As California burns: the psychology of wildfire- and wildfire smoke-related migration intentions

Population and Environment - Climate change impacts and rapid development in the wildland-urban interface are increasing population exposure and vulnerability to the harmful effects of wildfire and...     

Employment Insecurity and the Frayed American Dream

This paper reviews literature on employment insecurity and situates objective and subjective employment insecurity in the context of the contemporary economy. I draw on the argument about shifting social contracts to explain both real and perceived pervasive employment insecurity and the frayed American Dream. Employment insecurity derives from the macro‐economic changes that produced the social structure of accumulation identified as flexible accumulation that requires employment insecurity as both a form of labor discipline and profit‐enhancing strategy. This paper argues that contemporary employment insecurity is both objective and subjective and affects how individuals understand their world and their selves. To this latter point, I look at research on generational differences in the experience of employment insecurity.     

HIV Seroprevalence and Clinical Characteristics of Severe Inpatient Mentally III Homeless

Two related studies were carried out at a state psychiatric center unit designed for the long-term hospitalization of homeless mentally ill people removed from the streets of New York City and taken to hospitals for psychiatric treatment. The first study, a charl review of 102 patients, documented high rates of severe psychiatric illness, alcohol and other substance use, and untreated medical problems. Patient histories showed significant social disadvantages, including high rates of criminal activity and inability to complete high school or establish long-term relationships. Our second study anonymously tested 87 patients between the ages of 18 and 59 for the presence of HIV antibodies. An overall seroprevalence rate of 5.8% is reported. Men and women in this population are likely to have similar rates of HIV infection. Being young, and Black, or Hispanic appears to be associated with increased risk. This disenfranchised population urgently needs a broad array of social, medical and psychiatric selVices. Assertive community outreach programs are necessary to assure delivery of services to this population.     

Short-run characteristics of samples drawn by random walks

An alternative to using acceptance-rejection methods to generate a sample of points distributed uniformly over a region is to employ a random walk over that region. The sequence of points generated by a random walk has been shown, under certain easily satisfied conditions, to be a realization of a vector-valued discrete parameter Markov process, and to have the uniform distribution as its limiting distribution. The purpose of this paper is to point out that even if the marginal distribution of each point is actually uniform, rather than merely being asymptotically uniform, small samples may exhibit nonuniform characteristics due to serial autocorrelation within the sample.     

Termination of Casework: The Student,Client and Field Instructor

This study of 65 supervisees and 64 supervisors addresses current issues in social work supervision through exploring various models of structure, authority, and teaching that were perceived to be in use. Significant differences in level of interaction, supervision and job satisfaction, and sense of accomplishment were found as the source of the supervisors' authority varied, but no differences occurred in variations of structure. Incongruence between supervisees' and supervisors' perceptions of actual and preferred structure, authority, conference frequency and initiation, and content in supervision demonstrates the need for exploration of autonomy in practice and control in supervision.     

A Survey of Online Practitioners: Implications for Education and Practice

In the last decade the helping professions have seen a growing interest in the provision of online counseling and therapeutic services for individuals. Like most fields of work, social work also has experienced a growth in the creative use of technology in various areas of professional work. Based on this growing interest and the need for such services and research on its efficacy, a study was conducted to learn from e-therapists across the United States on their experiences with this mode of service delivery. This paper elicits results from the online survey and provides recommendations to better serve our clients in the tech savvy world and future research endeavors. The main findings of this preliminary study include: (a) Many theoretical perspectives and models are being used to ground online practice, (b) e-therapists are beginning to use videoconferencing for online practice supplementing their face-to-face sessions, and (c) e-therapists believe that online interventions benefit their clients.     

The Role of Procedural Justice in Public Personnel Management: Empirical Results from the Department of Defense

This article examines the relationship between federal employeeperceptions of procedural justice and work satisfaction rates,turnover intentions, and the degree to which employees trusttheir managers. As the federal government considers reformingthe civil service system, including changes to the proceduresused to discipline employees and resolve grievances, understandingthese relationships becomes particularly important. Analysisof Department of Defense data from the 2002 Federal Human CapitalSurvey indicates a significant, positive relationship betweenprocedural justice perceptions, satisfaction rates, and trustin management. Likewise, a significant and negative relationshipexists between procedural justice perceptions and turnover intentions.Interestingly, given similar levels of procedural justice perceptions,managers exhibit lower levels of satisfaction and trust andhigher turnover intentions. This study provides an importantbenchmark for Defense and other agencies that are redesigningpersonnel systems and serves as a caution against implementingsystems that employees may not view as either legitimate orjust.     

A new approach to default priors and robust bayes methodology

Following the developments in DasGupta et al. (2000), the authors propose and explore a new method for constructing proper default priors and a method for selecting a Bayes estimate from a family. Their results are based on asymptotic expansions of certain marginal correlations. For ease of exposition, most results are presented for location families and squared error loss only. The default prior methodology amounts, ultimately, to the minimization of Fisher information, and hence, Bickel's prior works out as the default prior if the location parameter is bounded. As for the selected Bayes estimate, it corresponds to ‘Gaussian tilting’ of an initial reference prior.