One Wedding and a Funeral: Reflections on Fieldwork,Community and Relationships in Cape York Peninsula

Marrying into the community whose culture you are studying opens up philosophical and practical quandaries for the researcher and facilitates opportunities that are not otherwise available. Marriage brings with it many subtle shifts in relationships within the community. George Orwell (1937) speaks of class difference but could equally have been talking of cultural difference when he said ‘it is not so much a stone wall as a plate glass pane of an aquarium; it is so easy to pretend that it isn't there, and so impossible to get through it’. Does marriage enable you to cross that barrier? What difference, if any, is there in the nature of the resulting research and its benefits or otherwise to the community? This paper provides a glimpse into the author's journey as a researcher in Northern Cape York Peninsula, Australia and reflects on the way interpersonal relationships influenced her approach to research.     

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) in the elderly – a geriatrician's perspective

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is becoming increasingly prevalent among many different populations all over the world, including the US and Europe. Its multitude of complications with devastating outcomes leads to a significantly higher risk for cardio-vascular and all-cause mortality in an individual. However, it is clear now that early detection of CKD might not only delay some of the complications but also prevent them. Therefore, various important public health organizations all over the world have turned their focus and attention to CKD and its risk factors, early detection and early intervention. Nevertheless, the general goals in preventing the increase in CKD and its complications are far from being completely achieved. Why is this so? What is the magnitude and complexity of the problem? How is it affecting the population – are there differences in its affection by age, gender or frail elderly versus the robust? Are we modifying the risk factors appropriately and aggressively? Are there subtle differences in managing the risk factors in those on dialysis versus the non-dialysis CKD patients? Is it important to treat anaemia of CKD aggressively, will it make a difference in the disease progression, its complications or to quality of life? What do these unfortunate individuals commonly succumb to? What do we advise patients who refuse dialysis or those who desire dialysis or transplant? Are there useful non-dialytic treatment recommendations for those who refuse dialysis? What is the role of the physicians caring for the elderly with CKD? When should the primary care givers refer a CKD patient to a nephrologist? The key to eventually controlling incident and prevalent CKD and improve quality of life of affected individuals, lies in not only knowing these and many other vital aspects, but also in applying such knowledge compulsively in day-to-day practice by each and every one us. As CKD is increasingly a disease of the elderly with men being affected more, this review details fairly comprehensively the vital aspects of CKD, especially from a primary care geriatrician's practical standpoint.     

Phenomenology and intersubjectivity: considerations for webcam-facilitated psychotherapy

ABSTRACT

The clearest distinction between webcam-facilitated versus face-to-face psychotherapy is the available sensorial information. The following questions guide this discussion: 1. How do our senses inform the psychotherapeutic process? 2. What are the implications for the therapeutic process when sensory information is different than during face-to-face therapy? This examination of the role of the senses in the creation of knowledge is grounded in phenomenology. Individual unity of consciousness and reciprocal understanding are applied to literature on webcam-facilitated therapy. An amalgam clinical example illustrates these phenomenological concepts and role of intersubjectivity. The core issues are involvement of sensory processes in the process of psychotherapy and co-construction of knowledge. By accepting the limitations of therapist knowledge, the client is encouraged to articulate and develop their own knowledge, and make conscious their unconscious. It is not necessary for therapist and client to share a physical space for co-creation of knowledge necessary for client transformation.     

Becoming Resilient: Overturning Common Sense — Part 1

How might we engage with the concept resilience in a world obsessed with the measurement and cataloguing of deficits and virtues alike; with predicting outcomes, producing certainty and the reification of stable identity? This article is based on a plenary address presented to the Australian Family Therapy Conference in 2009 and takes Deleuze's paraphrase of the 17th century philosopher, Spinoza as a point of departure from common sense views of identity. Can resilience be possessed by some as a personal quality enhancing their coping skills or might resilience be a vital aspect of living which passes through us? Perhaps resilience bounces back towards us and enables the unsettling of dogmatic beliefs and a stable sense of identity Enquiry might then shift from the moral; What kind of person am I? How should I live? towards an ethical position of wonder; What else might there be? What might I be capable of?This article invites an ethical exploration of desire, its capture and of resistance and explores the politics of identity; illustrated with men's journeys of struggle with violence, sexuality and belonging and the discovery of ethics and generous forms of love in the face of adversity.     

A Philosopher's War on Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments: A Review of Fiona Cowie's What's Within? Nativism Reconsidered

In What''s Within? Nativism Reconsidered 1999 Fiona Cowie addresses three questions: (1) What is nativism? (2) What is meant by calling some trait “innate”? and (3) What types of evidence should be offered when claiming innateness? This review concentrates on these questions as they pertain to Chomsky''s faculties-based account of language acquisition. In particular, this review focuses on Cowie''s critique of three versions of the poverty of the stimulus argument (POSA): (1) the a posteriori POSA, (2) the logical problem POSA, and (3) the iterated POSA. In addition, counter arguments to her critique, and Cowie''s response, in turn, to some of those counter arguments, are also reviewed.     

Outline of a sociology of decisionism

I propose an agenda for empirical research on decision, choice, decision‐makers, and decision‐making qua social facts. Given society S, group G, or field F, I make a twofold sociological proposal. First, empirically investigate the conditions under which something—call it X—is taken to be a decision or choice, or the outcome of a decision‐making process. What must X be like? What doesn't count (besides, presumably, myotatic reflexes and blushing)? Whom or what must X be done by? What can't be a decision‐maker (besides, presumably, rocks and apples)? Second, empirically investigate how decision/choice concepts are used in everyday life, politics, business, education, law, technology, and science. What are they used for? To what extent do people understand and represent themselves and others as decision‐makers? Where do decision‐centric or “decisionist” understandings succeed? These aren't armchair, theoretical, philosophical questions, but empirical ones. Decision/choice concepts’ apparent ubiquity in contemporary societies calls for a well‐thought‐out research program on their social life and uses.     

‘It's About People and Their Environment’: Student Social Workers' Definitions of Social Work Research

This article considers constructions of social work research from the perspectives of student social workers in New Zealand. There have been many academic discussions of the unique epistemology that can be called social work research but little is known of students and/or practitioner views. Are they interested in social work research? Do they even care about debates on epistemology? Forty-three student social workers considered two questions while attending a social work research methods course: ‘What is social work research?’ and ‘What kind of social work researcher might I be?’. A subset of 18 distance students explored a third question: ‘Should social work research be part of everyday practice or not?’. To answer these questions students provided comments in a short survey, material from their written student assignments and comments from online discussion board activities. The results suggest that student social workers have a preference for social work research that is compatible with their clearly articulated social work value base, and that social work research primarily should benefit the client group with which a social worker is closely linked. Student social workers also recognise the importance of research for their everyday practice, yet at the same time feel there are organisational constraints to this happening.     

Adult images of childhood and research on client children

The point of departure in this article is a client study with children who had received services from child welfare, school counselling or child psychiatric clinics, compared to a cohort study targeting all children in the same community. It discusses whether parents' reservations towards letting their client children participate in the study indicates a fear of the researchers interfering in family life, and how the choice of research strategies influence the images constructed of client children and their families. A common finding in the two studies was that the children themselves provided the most positive information about their lives. It is argued that adult images of children as either vulnerable, and thus in need of protection, or competent, and thus with an ability to participate, influence access to, as well as construction of, client children's lives.     

Chinks in Gender?

This comment argues that differences between clinical and normal populations, between clinical data and sociological data, and differences in social class and cultural settings should be taken into account in order to understand the varying psychological dynamics behind self representations. Research from the Nordic countries indicates that young women's relationships with their mothers and fathers are becoming more similar. The daughters appreciate their mothers' ability to combine independent lives of their own with care for children and family, and fathers are to a higher degree than before perceived as warm and caring figures. This may imply that the gender-differentiated psychological roles of the mother and the father in the heterosexual nuclear family are becoming less distinct. If chinks undermine not only the merged attachment but also gender as such, this question arises: What ways and to what extent are the new psychological dispositions Susie Orbach describes actually gendered?     

Single Motherhood: A Personal View

What model of “family” do social workers carry around in their heads? How does this influence their behaviour in relation to, say, single mothers? Through identifying the difficulties experienced by women who are single mothers, the author challenges social workers to reflect on the value judgments they pass and the expectations they hold of this client group.     

Social choice theory and the “Centre de Mathématique Sociale”: some historical notes

In this paper we describe some research directions in social choice and aggregation theory taken at the “Centre de Mathématique Sociale” since the fifties. We begin by presenting some institutional aspects concerning this center. Then we sketch a thematic history by considering the following questions about the “effet Condorcet” (“voting paradox”): What is it? How is it overcome? Why does it occur? These questions were adressed in Guilbaud's paper (Guilbaud GTh (1952) Les théories de l'intérêt général et le problème logique de l'agrégation, (Theories of the general interest and the logical problem of aggregation) which will mark the beginning of our inquiry. The conclusion outlines some more recent research developments linked to these questions.     

The problem of justification in social work

Abstract

In this paper we argue that the real test of professional social work practice is whether it can be plausibly, effectively and defensibly justified. Since the early 1950s social work in Australia has engaged in a strategy of professionalisation. This strategy and its implications were described by McDonald and Jones in 2000. This paper supports the concerns expressed. We argue that the way out of our profession's dilemma is by focusing on the problem of justification. The main questions addressed by McDonald and Jones appear to be: What is professional social work practice? Does the concept of professionalism serve us and our clients well now? What form should social work take in the future? Their answer is ‘that the “strategy of professionalisation”, as conventionally conceived by Australian social work, is no longer viable in the emerging milieu.’ We build on that answer by exploring the notion of justification in terms of the concepts Foundationalism, Coherentism and Reliabilism. We conclude by suggesting that the immediate task for social work in this new century is to solve the problem of justification.     

Ten Research Questions for Family Therapy

A growing evidence‐base shows that family therapy works, but many gaps in our knowledge remain about the conditions under which family therapy is effective and how it works. In this paper, ten critical research questions about family therapy that need to be addressed are considered. In short these are:

• 1 Is family therapy as effective in community settings as it is in specialist clinics?
• 2 For what problems is family therapy cost‐effective?
• 3 Does family therapy work for under‐researched problems and populations?
• 4 Do social‐constructionist and narrative approaches to family therapy work?
• 5 Can family therapy protocols be enhanced for non‐responders?
• 6 Can family therapy be combined with other psychotherapies to effectively treat specific problems?
• 7 Can family therapy be combined with pharmacotherapy to effectively treat specific problems?
• 8 What specific factors contribute to the effectiveness of family therapy with particular problems?
• 9 What common factors contribute to the effectiveness of family therapy?
• 10 What therapist and client factors contribute to the effectiveness of family therapy?

     

Mental Health Law: Innovations in Education and Representation

What do we know about the lives of people with learning difficulties? What do we know about the lives of people who have used mental health services? People require legal representation to obtain access to the basics of life. Legal representation for people with mental disabilities or learning difficulties also provides a forum for client empowerment. Legal representation has historically been dominated by professionals trained in traditional methods. A mental health law clinic, based upon consumer objectives, provides an opportunity to apply critical legal theory to the practice of law. Legal and citizen advocacy are combined to provide maximum participation in obtaining results. In this article, the author traces the development of a mental health law clinic by documenting the value of clinical legal education and the necessity of commitment to consumer-centred representation.     

Thinking with restriction: immigration restriction and Polish Jewish accounts of the post-liberal state,empire, race,and political reason 1926–39

This paper investigates how educated Jewish observers struggled to understand the causes of the global immigration restriction that so impacted East European Jewry in the 1920s and 1930s, and uses their competing explanations, convictions, and uncertainties to reveal underlying structures of Jewish political understanding in the interwar period more broadly. Efforts to explain restriction, the ways in which it seemed both to target Jews and to be part of a general closure of the developed world, and questions of timing demanded reflection on the most fundamental questions of the interwar political order. Did state policies flow from economic reason, and did nationalisation, democratisation, and socialisation of domestic politics alter this causal pattern? In a world where closed borders were the default, what difference did statehood or statelessness make? What was the meaning and implication of the deployment of “race” in others' debates about restriction, and what role did global race-thinking play in determining population policies? What was the causal significance of specifically anti-Jewish animus, its nature, and the role of Jews' own choices in determining their situation? Analyzing a number of loci of Jewish social policy debate, the essay focuses particularly on the diasporist emigration activist Il'ya Dizhur, the Zionist sociologist Aryeh Tartakover, and the cooperative-movement activist Majer Pollner.     

Abstinence-Only: Are You Not Working the Program or Is the Program Not Working for You?

Low retention rates are common in substance use treatment programs. The dominant model of service delivery in the United States is abstinence-only, a high-threshold service delivery model requiring abstinence. What “doesn’t work” for the client—from the client point of view—is an overlooked source of insight about client engagement and disengagement. We report client counter-narratives about the choice to disengage from abstinence-based services, shifting from a story of “dropouts” to one of self-respect. Understanding why clients choose to disengage from treatment can help us as practitioners to “meet clients where they are” and enhance engagement in substance abuse treatment.     

COACHING TEAM PRODUCTION

The actual function of managers is the subject of much debate. Using data on more than 3000 male college basketball players, their coaches, and their skill levels, we find a positive and significant relation between our ability to replicate an individual coach's allocation of playing time across players and his winning percentage. Although this result does not answer the central question of just what it is that managers contribute, the results do support the property rights paradigm: managers are the employees of workers; and more generally, sports data can be used to help understand related economic processes where quantifiable measures of inputs and outputs are more costly to obtain. “What is meant by performance? Input energy, initiative, work attitude, perspiration, rate of exhaustion? Or output?…sometimes by inspecting a team member's input activity we can better judge his output effect…It is not always the case that watching input activity is the only or best means of detecting, measuring, or monitoring output effects of each team member, but in some cases it is a useful way.”     

Was leistet Organisationsentwicklung?

Potentials of organization development (OD) are discussed from the perspectives of organization/client, counselling and science. The focal questions of the discussion are: What can OD achieve compared to strategy consulting? How can both forms be sensibly combined? What are the potentials of a psychologically based form of organizational counselling? Which (potentially latent) functions do organizational consulting / OD fulfil for the client organization? The discussion closes with considerations regarding a potential professionalization and the future of OD.     

Reflections on repeated abortions: The meanings and motivations

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to answer three questions concerning women who have repeated abortions -Why do they do it?, What is being aborted?, and why do they need to repeat it? By exploring developmental factors in relation to clinical cases, ideas are formulated about the type of women who might be using abortion to act out problems of separation-individuation. I speculate that for some women abortion may act as a rite de passage from one self-image to another or from dependency toward independence. The act of abortion may be an unconscious way to touch or repair infantile developmental failure and to find a 'good enough' resolution.     

The same but different: Social work with centenarians

Abstract

Since the underlying theme of the 1999 International Year of Older Persons was 'Towards a society for all ages', analysis of client groups at the extremes of the age structure should not be neglected. The research reported here was undertaken as part of the International Year and presents a brief investigation of an under-researched group of very long-lived individuals who occasionally interact with social workers working in aged care. Following some introductory information on the socio-demographics of this group, findings on their health status are presented, as well as social workers' experiences of working with centenarians. The study finds that despite their unique age, the health and social support required is no different from that needed by much younger aged clients. This important finding of heterogeneity and inter-individual variability should assist social work advocates arguing against stereotyping this group based solely on their outstanding chronological characteristic.