Assessing outcomes for sufferers of severe mental disorder: A conceptual framework and review

A conceptual framework is presented for classifying the outcomes of services for sufferers of severe mental disorders. The proposed classification framework contains three dimensions: (a) the respondent type; (b) the social context; and (c) the domain of treatment outcomes. Respondent types include the client, the family, the extended social network, the clinician and the scientist. Social contexts include the individual, the family, work/school and the broader community. Domains of treatment outcome include “clinical status,” “functional status,” “life satisfaction and fulfillment,” and “safety and welfare.” This multidimensional framework is used to organize an illustrative review of existing outcome measures. It is concluded that: (a) measures of safety and welfare raise important social and policy questions and these measures require considerable development in order for utility to be realized; (b) although a good beginning has been made, more attention needs to be focused on defining and measuring “life satisfaction and fulfillment” and combining this domain with others to produce “well being” or “quality of life” scales; (c) the functional status area requires additional research and development especially when measurement is conducted in contexts other than work/school; and (d) although measures of clinical status are relatively well developed, the family perspective and context must be integrated into these measures.     

A tale of two regions: Novgorod and Pskov as models of symbolic development

Russian regions display remarkably different patterns of economic and political development. These differences come into sharp focus when comparing two nearly identical northwestern regions, Novgorod and Pskov. Novgorod's success and Pskov's failure are attributed to the local elite's creative use of key cultural symbols and myths to support regional development. Contrasting two popular approaches to culture and development—“cultural adjustment” and “cultural congruence”—the author argues that the cultural congruence model, adopted by Novgorod, dramatically improves the chances for rapid social and economic transformation.     

Theorizing the relationship between inequality and economic growth

This article explores a promising theoretical approach for reassessing the relationship between inequality and economic growth. The article draws some insights from the influential inverted U-curve hypothesis originally advanced by Simon Kuznets, but drastically recasts the original arguments by shifting two fundamental premises. First, retaining Kuznets’s emphasis on the importance of economic growth in generating demographic transitions between existing and new distributional arrays, we argue that a “constant drive toward inequality” results after replacing a Schumpeterian notion of “creative destruction” for the dualistic assumptions in Kuznets’s model. Second, while Kuznets devoted considerable attention to the impact of institutions on distributional outcomes, we argue that institutions should be understood as relational and global mechanisms of regulation, operating within countries while simultaneously shaping interactions and flows between nations. The article argues that economic growth, unfolding through institutions embedded in time and space, produces a constant drive towards inequality that results in a multiple and overlapping matrix of distributional arrays, an overall income distribution (e.g., within and between countries) that is both systemic and historical.     

Is a good deal always fair? Examining the concepts of transaction value and price fairness

Previous research has shown that if consumers are aware that they are paying more than another customer for a similar transaction, then they may perceive the price to be unfair. A concept closely related to fairness is transaction value, defined as consumers’ perceptions of the psychological satisfaction or pleasure from taking advantage of a price deal. In this research, we conceptualize that although consumers’ perceptions of price fairness and transaction value share many similarities, nevertheless there are also important differences. Using three studies, we empirically examine these differences. We show that although a “bad deal” is typically perceived to be an unfair price, a “good deal” is not necessarily perceived to be the fairest price.     

Beyond the Career Mystique: “Time In,” “Time Out,” and “Second Acts”

The career mystique is the belief that working hard and putting in long hours continuously throughout adulthood is the path to occupational success, personal fulfillment, and a secure retirement. This is a false myth, increasingly irrelevant for most contemporary Americans, given that (1) few employees today have the back up of full-time homemakers, and (2) a competitive, information economy has fostered a global labor market, destroying the implicit contract linking seniority with security. America’s 21st century workforce requires a reconfiguration of “time in” paid work, including opportunities for “time outs,” as well as for “second acts.”President’s Address, Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, February 2004; also presented at the parallel research and policy forum “Sustainable Careers for a Changing Workforce.”     

Benefits of cultural matching in foster care

Sixty-one foster parents from a central Canadian province participated in a telephone interview that included the question: “What are the benefits of fostering children who have the same values, beliefs and traditions as you?” A total of 51 unique responses were obtained and grouped together by 13 foster parents. Multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis were used to analyze the grouping data. Foster parents described five themes: expand on held values, child feels secure, smooth transitions, low stress and more in common. There were similarities and differences between the perspectives of foster parents interviewed and the literature. Implications for future research are discussed.     

The issue is human quality: In praise of children

This essay is based on the premise that quality in human life is inseparably linked to the well-being of children. In this view, the well-being of children is both the principal challenge faced by a modern society and the principal focal point tor a society “bound to move away from ‘growth’ defined as quantitative product irrespective of what and whom it is for.” Children and their needs provide an anchoring point for adult relationships that is “labor intensive” and intrinsically satisfying when set within a social context rich in enduring, reciprocal interpersonal relationships. The principal threats to the quality of social life are trends toward universalistic rather than particularistic systems for evaluating individuals, and materialistic rather than social criteria for evaluating productivity. Both these trends threaten childrearing as a valued activity. Both emphasize the “hurdensomeness” of children. Large schools and socially isolated families are the contexts in which these two trends find their most dangerous expression. A sustainable society requires a pro-family orientation if it is to meet the needs of children and thus provide for the fundamental psychic needs of adults. A variety of implications for individual action and social planning are derived from this discussion. These implications include the need to preserve and restore socially strong neighborhoods, reduce school size, and conduct “family impact analysis” as a basis for guiding decisions in the public and private sectors.     

Kelso’s binary economy as social ethics

Professor Robert Ashford (1996) has undertaken to bring attention to the economic ideas of the late Louis Kelso, best known as the inventor of leveraged Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). ESOPs are but a small part of a much more ambitious policy program for spreading capital ownership, a program predicated on Kelso’s unique economic theory, dubbed “binary economics,” and intended to create a “binary economy.” This article critically examines two normative arguments for creating a binary economy as a question of social ethics. It finds that the argument that a binary economy would be more just has a serious flaw related to Kelso’s concept of “productiveness,” but that the argument that a binary economy would be more democratic offers a more promising normative basis for instituting a binary economy. It concludes that the rest of Kelso’s theory and his policy program are worth further examination.     

Culture and Chinese public relations: A multi-method “inside out” approach

This study adopts an “inside out” approach to examine contemporary Chinese public relations and culture's effect on it, based on an analysis of the top 15 domestic Chinese public relations agencies’ Web sites and 17 in-depth interviews of public relations professionals from multinationals operating in mainland China. Results indicate an emerging trend of Chinese strategic management and a new understanding of guanxi as an ongoing process of one-on-one bonding.     

Trust responsiveness. On the dynamics of fiduciary interactions

Trust and trustworthiness are key elements, both at the micro and macro level, in sustaining the working of modern economies and their institutions. However, despite its centrality, trust continues to be considered as a “conceptual bumblebee”, it works in practice but not in theory. In particular, its behavioural rationale still represents a puzzle for traditional rational choice theory and game theory. In this paper “trust responsiveness”, an alternative explanatory principle that can account for trustful and trustworthy behaviour, is proposed. Such principle assumes that people can be motivated to behave trustworthily by trustful actions. The paper discusses the philosophical roots, the historical development, as well as the relational nature of this principle as well as its theoretical implications.     

Learning from tradition: the planning of residential neighborhoods in a changing world

This paper analyses the community values of residential neighborhoods in the southwestern region of Saudi Arabia as an approach to a new theory in urbanism. The indigenous masterbuilders and tribemen incorporated planning decisions pertinent to climatic, cultural, social, economic and religious factors when designing physical elements in their built environment. This is what makes every traditional settlement in the southwest region of Saudi Arabia unique in terms of urban form and social structure. As a step to examining and evaluating the process of residential neighborhood development, three stages of practiced urbanism are discussed. These stages are labelled “vernacular”, “transitional” and “new vernacularism”. These are planning concepts used worldwide in the development of residential neighborhoods throughout history until the present. “New Vernacularism” is envisioned in this investigation as a design/planning objective implemented in most recently planned neighborhoods in Al-Horaidhah, Southwest Saudi Arabia. The achievement of successful urbanism underlies the political goals of urban planning practice. The Al-Horaidhah planning concept is conceived in the light of preservation of community values in neighborhood design/planning as a critical issue.The paper aims to investigate and reconcile the conflicts in the planning of residential neighborhoods in a changing world. The conflicts are restricted between retaining traditions of architecture, urban design and planning with the necessary social, economic, and technological changes in urban formation, mainly, the vernacular and modern. The paper illustrates the concept “New Vernacularism” by presenting Al-Horaidhah scheme as a model for community development in three administrative regions along the Red Sea coastline. “New Vernacularism” as a planning concept looks at the community development in Al-Horaidhah in the light of Sharicah, the Islamic Law and Customary norms by emphasizing the importance of the involvement of local residents in the planning process and gives suggestions of how this might best be achieved and later implemented into new communities.     

Multiple reference points in investor regret

Regret is the result of a comparison between “what is” and “what might have been”. Although regret is a relevant emotion in the life of investors, research studying the regrets of real investors and how these are influenced by multiple reference points is lacking. We present a field survey that investigated the regrets of real stock investors in relation to multiple “what might have been’s.” We found that their regrets are most influenced by what their outcomes might have been had they not invested, by their expected outcomes and by the best-performing unchosen stocks. In addition, we also found that the feeling of regret was influenced by losses or gains relative to each reference point rather than by the size of the loss or gain.     

Adoptive parents' hostility toward their adopted children

This paper focuses on the latent, underlying hostility that we feel exists between adoptive parents and their adopted children. The focus of this study is on the adolescent adoptee who is struggling with a “double” identity-crisis. Also addressed are countertransference feelings between the adoptive parent and the adolescent adoptee.     

Constituents’ economic interests and senator support for spending limitations

Peltzman [Peltzman, S., 1984. Constituent interest and congressional voting. Journal of Law and Economics 27, 181–210] argues that if constituents’ economic interests have well-defined “winners and losers” and are appropriately measured, then constituents’ economic interests, and not legislator ideology, are the most important determinates of legislator voting. We test Peltzman's theory by examining senatorial voting on three mandated spending limitation bills. We find, consistent with Peltzman's theory, that the ratio of federal spending in a senator's state to federal taxes paid by that state, and not a senator's personal ideology, matters on legislation where there are well-defined economic “winners and losers.” This is particularly important because unlike other constituents’ economic interest measures that only impact a fraction of the constituency, the ratio of federal spending to federal taxes in a state represents the economic interests of all the constituents in a state.     

Public relations as “practice:” applying the theory of Alasdair MacIntyre

Public relation’s search for a unifying theory may be fulfilled through application of Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of a “practice,” a very specific and value-laden concept. This article explores what it would mean to be a public relations practice in MacIntyre’s concept of the term and argues that such an approach to public relations is of value for the field.     

Cognitive differentiation in consumer product judgments

The investigations reported in this article examined some of the individual and situational determinants of the level of cognitive product differentiation in consumer products judgements, Subjects consisted of four large samples of male and female consumers in two large metropolitan areas in the USA. These four independent studies found empirical support for the following hypothesis: consumers tend to have more differentiated judgments of negatively valenced products than positively valenced products. These findings were discussed in the context of the “vigilance”. “justification” and “Pollyanna” hypotheses. Finally, as a promising direction for future research. the need for an interactionist approach to cognitive functioning was emphasized.     

Getting my stories straight: A narrativist in quest of congruence

Drawing on his work in the area of narrative gerontology, the author reflects on the measure of congruence that exists between the theories he has been developing about the storied complexity of adult development and his lived experience as an aging individual himself. His reflections include a discussion of his former career as a parish minister and his ongoing passion for “the writing life”. He concludes with some speculation on the possibility of combining his interests in narrative and aging with his continuing interest in theological themes.     

Dignity in dementia: Person-centered care in community

Drawing on Kitwood's [Ageing Soc. 13 (1993) 51] theory of person-centered care and the interpersonal process of caregiving, this article offers an alternative to the image of the family caregiver as victim through an exploration of the lived experience of caring for a person with dementia in community. Extending care beyond coping, the act of giving care is promoted as a worthy activity and reciprocal social opportunity. Three nonfamily caregiver “portraits” are offered in an arts-informed representational form. The relational processes of caregiving are explored from the vantage point of personal experience and theoretical knowledge. Dignity emerges as the resonant quality, essential value, and guiding principle in an ethic of dementia care. Implications about the direction of research about care and caregiving and research accessibility and usefulness are explored.     

Why a fixed workweek?

The main goal of this article is to explain why the fixed workweek appeared. To this purpose we differentiate between “jobs” and “hours per job”. We consider an economy where hours and number of workers are substitutes in production but in which hiring a worker entails a fixed cost plus a variable cost per hour worked. As a consequence, firms would like workers to work as many hours as possible. In an unregulated economy, workers work more hours that they would like to at the on-going wage rate. This situation characterizes the economy of today’s industrialized countries in the 19th century.     

Narratives and self-identity in later life: Two rural American older women

Older adults often draw on memories to construct stories about themselves that help them to retain and validate their self-identities, doing this within the cultural contexts that have shaped their lives. In this paper, we examine the life history narratives of two working class, rural American older women and the ways in which those narratives are similar despite one major difference: one has dementia. In both cases, major themes that are consistent with gender-based, working class, rural American cultural values are dominant, including closeness of family, hard work, ties to the land, and religious faith. In the first case, she reconstructs memories of her life in accordance with dominant cultural and personal values, downplaying the ways in which her experiences were “out of step” with these values. In the second case, her sense of identity remains and is expressed through her co-constructed memories although she is experiencing cognitive loss.