Association for Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,and Transgender Issues in Counseling’s Best Practices in Addressing Conscience Clause Legislation in Counselor Education and Supervision

The amount of various, state-level legislation allowing the denial of counseling services to individuals with values that conflict with those of the professional counselor continues to increase. Such laws are in direct conflict with the values, principles, and ethical standards of the counseling profession. These “conscience clause” legislations are of concern due to the ability of the counseling profession to safeguard and protect the welfare of clients seeking counseling services. Potently, however, much of the focus of conscience clause legislation centers around the legal sanctioning of bias and refusal to provide services to affectional and gender minority clients, and the intersection of sexual/affectional orientation to spiritual and religious values. Provided is a review of these laws and the way they clash with the counseling profession. To assist profession counselors in navigating appropriate ethical behavior, specific counseling-appropriate and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer affirming recommendations are provided. Each layer of professional counseling, direct work with clients, supervision, and counselor education, is addressed.     

Sexual coercion reported by women in three midwestern prisons

The study was an anonymous self-report survey of coercive sexual experiences of women incarcerated in three Midwestern prisons. Inmate populations were 295 (Facility 1), 113 (Facility 2) and 60 (Facility 3). Return rates were over 50%. Some prison staff were also surveyed. The 150 inmates in Facility 1 reported relatively high rates of sexual coercion: 27% had been coerced in the state system and 19% in their present facility. The 80 inmates in Facility 1 and 36 inmates in Facility 3 reported lower rates: 8% to 9% for prisons statewide and 6% to 8% for their present facility. One half of the perpetrators were females. Most incidents involved genital touching. About one fifth of the incidents were classifiable as rape. We concluded that the prison environment potentially fosters female sexual aggression among inmates and sexual exploitation by staff.     

Does Knowledge Mediate the Effect of Context on Performance? Some Initial Evidence

This research examines the links among four firm context variables, knowledge, and financial performance. Adopting a knowledge‐based, contingency view of the firm and assuming that strategy's locus is knowledge creation and application, we hypothesize that knowledge completely mediates the effects of context on performance. The results from analyzing 208 manufacturers found a positive relationship between applied knowledge and financial performance, but none between knowledge creation and performance. As for context, production technology routineness and low demand unpredictability were positively related only to greater applied knowledge; high technological turbulence was positively related to both knowledge creation and knowledge application; and firm size had no effect on either knowledge construct. No direct context‐performance relationships were found (i.e., all effects were indirect): knowledge, in particular applied knowledge, completely mediated the impact of context on performance.     

Contextualizing mistreatment in cognitive impairment in Latin America

Mistreatment is an important social outcome of the growing cognitive impairment epidemic, particularly in developing countries. This study aimed to bring to light what is known about mistreatment in cognitively impaired individuals in Latin American Countries. We identified a gap in the literature on this topic that opens the door for future research.     

How to Do Things With Texts: A Functional Account of Reading Comprehension

We offer an account of reading comprehension that we believe will help clarify some common conceptual confusions in the relevant literature, as well as contribute to existing functional accounts. We argue that defining texts qua texts as stimulus classes, on the one hand, and equating “comprehension” with behavior (covert or otherwise), on the other, are not useful conceptual moves, especially when behavioral settings go beyond basic literacy skills acquisition. We then analyze the structure of the contingencies that usually evoke talk of “comprehension” using techniques from analytic philosophy. We show how keeping the results of this analysis in mind can help avoid the conceptual bafflement that often arises, even among behavior analysts, when defining or assessing behavioral phenomena related to reading comprehension. Using two contrasting cases (legal texts and stories), we argue that what counts as comprehension depends, not peripherally but crucially, on the shared social practices of which texts are a part. Finally, we propose a new framework for classifying reader–text contingencies by combining two dimensions: openness of setting and embeddedness of reinforcement.     

Gender,electrodermal activity,and videogames: Adding a psychophysiological dimension to sociolinguistic methods

User experience research on the affective dimensions of videogame players’ interactions has looked to psychophysiological measures as proxies for emotional states. We add to the growing body of literature on this topic and offer our research as a novel application to the methodological toolbox of sociolinguistics. We present a case study of an interaction occurring in a mixed‐gender group (3m/1f) playing a video game that has a potentially sexualized component in gameplay, using a Nintendo Wii‐mote joystick as a mimetic penis in the game Mario Party 8. Through a detailed analysis of (1) gameplay interaction, including talk, laughter and gesture, (2) participants’ electrodermal activity (EDA), and (3) a post‐game debriefing, we track the varied engagements of the players in‐game and with each other, showing how the design of the game itself and the entanglement of hardware and software design with gendered gameplay serve to marginalize and exclude the female participant.     

Impact of misspecified residual correlation structure on the parameter estimates in a shared spatial frailty model

In practice, survival data are often collected over geographical regions. Shared spatial frailty models have been used to model spatial variation in survival times, which are often implemented using the Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo method. However, this method comes at the price of slow mixing rates and heavy computational cost, which may render it impractical for data-intensive application. Alternatively, a frailty model assuming an independent and identically distributed (iid) random effect can be easily and efficiently implemented. Therefore, we used simulations to assess the bias and efficiency loss in the estimated parameters, if residual spatial correlation is present but using an iid random effect. Our simulations indicate that a shared frailty model with an iid random effect can estimate the regression coefficients reasonably well, even with residual spatial correlation present, when the percentage of censoring is not too high and the number of clusters and cluster size are not too low. Therefore, if the primary goal is to assess the covariate effects, one may choose the frailty model with an iid random effect; whereas if the goal is to predict the hazard, additional care needs to be given due to the efficiency loss in the parameter(s) for the baseline hazard.