Using the Therapist's Inner Conversation in Teamwork with Novice Therapists

Peter Rober's work (2005a) on the therapist’s inner conversation (TIC) has been a significant contribution to understanding the therapist's 'here and now' experience that focuses on the emergence of different voices responding to what is said in the therapy session. Frediani and Rober (2016) conducted an investigation into the experience and TIC of novice therapists concerning emotions aroused and how they deal with them during family therapy. Their research prompted us to ask how this methodology could work with recent graduates and those in the last year of their undergraduate training. This was addressed in the adolescent psychotherapy team that is part of the Equipo de Trabajo y Asesoría Sistémica (Systemic Counselling and Teamwork) (eQtasis) of the Psychology Department of the University of Chile. An important characteristic has been developing an ethics for clinical practice and generating a collaborative reflexive approach as a central aspect of the clinical training. The paper aims to promote the legitimacy of the experience of novice therapists who despite limited professional experience have many stories that connect with what is said in therapy.     

‘He didn't mean to hit mom,I think’: positioning,agency and point in adolescents' narratives about domestic violence

This paper analyses the narratives of adolescents who have experienced domestic violence. It focuses on what we can learn about being an adolescent who experiences domestic violence, using a narrative approach. Attentive to both form and content, the paper sheds light on why the narrative is being told, who the actors in the narratives are, who are positioned in the forefront/background and what the point of the narrative is. The analysis shows that through the storytelling, the father's position as the reluctant/dangerous/weak aggressor is negotiated, the mother is positioned both in the background as a victim and in the forefront as an actor resisting his violent behaviour. The children position themselves as actors with power to alter the progress, to protect and stop the violence. The point of the narratives is to describe the father as the aggressor, and to describe the important role of the children. This picture of the father, mother and child questions the traditional understanding of the father as the aggressor, the mother as the victim and the child as a powerless bystander being exposed to the violence, and underlines the complexities of the dynamics in families living with domestic violence.     

And yet they Co-move! Public capital and productivity in OECD

In this paper, we add to the debate on the public capital–productivity link by applying very recent developments in the panel time series literature that take into account cross sectional correlation in non-stationary panels. In particular, we evaluate the productive effect of public capital by estimating various production functions on a panel of 21 OECD countries over the period 1975–2002. Our results suggest that public capital has a positive long run impact on output, with elasticities that range between 0.05 and 0.15, depending on model specification. These findings are robust to the existence of spillover effects from public capital investments in other countries and to the inclusion of other productivity determinants, like human capital, the stock of patents and R&D capital. Finally, we do not find any important effect of public capital on GDP in the short run: this suggests that public infrastructure investments might not be a powerful countercyclical policy instrument.     

Emerging coherence and relations to communication among executive function tasks in toddlers: Evidence from a Latin American sample

Recent work within early executive function (EF) seems to suggest that toddlers show distinct patterns of development, involving poorly correlated performance across EF tasks and significant improvements over relatively short periods of time. The present study sought to extend these findings by investigating evidence for these patterns in toddlers and the existence of more traditional patterns of EF (e.g., correlations between tasks, links to language) when using the same tasks in a novel Latin American sample. Eighty toddlers (18–24 months) and sixty young preschoolers (30–36) months completed a battery of EF tasks, early social communication, and receptive and expressive language measures. Results indicated that toddlers showed similar distinct patterns of development (i.e., few relations between tasks and links to responding to joint attention), but by early preschool a more cohesive EF and links to language were present. Further, work demonstrated significant age (older children outperformed younger children), gender (girls outperformed boys), and socioeconomic differences (satisfied basic needs outperformed unsatisfied basic needs, but only on the snack delay). This work provides evidence for patterns of emerging EF development within this novel cultural sample (and evidence for group differences) that may be supported by communicative and representational development.     

Dignity‐based practices in Norwegian activation work

This qualitative study sought to identify dignity‐based practices in a Norwegian activation programme ? the Qualification Programme. Some welfare recipients are likely to experience shame in connection with their interaction with the welfare system. Previous research suggests that a dignity‐based approach could help welfare recipients to avoid such negative experiences. The operational components of dignity have been identified as autonomy, empathy and rights. Data gathered through individual interviews with participants and activation workers were examined using interpretative phenomenological analysis with a focus on exploring respondents’ perceptions of events to which they ascribe meaning. The findings indicate that accounts of empathy were common, but that the study’s participants seldom reported experiencing that their autonomy and rights were enhanced. Participation in the programme appeared to undermine the participants’ dignity, particularly when individual needs were overlooked. An underlying reason could be the current move away from a comprehensive understanding of service users’ different needs and to a narrow focus on employability.     

Towards a Socio‐Economics of the Brain Drain and Distributed Human Capital

This paper derives from our joint interest in understanding how scientific mobility affects developing countries. Many authors have addressed the topic previously, both from an economic and from a sociological perspective. However, recent literature evinces dissatisfaction with both analytical frameworks and the framing of public policies addressing the brain drain problematic. This paper is a contribution to understanding the historical and theoretical foundations of the “brain drain” debate. We aim to improve conceptual clarity regarding the itinerancy of human beings and the mobilization of human capital. We develop a critical review of the economics of the brain drain, highlighting the work of some key early thinkers and pointing out the way in which subsequent work has taken up selected aspects of their approaches leaving other challenges aside. We then consider the diaspora networks literature, which is characterized as taking a “connectionist” approach to the brain drain. We identify two fundamental problems: the sidelining of complementarity and context dependency as basic properties of human capital; and a failure to adequately disentangle the concepts of human resources for science and technology (HRST) and human capital in academic and policy discourse about the brain drain.     

Effects of Impact-Absorbing Flooring in Residential Care from the Perspectives of Enrolled Nurses

Falls are a daily occurrence in nursing homes and few interventions for reducing fall-related injuries have proven to be effective. Impact absorbing flooring (IAF) in residential care has shown promising results in reducing fall-injuries and in the process of developing and implementing IAF all aspects are valuable to explore. Therefore, the aim of this qualitative study is to describe the enrolled nurses (ENs) experiences of IAF. We carried out focus group interviews with ENs and used content analysis to process the data. The ENs experienced both negative and positive aspects with the IAF. Importantly, the ENs perceived the IAF as effective in preventing fall-injuries. They also appreciated the improvements in acoustics. Negative aspects were that the flooring initially was challenging to walk on and that it made it harder to maneuver heavy equipment. A significant and transferable finding in this study was the importance of the ENs' perceived difficulty in preventing fall-injuries amongst elderly people living in nursing homes. This seemed to be a driving force to accept the intervention. Although IAF affects the working conditions in a nursing home, ENs are willing to accept these issues given the perceived effectiveness of the intervention.     

Truncated location-scale non linear regression models

We present a class of truncated non linear regression models for location and scale where the truncated nature of the data is incorporated into the statistical model by assuming that the response variable follows a truncated distribution. The location parameter of the response variable is assumed to be modeled by a continuous non linear function of covariates and unknown parameters. In addition, the proposed model also allows for the scale parameter of the responses to be characterized by a continuous function of the covariates and unknown parameters. Three particular cases of the proposed models are presented by considering the response variable to follow a truncated normal, truncated skew normal, and truncated beta distribution. These truncated non linear regression models are constructed assuming fixed known truncation limits and model parameters are estimated by direct maximization of the log-likelihood using a non linear optimization algorithm. Standardized residuals and diagnostic metrics based on the cases deletion are considered to verify the adequacy of the model and to detect outliers and influential observations. Results based on simulated data are presented to assess the frequentist properties of estimates, and a real data set on soil-water retention from the Buriti Vermelho River Basin database is analyzed using the proposed methodology.