Role conflicts & coping strategies in caregiving. A symbolic interactionist view

Institutional health care delivery is characterized by interdependency among caregivers and between caregivers and care receivers, which leads to role conflicts. This article examines role conflicts and coping strategies of health care aides who are faced with differing expectations of RNs and residents. Guided by a symbolic interactionist perspective, ethnographic data from 12 RNs, 15 health care aides, and 32 nursing home residents of Italian-Catholic and Anglo-Saxon descent in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, was gathered. Results showed that health care aides differed in how they handled role conflict and their elderly clients' concerns. Health care aides were more likely to reject conflicting role expectations from residents than from RNs.     

Popular attitudes to the transition to a market economy in the Soviet Union on the eve of reform

This paper surveys a wide range of Soviet opinion poll data, mostly collected between the middle of 1990 and the middle of 1991, to investigate attitudes to the transition to the market economy. The majority of the population welcomed the transition to a market economy as the only means of freeing themselves from an oppressive system, and were willing to pay a high price for their liberation, but they were not willing to exchange one form of exploitation for another.     

Money Isn't Everything. Fiscal Policy and Family Policy in the Child Support Act

One of the explicit aims of the 1991 Child Support Act is to ensure that parents honour their financial obligations towards their natural children to a greater extent than they have hitherto. An equally important underlying objective is that of reducing the costs to the state of supporting lone parents. This paper examines the extent to which these two objectives are compatible within the framework of the Child Support Act through an examination of the impact of the Act's implementation on lone mothers and their children. It presents some of the key findings of a study of lone mothers on means-tested benefits, interviewed almost one year after the implementation of the Act. The paper concludes that the Act is failing to meet its stated aim of increasing the extent to which parents honour their financial obligations to children, because of an excessively narrow conception of the ways in which financial obligations are met combined with too strong an emphasis on maximizing savings in state expenditure on lone parents. The implementation of the Child Support Act, far from enhancing the welfare of children in lone parent families, has brought with it considerable financial and emotional costs for children and their mothers.     

The effect of religious concentration and affiliation on county cancer mortality rates

Previous research has documented lower cancer mortality rates among religious groups characterized by doctrinal orthodoxy and behavioral conformity. In addition, there is evidence that the general population in an area with a high concentration of religious participants may experience health benefits resulting from diminished exposure to or increased social disapproval of behaviors related to cancer mortality. This research examines the effect of religious concentration and denominational affiliation on county cancer mortality rates. Our findings suggest that religion has a significant impact on mortality rates for all malignancies combined, for digestive cancer, and for respiratory cancer when we control for demographic, environmental, and regional factors known to affect cancer mortality. These results provide new insight into the relationship between religion and health at the macro or community level and suggest that the influence of religion on social structure warrants further attention.     

Use of functional capacity evaluations in workplaces and the compensation system: a report on workers' and report users' perceptions

Until recently, little was documented about how functional capacity evaluations (FCEs) are used by employers and workers' compensation organizations. Such information was one focus of a comprehensive research study on FCEs carried out in southern Ontario, Canada, which involved representatives from the full range of groups involved in FCEs: referral sources, assessors, return-to-work specialists, third party payers and injured workers [1]. This paper shares findings from a cohort of injured workers undergoing FCEs, and explored how their FCE results were perceived and utilized by those receiving the reports. Based on study findings, we provide recommendations as to how FCEs should be requested, undertaken, reported and particularly applied to reduce work disability among injured workers.