Changing attitudes about self-injury prevention management: lessons learned

In the behavioral health environment, nurses often use continuous staff monitoring and, at times, physical restraints, to manage the severity of patients' self-injury. Both options put staff in control, are the most restrictive in nature, and can be financially draining on the hospital's budget. This can result in negative reactions by both patients and staff. It is important to develop a program that will empower patients to control their behavior and allow staff to be aware of their perceptions and attitudes toward patients who self-injure. This article describes the leadership initiative that drove the development, training, and implementation of a self-injury prevention project and the lessons learned by staff.     

Illuminating the Phenomenological Challenges of Cross-Cultural Supervision

ABSTRACT

The authors discuss transference enactments that occur during cross-cultural supervision. Previous research has shown that few mental health professionals willingly talk about race during supervision and that White supervisees experience significant difficulty when directly engaged in discussions about race. They introduce a new phenomenon, “stereotypical” transference enactments, as a means for understanding the countertransference Black female clinical supervisors experience during clinical supervision of White supervisees. The findings indicated that effective cross-cultural supervision should address the intersectionality of race and gender to enhance the development of multicultural clinical skills. The clinical and educational challenges are discussed by using two case vignettes.     

Familism Values,Perspective Taking,and Prosocial Moral Reasoning: Predicting Prosocial Tendencies Among Mexican American Adolescents

Mexican American youth often engage in relatively high levels of prosocial behaviors. We theorize that this may be due to a cultural value system that encourages familism values, which, in turn, may foster the development of sociocognitive processes that promote prosocial behaviors. Two hundred and five Mexican American early adolescent youth (M_age = 10.9 years, SD = 0.84; 51% girls) reported their familism values, perspective taking, prosocial moral reasoning, and six types of prosocial behaviors. The results indicated that perspective taking partially mediated the relation between familism values and the specific prosocial tendencies theoretically linked to the Mexican American culture. The study demonstrated the utility of integrating cultural and traditional developmental mechanisms in attempting to explain prosocial behaviors.     

Social and semantic coevolution in knowledge networks

Socio-semantic networks involve agents creating and processing information: communities of scientists, software developers, wiki contributors and webloggers are, among others, examples of such knowledge networks. We aim at demonstrating that the dynamics of these communities can be adequately described as the coevolution of a social and a socio-semantic network. More precisely, we will first introduce a theoretical framework based on a social network and a socio-semantic network, i.e. an epistemic network featuring agents, concepts and links between agents and between agents and concepts. Adopting a relevant empirical protocol, we will then describe the joint dynamics of social and socio-semantic structures, at both macroscopic and microscopic scales, emphasizing the remarkable stability of these macroscopic properties in spite of a vivid local, agent-based network dynamics.     

Housing needs of grandparent caregivers: grandparent,youth, and professional perspectives

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study examined the housing needs of grandparent caregivers and the youth in their care in New York State. Nine focus groups were conducted separately with grandparent caregivers (n = 46) and youth (n = 34), and interviews were conducted with key informants (n = 17) knowledgeable about housing and issues. Housing needs of greatest priority, contextual differences, and potential barriers to securing housing and social services were identified. Key themes indicated that housing challenges stem from four problem domains: the experience of poverty, which creates affordability challenges that trap grandparent caregivers and their grandchildren in unsuitable homes and unsafe neighborhoods; physical challenges of aging grandparents, which require specific housing accommodations; changes in family composition when taking in grandchildren, which necessitate moving out of prior accommodations or changing housing plans due to regulatory issues; and obstacles to obtaining needed benefits, including a lack of information, burdensome application processes, ineligibility, and a shortage of resources. These issues are discussed with implications for policy and practice.     

Black women talk about stereotypical transference enactments in cross-cultural supervision

ABSTRACT

Little is known about cross-cultural supervision dynamics between Black, female supervisors who provide clinical supervision of White supervisees. This study examined transference enactments which occurred between Black, female clinical supervisors (N = 57) and White supervisees. The results show that White supervisees’ racist and sexist behaviors towards the Black, female supervisors demonstrated remnants of stereotypical images historically attributed to Black women (i.e., Mammy, Jezebel, and/or Sapphire). Moreover, the findings highlight the need to initiate multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills to enhance clinical skills. The paper concludes with recommendations for cross-cultural supervisory dyads and implications for future research.     

Utilizing Social Support to Conserve the Fighting Strength: Important Considerations for Military Social Workers

This article is a continuation of a conference panel dialogue that focused on providing individualized, culturally responsible treatment of secondary traumatic stress (STS) for military social workers. Key aspects of the roles and responsibilities, professional and ethical challenges of military social workers and social work officers serve as focal points for understanding the importance of social support. This article discusses ways social support might help to moderate the impact of STS. The “buddy system” describes a culturally unique protective factor, which is a well‐known and effective type of social support utilized throughout the military. This article provides valuable information on how the “buddy system” can serve as a blueprint for managing STS experienced by military social workers. The article concludes with research, policy, and practice implications.     

A Preliminary Examination of Covitality as Integrated Well-Being in College Students

The emergence of positive psychology has generated increased interest about the correlates of positive psychological functioning. Researchers have identified and studied various positive psychological constructs (e.g., hope, optimism, self-efficacy, gratitude, and life satisfaction) and found them to covary and to be positively associated with optimal human functioning and negatively associated with mental illness. This study of 528 college students examined the co-occurrence of selected positive psychological traits and explored their relations with a proposed second-order latent construct called covitality and with psychological well-being. Structural equation modeling examined each first-order positive psychology construct related to the second-order concept of covitality. Findings supported the second-order latent factor model of covitality, which was also significantly related to indicators of psychological well-being. Implications for theory development related to understanding positive human resources and applications within the context of college student populations are discussed.