Examination of the Child Protective Services Decision-Making Context with Implications for Decision Support System Design

Abstract

The general perception of Child Protective Services (CPS) decision making is that it is inconsistent and prone to error. As a result, risk assessment instruments were developed to enable investigators to make better decisions. The present study uses a qualitative approach with an explicit theoretical framework pertinent to management information systems and decision support system design to examine the context in which investigators operate and make decisions. The resulting information can be used to determine design requirements that would improve the experience of using a risk assessment instrument that serves as a decision support system (DSS) for CPS investigators.     

Visual impairment,sport and somatic work: the auditory experiences of blind and partially sighted cricket players

This article explores the auditory experiences of a group of visually impaired elite sportsmen and how their sporting participation provides an alternative way of being in team sport. Here, the focus is upon the constructed auditory structure of visually impaired cricket and how this vast, featureless sporting space is endowed with social value. Unlike previous research into the spatial experiences of relatively stable environments, this article is the first to detail how visually impaired people conceptualize and negotiate such a dynamic and fluid space. Drawing upon the concepts of somatic work, and auditory knowledge, this article establishes the participants’ rich sensuous experiences of this physical activity and how their negotiation of the dynamic sporting environment, through the active creation of unique sense-making strategies, subverts the dominant ocularcentric notion of the sporting body. Rather than blindness being reduced to a state of deficit, visually impaired cricket provides an embodied platform to celebrate the participants’ multifarious capabilities.     

Time‐Space Distanciation: An Interdisciplinary Account of How Culture Shapes the Implicit and Explicit Psychology of Time and Space

The growing body of research on temporal and spatial experience lacks a comprehensive theoretical approach. Drawing on Giddens’ framework, we present time‐space distanciation (TSD) as a construct for theorizing the relations between culture, time, and space. TSD in a culture may be understood as the extent to which (1) time and space are abstracted as separate dimensions and (2) activities are extended and organized across time and space. After providing a historical account of its development, we outline a multi‐level conceptualization of TSD supported by research on cultural differences in the experience of time and space. We impact this conceptualization by examining two ethnographic case studies. We conclude by highlighting future research directions. TSD is an integrative, interdisciplinary, multi level construct with the potential to guide the burgeoning social science of time and space.     

Sensing the Natural in the Caribbean's Nature Island

ABSTRACT

This article uses research carried out in the Caribbean island of Dominica to consider how sensory experiences shape and influence people's perceptions of and relationships to nature. People's ideas of nature are not purely abstract; they are embodied and emplaced in geographical and social contexts. That is, people acquire understandings of nature through their experiences of the natural world, their engagements with flowers and birds, rivers and mountains, forests and vegetable gardens. On this basis, this article explores how sensory perception, in addition to being a way to apprehend the material reality of the natural environment, also plays a role in how people relate to and think about nature and the natural, based on their bodily experiences in a particular place.     

The Institute for Senior Action

Abstract

Since 1977, the Joint Public Affairs Committee for Older Adults (JPAC) has been educating and mobilizing older adults to take an active role in the public policy decisions affecting their lives. Recognizing the need to better train its members in the techniques of social action and in an effort to familiarize recent retirees with the world of senior advocacy, JPAC founded a comprehensive leadership training program called the Institute for Senior Action in 1994. JPAC's 10-week training Institute integrates critical aging policy issues with practical grassroots applications for action. In addition to honing the skills of longtime community activists, the Institute serves as a vehicle for recent retirees and others to become more involved in social action.     

Hitting the target without missing the point: New Zealand’s immunisation health target for two year olds

ABSTRACT

The use of health targets as a form of performance measurement has become more prominent internationally as governments have sought to control public expenditure, produce greater efficiency and improve accountability. However, health targets have faced criticism for their potential to produce negative outcomes within a health system. This paper examines how a health target was used as a policy instrument within the New Zealand health system to improve immunisation coverage at two years of age. It explores how the immunisation health target was implemented within four case study sites and discusses the effectiveness of the health target as a policy instrument for improving immunisation coverage and addressing persistent immunisation inequities. Measuring and monitoring performance towards the immunisation health target improved accountability for immunisation coverage within the New Zealand health system and focused attention on improving immunisation coverage in a way that previous policy attempts had failed to do. Health targets may be an effective policy instrument for creating change within specific areas of a health system if their potential for dysfunctional consequences are taken into consideration at the outset.     

Affect,Heat and Tacos. A Speculative Account of Thermoception

Abstract

Current affective approaches in the experience of heat or thermoception focus on the capacity of control and regulation of temperature by means of consciously driven physical activity of the human body. With this paper, I suggest that thermoception is a complex process whose explanation requires considering events of production of heat that are not registered by conscious activity and that do not even appear in the strata of the organic body. In order to further expand the understanding of thermoception I turn to Whitehead’s philosophy to develop a speculative account of the experience of heat. I use his concept of prehension as well as his analysis of “division” to explain the relation between events of production of heat from three different scales of organization: molecular, organic, and cultural. I will explain how each event of production of heat modify the affective capacity of feeling heat as well as the way each event of heat inherits its quota of subjectivity all the way up to the production of human experience and the rise of anxiety as an emotion made of heat. To make my case, I will provide a division analysis of prehension in the experience of heat when eating tacos in the streets of Mexico City.     

Tasting off-flavors: food science,sensory knowledge and the consumer sensorium

Abstract

In food science and technology, understanding off-flavors has a significance with both technical and commercial implications. In the food industry in the United States, it is a widely held truism that consumers will not buy a product if they do not like the way it tastes or if it contains unpleasant flavors. But how can science determine when food is off putting, and how do scientists learn to address bad tastes in their experimental and technical practice? Based on ethnographic work with food scientists in the United States, this paper is a reflexive account of learning to taste off-flavors, a form of sensory learning that utilizes the scientist’s own body as a kind of instrument. The paper argues that a particular understanding of the consumer sensorium emerges through food scientists’ approach to off-flavors. This is an image of the consumer as a chemically receptive sensory system that is highly sensitive to compounds at trace levels. By utilizing the sensitivity of their own senses, food scientists exploit the relationship between distaste, memory and sensory perception as a form of training to produce future aesthetic memories of off-flavors that can be deployed in a technical context.     

Systematic review of the physical home environment and the relationship to psychological well-being among community-dwelling older adults

ABSTRACT

Older adults with functional impairments are at risk of being excluded from participation in day-to-day life. This exclusion can have detrimental effects on psychological well-being. The physical home environment is a potential force for both enhancing and limiting participation for this population. This systematic review of literature examined relationships between the physical home environment, functional impairment, and psychological well-being among older adults who live in community settings. The Ecological Model of Aging served as the guiding framework for this review. Results suggest that knowledge of the relationships between these constructs is still in the early stages. While associational relationships are established, the nature of these relationships is clouded by the inconsistency of measurement across studies, as well as design challenges. Objective and subjective features of the physical home environment are linked to psychological well-being throughout the literature. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that personal competence serves as a moderator of those relationships.     

Living Arrangements,Depression, and Health Status Among Elderly Russian-Speaking Immigrants

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between living arrangements, depression, and health status in a community-based sample of 300 elderly Russian-speaking immigrants. Data were collected via a self-administered questionnaire survey method. The questionnaire was designed to investigate various aspects of health, mental health, health services utilization, and health behaviors. A team of bilingual professionals was involved in the construction and translation of the survey instrument. The sample consists of 150 females and 150 males. The respondents' average age was 73.2 years. The regression analysis reveals that elderly Russian-speaking immigrants who live alone are more likely to experience a higher level of depression than those living with others. This relationship remains statistically significant after controlling for age, education, income, ability to speak English, years residing in the United States, gender, and health status. Since health status appears to influence depression, we performed further regression analyses and found that living arrangements had no statistically significant relationship with health status. Health status serves as an intermediate variable between the block of demographic variables and depression. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Maybe We Should Just Shut Up: The Body as an Important Consideration for Group Work Practice

ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of the human body as an important consideration for group work. It discusses six concepts related to how the body can be paid attention to and utilized within the realm of practice. These concepts include the idea of the body as related to the sense of self; physical experience as metaphor; the body as a barometer of group experience; shared physical experience and group cohesion; physical experiences and behavior; and the notion of somatic intelligence and communication. Examples of each are discussed from the lens of the author's practice.     

The Japanese Touch

ABSTRACT

Touch, as it is conventionally conceived, appears to be lacking in everyday Japanese intimate relationships. Here, the “touching spaces” between Japanese people are explored, challenging assumptions about closeness and intimacy. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Japan, this review suggests that “finite” conceptions of touch, body, and subjectivity limit our understanding of experiences of closeness in a Japanese cultural context. Instead, how the space between people is inhabited, and the feelings in this space, seems much more significant. In sum, Japanese experiences of touch, particularly in a familial context, should best be seen as a tangible and sensuous connection that is not just felt in the body. Focusing on two body practices, this review explores the connection and embodied experience of closeness in the Japanese family vis-à-vis co-bathing and co-sleeping. It ends with a summary of the design of these sites of intimacy and some ways in which communication and bonding can be enhanced.     

A body passes by: the flâneur and the senses in nineteenth-century London and Paris

Abstract

The flâneur is well-known for being the most emblematic nineteenth-century observer of urban life. Critics have often compared the flâneur to a camera eye which records everything and insisted on the predominance of sight over other senses in the cognitive process. This article emphasises the embodiedness of the flâneur’s vision, which is an experience of all the senses. Urban public space can be envisaged as a ‘metabolic space,’ in which “the links between background and figures are very unstable” (Augoyard 1991). The moving body of the flâneur, which can adapt to this changing space, seems to be in an ideal position to apprehend the metabolic body of the city. The flâneur is not only a “transparent eye-ball” (Emerson 2003), he is “a living eye” which communicates with all the other senses and captures the whole experience of moving through the city. By looking at texts by Balzac, Baudelaire, Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, the article shows that flânerie is a sensory activity that shapes our perception of the city as much as the city shapes our own flâneries by transforming our bodies into scribes who write the “thicks and thins of the urban text” (de Certeau, 1984).     

Performance measurement as a policy instrument

ABSTRACT

The rise of government by indicators, by figures may reveal a new wave of rationalization organized by the state in the classic Weberian sense. Contemporary forms of government are marked by the rise of indicators, measures and new metrics to compare, certify, codify and evaluate. In many countries, performance measurement has become one of the symbols of the transformation of governance. The paper aims to show how performance indicators are a particular type of policy instrument that increases competitive pressure within societies even if that cannot be analysed only in terms of neoliberalism.     

Reactions of Practitioners to the Introduction of a Standard Instrument to Monitor Clinical Outcomes

ABSTRACT

This paper describes, step by step, the efforts made by the authors to introduce a clinical monitoring system into a marital and family counselling clinic in Tel Aviv, Israel. The monitoring system which was chosen for that purpose was the McMaster Clinical Rating Scale (MCRS). Systematic training helped the counsellors to become more receptive to the idea of monitoring, acknowledge its potential utility, and try it out. However, they failed to use the instrument fully and regularly, until finally the whole effort had to be abandoned. It emerged that the assumptions underlying the system fit the agency's ideology, but not the actual practice of counselling and supervision. Furthermore, the administrative and technical environment may not have been adequate to assure counsellors sufficient rewards for compliance. A vicious circle developed: The monitoring instrument was regarded by partationoner as irrevlent as long as the information it provided was not integreated into counselling and supervision.     

Themes in Group Work with Lesbian and Gay Adolescents

ABSTRACT

Lesbian and gay youth often face severe isolation, growing up in an environment that is frequently ignorant of their unique needs and hostile toward them. Youth groups can serve a vital role in overcoming this isolation in addition to providing a safe space for working out the various problems surrounding the stigma of growing up gay. This article presents several themes in group work with lesbian and gay adolescents based on the author's experience as a group worker at a lesbian and gay youth project. Isolation, coming out, learning/re-learning, and initiation into a community are offered as four main themes which provide a foundation for understanding how to help lesbian and gay adolescents in groups.     

Sonic Envelopes

ABSTRACT

This article examines ways in which an individual's experiences of spatial environments are informed by physical and psychic perceptions of sound. It explores how sonic images, memories, voices, spaces and events constitute “sonic envelopes.” These aesthetic figures are developed out of the late-nineteenth-century writings by the philosopher Henri Bergson and from contemporary audio-walks by the artist, Janet Cardiff. Each shows that sound, space and time are embodied in the individual's powers of sensory perception. Bergson and Cardiff's sonic envelopes may therefore enable reevaluations of the relationships between sound, space and time that connect the individual to his or her environment.     

A Rhythmic Time for the Digital

ABSTRACT

For the past twenty years, different theoretical accounts in the humanities have either denigrated the digital as precipitating the recession of reality, praised it for constructing new cultural identities, or understood it to empower sensory perception. Broadly speaking, whether positive or negative, most theorists of the digital have tended to focus on a somewhat traditional understanding of technology as separate from the human body, one that enables, extends, addresses or severs, but remains consistently external. This article explores the idea of a rhythmic virtual movement that lurks in the unknown and “unthought” dimensions of experience, in particular it considers how digital art environments can act as an expression of rhythmic time.     

Fingerbombing,or “Touching is Good”: The Cultural Construction of Technologized Touch

ABSTRACT

The development of new interface technologies involves reimagining perceptual processes. Grounded in histories of perception, this paper examines the discursive framing of touch in the advertisements for Nintendo's Dual Screen portable gaming system, explaining the way that the ads posit the DS as a means of reconnecting with a lost and repressed mode of perception. In the process of technologizing touch, the ads paradoxically assert a nostalgic memory of a pretechnological sensorium that can be restored using technology. However, in doing so, they displace older models of touch and attempt to redefine what it means to touch. I argue that the DS ads, in addition to demanding new body habits, call for a reconfiguration of perception that brings it into accord with the limits of the present technology. The DS interface serves as sensory armor that allows the subject to touch without feeling, to manipulate without sensation.     

Seeing with the Hands,Touching with the Eyes: Vision,Touch and the Enlightenment Spatial Imaginary

ABSTRACT

Blindness has been a topic of great interest for philosophers, and the centrality of the so-called Molyneux problem explicitly raises questions concerning visual and tactile experience of the blind. Begun as a purely speculative philosophical exercise before ophthalmic operations could be performed, the debate continues and is examined here in relation to current work in psychology and neuropsychology. From debates and correspondence in the seventeenth century onwards, sparked by this hypothetical question, first-person accounts of the blind were sought to bolster the philosophical speculations. The question asked by Molyneux is crucial in Enlightenment philosophy, and is discussed in a series of dialogs between philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, Descartes and especially Diderot. This paper shows how a philosophical debate rooted in a distinct period in history has continued to excite the attention of those who attempt to draw together a psychological philosophy of sensory-spatial experience. In particular, the Molyneux problem concentrated on the interaction of the visual and the tactile, of hands and eyes, and how they are involved in spatial cognition. The legacy of these debates concerning the spatial imaginary of the blind remain pertinent to this day.