Examining Mental Health Court Completion: A Focal Concerns Perspective

Sociologists have long‐raised concern about disparate treatment in the justice system. Focal concerns have become the dominant perspective in explaining these disparities in legal processing decisions. Despite the growth of problem‐solving courts, little research has examined how this perspective operates in nontraditional court settings. This article used a mixed‐method approach to examine focal concerns in a mental health court (MHC). Observational findings indicate that gender and length of time in court influence the court's contextualization of noncompliance. While discussions of race were absent in observational data, competing‐risk survival analysis finds that gender and race interact to predict MHC termination.     

Transforming into the new era: public relations industry in Hong Kong and China

The public relations industry as one of the key industries in Hong Kong has metamorphosed into a new phase after the resumption of sovereignty to China. Based on in-depth interviews with eight experienced corporate communication practitioners from multi-national and sizeable local corporations in Hong Kong and China, the study traces the recent development of public relations and/or corporate communication (hereafter PR/CC) highlighting issues of role and function, language and communication strategy, and ethics and professionalism.     

Teaching Note—Asserting Social Work’s Role in Developing an Interprofessional Education Project

ABSTRACT

Interprofessional (IP) education is an essential component of today’s health care education. IP education has been recognized and supported for its potential to educate workforce-ready health care clinicians with the knowledge and skills, necessary to collaboratively deliver high-quality, client-centered care. While social work’s reflective, patient-centered, and holistic approach to care is invaluable in addressing healthcare challenges at all levels, social work’s lack of involvement in IP health care team practice is evident in the development of IP education curriculum with other health care disciplines. This article describes how one School of Social Work at a regional public university became part of a longitudinal IP education project in collaboration with a large R-1 research university, creating an IP opportunity for Master’s in Social Work (MSW) students. It also discusses the process taken for social work inclusion in the IP project, an experiential elective course designed to supplement the project, as well as Transformative Learning Theory, the conceptual framework used.     

The temporal and spatial dynamics of city-size distributions in China

Under the communist regime, the Chinese government has developed policies both to limit the growth of large cities and to promote spatial equity in population distribution. The literature provides only very general and inconclusive results regarding the impact of these policies. This paper aims at evaluating the effectiveness of China's urban policies by investigating the temporal and spatial dynamics of the size distribution of China's cities during the period 1922–82. The research framework — which is based on a function relating population size to rank —is used to test for trends of deconcentration (where smaller cities grow faster than larger cities) and spatial decentralization (with a more even spatial distribution) of population over the study period. More formally, the ‘expansion methodology’ is used to investigate the dynamics of the rank-size function in both temporal and spatial dimensions. The findings show that from 1953 to 1970 there was significant population deconcentration, which appeared to be reversed subsequently. However, policies of spatial decentralization were not found to be successful. Among the reasons suggested for the apparent failure are political upheavals and shifts in policies, the inertia within the urban system, the harsh physical environment in the interior, and current trends in economic policies that focus on the coastal areas. In spite of recent criticisms of studies on city-size distributions (which this paper also discusses), the research framework proposed and utilized here is able to portray the dynamics of a national urban system, and the framework can be used to evaluate national urban policies.     

Serial conversations: a man for all reasons: an interview with clifford lynch

Abstract

In July 2004, Cindy Hepfer asked friends and colleagues: “What question would you like to ask Clifford Lynch if you had the chance?” As a result, Clifford Lynch discusses a wide variety of topics and issues impacting the serials community from Open Access, institutional repositories, what we can learn from Google and Amazon, and Shibboleth to where his favorite places are to travel and how he prepares for presentations.     

Resolving Coparenting Dissatisfaction In Couples: A Preliminary Task Analysis Study

This study explored the change that unfolded when parents resolved their coparenting dissatisfaction during an Integrative Brief Systemic Intervention (IBSI) for parent couples. We conducted a task analysis (Greenberg, 2007) to build a model of resolving coparenting dissatisfaction. We compared a postulated model of change (rational model) based on theoretical and clinical assumptions to the observations of the actual change process that couples experienced in an IBSI (empirical analysis). The empirical analysis was conducted on six IBSI therapy cases (three exhibiting positive development and three exhibiting no development). We defined positive development in IBSI as moving from coparenting dissatisfaction to coparenting satisfaction. The final rational–empirical model included six steps that facilitated the resolution of coparenting dissatisfaction. This study contributes to deepening the knowledge of how coparenting may change during marital therapy.