modern society. While commentators have remarked on Goffman's apparent technical neutrality, a sociology of humor can help reveal his critical thrust. Using a latent content analysis, we demonstrate how several frames found in Jerry Seinfeld's humor are both dramaturgical and covertly critical. We use these themes to illuminate the critical analyses of modern social life provided by Goffman's method.     

Humor Your Way to Good Health

ABSTRACT

Although humor has been used in many ways, humor practices have not been fully conceptualized or utilized as a means to impact major concerns on a societal level. In this intergenerational model demonstration, humor practices were re-conceptualized and used as an effective vehicle for communicating messages to impact a societal issue, overweight and obesity among children. This objective was operationalized through an intergenerational project of the Legacy Leadership Institute on Humor Communication and Health (LLIHCH). Legacy Leaders were trained to use humor practices to convey messages about healthy eating and physical activity to children. They participated in interactive instruction on key topics (nutrition, humor practices, intergenerational relationships, children and schools, leadership, and instructional methods. Legacy Leaders used this training to conduct the Humor Your Way to Good Health program in two public elementary schools. Assessments indicate the children benefit significantly from the Humor Your Way to Good Health intergenerational program in terms of the knowledge acquired and its application to making choices that support healthy behaviors. The unique humor approach captures the attention and imagination of children. The intergenerational approach unites children and adults in a joint quest for healthier lifestyles. Together, they are addressing the epidemic of overweight and obesity among children.     

The roles of humour and laughter in youth focus groups on school food

The article examines young people's group interaction and the roles of humor and laughter in relation to school food and school lunch situations. The analysed focus group discussion data is drawn from a broader case study (2012?2013) with 9th grade students (15–16 years old; 62 pupils; 25 boys and 37 girls; 14 groups; 4?6 pupils per group) in a Finnish secondary school. The analysis is based on existing interpretations and classifications of humor in literature, which is complemented by notions drawn from the study's data set. It is argued that an analysis of humor and laughter can provide valuable notions of how collective attitudes towards school food are constructed, enforced and distributed among students, while also providing insight regarding what kinds of issues around school lunch practices are considered important and worthwhile in the context of students' informal peer cultures. The results illustrate how humor and laughter functioned for the students as a space for (1) Constructing ‘us’ versus ‘them’; (2) Negotiating social order; and (3) Engaging in fun and safe interaction. Results are discussed in the light of how humor and laughter uphold or divide social groups, as well mediate shifts between formal conventions and students' informal worlds.     

Role-Taking Accuracy in Medical Encounters: A Test of two Theories

Abstract

This paper tests five hypotheses derived from two contrasting theoretical perspectives on role-taking accuracy: a social contact theory and an institutional resource theory. We investigate how well doctors and patients perceive one another's perspectives in a medical encounter. The cumulative weight of the data supports the proposed social contact theory. Increased contact between residents and patients, as reflected in physician's year in residency, contributes to more accurate role-taking on the part of physicians. Conditions of social compatibility between doctors and patients vis a vis gender or race lead to more accurate role-taking. Finally, personal characteristics are better predictors of role-taking accuracy than institutional status variables such as type of residency training program or doctor's year in residency status.     

Gating Union: The Politics of Making a Historically Black Community

ABSTRACT

In 1999, Union was officially recognized as a Historic District by the National Register of Historic Places. Although approximately 80 percent of the residents are raced white, Union was identified as a historically black space. The recognition, premised on Union's origins as a town founded by freed slaves in the late nineteenth century, was the culmination of efforts by the Union Community Association. Its members, who are predominantly white, middle class, and newcomers to the area, took on the role of “protecting” their community by gaining official historic recognition, a task that established them as the gatekeepers of history, and black residents as historical artifacts. As Union became established as a historically black community, its social and legal boundaries could act to protect the place against unwanted land developers. While (white) residents took on the role as history's gatekeepers, (black) descendent residents were turned into tangible metonyms for history, authenticating by their presence Union's historic status. Official recognition has allowed the Union Community Association to fence in an oasis of rustic living at the edge of development, while less affluent residents find themselves gated into a stagnant social landscape in which social and economic opportunity has been effectively gated out.     

Religious multiculturalism and intercultural education: Reflections on the educational experiences at the Waldensian Collegio della Santa Trinità in Torre Pellice (Italy)

In this paper the author reflects on the educational experience of students attending the Waldensian high school in Torre Pellice (Italy), drawing on the findings of her own ethnographic fieldwork in the Waldensian valleys. The original research aim was to explore the meaning that education and schooling traditionally have for this religious minority group, and their relevance to the latter's identity construction as minority persons, as well as Italian citizens. But additional findings emerged which allow for an interpretation of the Collegio della Santa Trinità as a place where intercultural education has also been achieved. Fifteen fifth year high school students describe in in-depth interviews how this denominational high school is both open to diversity and attentive to a pluralism of views. As a consequence the school is perceived as providing its students not only with high quality education but also with a distinctive cultural perspective built around the common concerns of its students.     

Exposing Humanism: Prudence,Ingenium, and the Politics of the Posthuman

This article examines posthumanism and its relationship to humanism. First, it is argued that the term “posthumanism” relies upon an incomplete conception of humanism, and in a way that forecloses the possibility of looking to the humanist tradition for support. Addressing Foucault's often quoted comments about the recent invention and imminent demise of man, it is argued that Foucault is not anti‐humanist, but is rather critical of the use of humanism as an axis of reflection. Second, the posthumanist perspective is summarized as attending to a set of interrelated ethical and epistemological concerns. Calling into question the boundary between human and nonhuman animals, posthumanism also challenges the primacy of empirico‐deductive reasoning and advocates a re‐legitimization of rhetoric as a mode of thought. Lastly, using Ernesto Grassi's interpretation of the early Italian humanists, this article demonstrates not only the compatibility of Renaissance humanism with posthumanist concerns, but also the fruitfulness of this tradition as a conceptual resource. Although the Renaissance notion of ingenium, the ability to adapt and make concrete situations meaningful without also affirming strong ontological commitments, is absent from posthumanist discourse, it is a concept that has the power to enrich the posthumanist project. Consequently, posthumanism is not actually at odds with the humanist tradition in general, but rather only with a very limited and relatively recent conception.     

Mental Health and Substance Abuse Screening in Primary Care

ABSTRACT

An automated screening system for substance abuse and mental health problems was developed and implemented in a rural primary care clinic. Eighty-nine patients were assessed with this system. The incidence of identified problems, 35% in total, was consistent with that found in previous studies of patients in general and medical settings. Additionally, over half of the patients assessed felt at least some need for mental health or substance abuse treatment. Nonetheless, because of the staff's concerns over patient privacy, impeding patient flow, and the physician's perceived ability to adequately identify these problems without assistance, the system was not adopted.     

Continuous Violent Conflict as a System of Authority*

This paper analyzes how authority can be maintained by structuring reality through continuous violent conflict. Using Lewis Coser's reformulation of Simmel's propositions on fostering continuous conflict as a raison d'être in sect-like struggle groups as a general frame of analysis, the Stalinist case is then examined in order to evaluate systematically these propositions in a societal context and to specify the morphology of violence as a method of conflict. By examining a societal context, it is noted that instability in the social structure not only can be a condition for the legitimacy of a problematic political leadership and system, but also simultaneously be a consequence of a form of preventive punitive sanctioning, whereby potential threats, both persons and alternative courses of action, are eliminated before they become present dangers. In turn, an official definition of reality, justifying leadership and system, is constructed through the public documentation of a conspiracy, which employs invented categories to demonstrate ideological continuity and fabricates pseudo events to demonstrate indispensability in fulfilling necessary functions. This public documentation of a conspiracy is then used as a facade for a larger plan of social prophylaxis that implicates the public as well as the police in ferreting out tangible and visible enemies to till the invented categories in the pseudo events. As public complicity conjoins with the official definition of reality, commitment to the leadership and system is acquired.     

SAMHSA guidelines for recovery housing emphasize MAT

If there's any question about the appropriateness of medication‐assisted treatment (MAT) using methadone and buprenorphine for recovery housing residents, it has been settled by the most recent report from the federal government: Don't ban it, and, furthermore, do it.     

Sexual Concerns and Counseling Needs of “Normal” Women Attending a Student Health Service Women's Clinic

Abstract

The responses of approximately 1000 female university students attending a Women's Health Service for gynecologic or contraceptive services are presented. A self-report questionnaire examined the frequency of sexual problems experienced by the respondents and their partners. The most common concerns expressed about themselves were orgasmic difficulties (74%), dyspareunia (58%), and body inhibitions (46%). Forty-five percent of these women expressed a desire for counseling. The most common concerns that the respondents perceived in their partners were premature ejaculation (46%), too much interest in sex (33%), and difficulty maintaining an erection (28%). Twenty percent of the women thought their partners would desire counseling. Specific types of counseling desired (e.g., individual, group, mixed group) were determined. Various self-help educational interests of the students were also evaluated. Substantial numbers of “normal” female university students expressed sexual concerns and desire for counseling services and educational aids.     

'Totalitarianism', Treason and Containment in Catch-22 (and 1984)

Abstract

Critical writing on Catch-22 has often centred (quite naturally and understandably, it must be said) on concepts such as paradox, black humour and the absurdity of the human condition. Although these approaches have certainly not been without profit and have produced interesting readings, they have also tended to obscure, under the generic nature of such frameworks, the novel's patent political concerns — concerns which, moreover, are not at all unrelated to the usual critical preoccupations. In a similar way, although Catch-22 criticism has often relied heavily on the detection of literary allusions and influences at work in the text, a most obvious source of influence seems to have been generally ignored. This essay attempts to offer a different reading of Catch-22 based on the assertion that what the novel is really about is 'totalitarianism'. Its starting point is, therefore, a parallel reading bringing together Heller's best-known book with one of the central literary texts on 'totalitarianism' — George Orwell's 1984. Focusing initially on the similar way(s) in which the two novels construct what is called a 'totalitarian' atmosphere, the essay proceeds to briefly demonstrate the bearing of the 'totalitarian' problematic on another important '60s novel, E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, and to offer a fuller reading of Catch-22, including a summary excursion into the difficult question of how the student of '60s American fictions should approach the concept of 'totalitarianism'.     

An Ontological Turn for Childhood Studies?

The so‐called ‘ontological turn’ in the social sciences has brought with it yet another layer of theoretical concerns, except that this time the interest is in ontology rather than epistemology. New materialist thinking which has emerged in recent years promises to rethink the task of social theory in ways that circumvent modernist dualisms. In this paper, I explore what this might entail for childhood studies. What might such an ontological shift which emphasises among others relationality, connectedness and materiality mean for the further development of childhood studies? How would a decentring of children and the field's overpowering concerns for studying children's perspectives/voices/standpoints help rethink childhood studies and its remit? How, in short, would a shift from the child as an independent unit of analysis and of childhood as a categorical identity to a new ontology of emerging phenomena which implicate children, adults and non‐human forces affect the field's direction in the future?     

The Symbolic Type Revisited: Semiotics in Practice and the Reformation of the Israeli Commemorative Context

Revisiting Grathoff's theory of symbolic type (ST), we examine the personal evolution and commemorative work of Tsipi Kichler, a cultural entrepreneur and founder of an alternative Israeli Holocaust museum/geriatric center. As hybrid product of Israeli social cleavages, Kichler exteriorizes her paradoxical vision in the museum aiming to reform Holocaust‐related discourse and practice. Early biographical positioning and resultant contradictions become translated into resistant commemorative performance where serious humor deconstructs the binaries of life/death and past/present. We consider the implications of the ST's self‐referential closure to interaction, and the transformative potential of the alignment of cultural entrepreneurs' personal memory with collective memory.     

Chapter 2 Residents in Assisted Living Facilities and Visitation Patterns

Abstract

Resident visitation patterns within an assisted living facility provide insight into a resident's life satisfaction. This study investigated residents' perceptions of family and friend visitation. Thirty assisted living residents from Oklahoma participated in a comprehensive interview that included demographics, life satisfaction, visitation frequency, and perceptions of visitation patterns. A majority of the respondents (90%) perceived family and friend visitation as “important” to “very important” in their life. Visitation allows residents to reminisce with family members and friends, to fulfill the need to have outside contact, and to be reassured that they have not been forgotten. Results indicate residents do desire continued relationships with family and friends through visitation. Facilities should encourage activities involving outside members of a resident's support network and be aware of residents less visited, developing programs creating social contact and involvement.     

FATALISTIC VOLUNTARISM AND LIFE HAPPINESS IN POST-SOCIALIST CHINA

Fatalism has been recognized by sociologists as a key concept in sociology. Recent debates on fatalism revolve around the way theological fatalism influences the individual and society. Unfortunately, little has been said about the topic in the communist and post-communist world. Using recent data from a national survey of residents in People's Republic of China (P.R. China), this article examines the relationship between fatalistic voluntarism and life happiness in the context of China's Marxist-atheist monopoly. Results show that fatalistic voluntarism has a significant, positive net effect on life happiness among those Chinese who believe in fate control. Implications of this study are discussed.