Who Cares Wins? Women,Caring and Disability

This article is an attempt to open up some of the unexplored issues in the 'carer's debate'. The interest in carers started receiving Government funding in the early 1970s as a response to community care policies. It also received interest from carers themselves and from feminist researchers concerned with the position of women in the family and the labour market. However, in wanting to show the difficult and often unrecognised work of the carer, the debate, in both academic and popular presentation, has often emphasised the public's perception of disabled people as passive, helpless and demanding. Feminist research on carers, it is argued, has ignored women who may need care and the principle of the 'personal is political' has failed to identify with the lives of disabled people. It is both unhelpful and unproductive to polarise the needs of disabled people and their carers and treat them as if they are mutually exclusive. We need research which does not alienate disabled people by defining concepts like rights, independence and power in ways which exclude, making disabled people the problem rather than the focus of the research. We need to move forward in the debate, making sure that we give a voice to all those involved in the giving and receiving of personal care. The concept of citizenship with its association with universal human rights may be a way to look concurrently at these needs.     

Postcensal estimates of household income distributions

This article develops and evaluates a method for deriving postcensal estimates of household income distributions for counties. A modified lognormal probability curve is used as a model of income distribution. The function is closely related to the classical lognormal model, but it contains a nonlinear component in its derivation. Simulated postcensal estimates of household income distributions are compared with 1980 census data for the counties in California. The results indicate that the modified lognormal curve approximates observed income distributions well and produces reliable postcensal estimates for areas with a wide variety of median income levels and numbers of households.     

Separation and loss: Assessing the impacts on foster parent retention

Foster family homes are utilized as the primary substitute care arrangement for over one-quarter million dependent children annually in the United States. An unsuccessful retention of foster family homes permeates the country's foster care system, thus requiring a determination of the major factors which contribute to foster parent retention or loss. To this end, a comparative census survey of a statewide foster parent population was conducted. When respondents from currently licensed homes were compared with those previously licensed on factors pertaining to the separation and loss experience, significant differences were found in two major dimensions: (1) training and (2) agency services and supports. Both dimensions were indicated to be viable factors of foster parent retention.     

Resisting Amnesia in the Countertransference: A Clinical Strategy for Working with Lesbian Patients

Seldom emphasized in clinical writings are the ways in which lesbians construct and revise multiple narratives to create and navigate their lesbian identity within the clinical relationship. Case material is presented to show how the examination of the psychic meaning of the move from lesbian child to lesbian woman can be explored retrospectively through the collaborative therapeutic relationship set forth in the constructivist approach. To address the potential countertransference problems for clinicians working with this population, the concept of countertransference amnesia is introduced to describe a particular type of forgetting that reproduces within the clinical relationship the subtle forms of discrimination that restrict lesbian expression within the culture at large. This work also seeks to liberate lesbian identity formation from previous explanations and to demonstrate the construction of a lesbian identity as a psychically organizing process, which integrates inner and outer experience and allows the girl or woman to adapt to the social world.     

“Vygotskian-izing” Psychotherapy

Although Vygotsky’s ideas are applied to dozens of disciplines/practices, psychotherapy is not among them. With few exceptions, contemporary Vygotskians have stayed clear of the subject; and most psychotherapy researchers and clinical practitioners have little familiarity with Vygotsky—despite Vygotsky’s challenge to psychology’s isolation of the intellectual from the affective. Recent manifestations of psychotherapy’s cognitive bias are discussed, showing the need to “Vygotskian-ize” the discipline. The Vygotskian-influenced social therapy, focused on group creativity and emotional development, is presented as an expansion of Vygotsky’s dialectical methodology: method as tool-and-result, the unity learning-and-development, the zone of proximal development of play, and language completing thought.     

Youth at a Leftist and Rightist Political Rally: Reasons for Participating

Abstract

This paper investigates the degree of uniqueness of the contribution of youth to an anti-war rally of 1970. It contrasts that contribution to the part played by youth at a pro-war rally of the same year. Both rallies took place near the Washington Monument in Washington, D. C. Data collection consisted of on-the-spot interviews of a sample of participants at both rallies. The focus of the interview was on reasons expressed by participants for their attendance at the rally. The data support the following hypotheses: that youth at the anti-war rally were more highly oriented towards specific objectives and general objectives than were older participants at that rally or youthful ones at the pro-war rally; that youth at the anti-war rally were less highly oriented towards personal reasons than older participants at that rally or younger ones at the pro-war rally. Generally reasons for participating were found to be influenced by the interaction of age cohort and ideological thrust of the rally. The importance of belonging to the modal age group for a particular rally was discussed, along with other implications such as the role of generational conflict during the late 1960s and early 1970s.     

The private journey: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of exclusive breastfeeding

Background

Exclusive breast milk provides complete nutrition for a baby’s first six months of life. In Australia, breastfeeding initiation rates are high, however duration rates are low. Although numerous studies have explored the reasons behind low levels of breastfeeding, few have examined the experiences of women who maintain exclusive breastfeeding for the recommended six-month duration.