“I am a fat baby,who moved to a fat child,who moved to a fat teenager,who moved to a fat adult”: Women’s reflections of a lifetime of body and weight concern

The present study explored how women aged 50–65 years reflect and make meaning of a lifetime of body and weight struggles. Seven purposefully selected women with longstanding body image challenges participated in interviews and reflected on their perceptions, thoughts, and emotions around their body and weight since childhood. Findings revealed consistent and consuming concerns about the body; prevalent body-related self-conscious emotions; influential social experiences that impact physical self-perceptions; and enduring impacts of weight bias, stigma, and discrimination. Collectively, these findings provide support for the stability of body disturbances and highlight the need to explore the unique body-related narratives of women in midlife.     

Documented,Undocumented, and Liminally Legal: Legal Status During the Transition to Adulthood for 1.5‐Generation Brazilian Immigrants

This article deconstructs the “illegal–legal” binary that characterizes much immigration scholarship. Using in‐depth interviews with 42 1.5‐generation Brazilian immigrants in young adulthood, I find that respondents discuss a distinct hierarchy with four categories of legal membership—undocumented, liminal legality, lawful permanent resident (LPR), and citizen—that affect their daily lives and incorporation. Liminally legal and LPR statuses in particular challenge this illegal–legal dichotomy. Liminal legality is an “in‐between” status in which immigrants possess social security numbers and work permits but have no guarantee of eventual citizenship. Without opportunities to regularize their status, both undocumented and liminally legal young adults face increased vulnerabilities to poverty and social exclusion. Liminally legal youth, however, are in better positions than their undocumented peers during early adulthood because of state‐delimited rights associated with their legal status.     

Using best available science to protect critical areas in Washington state: challenges and barriers to planners

Urban development has profound impacts on ecological patterns and processes making the scientific information required for developing environmental ordinances central for mitigating these negative ecological impacts. Washington State requires that planners use the best available science (BAS) to formulate land use ordinances as part of the state’s Growth Management Act (GMA). We present empirical findings describing challenges to planners in defining “best available science” and using BAS to create local ordinances that balance development needs with natural resource protection. We interviewed city and county planners (and their consultants) in western Washington to determine what they find useful about BAS, whether or not BAS is applicable to their jurisdictions, and what constraints they experience in reviewing and using BAS to create or update their land use ordinances. Our results suggest that applying the BAS requirement is particularly difficult in urban areas. Specifically, planners had difficulty applying results from research conducted in systems dissimilar to their urban landscapes. These challenges to planners were exacerbated by (1) a lack of resources and (2) political tensions among stakeholders with competing values in urban settings. We conclude with recommendations for improving the consideration of science in statewide land-use planning.     

Attitudes Toward Women in Health Care Organizations: A Turkish Case Study

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the health care employees’ attitudes toward women in health care organizations in Turkey. It was measured using a 25-item scale by Spence, Helmreich, and Stapp (1973 Spence, J. T., Helmreich, R., & Stapp, J. (1973). A short version of the Attitudes toward Women Scale (AWS). Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 2(4), 219–220. doi:10.3758/BF03329252[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). The study was conducted on 541 employees: 279 males and 262 females. Structural equation model (SEM) was applied to analyze the relationship between gender, marital status, and income and attitudes toward woman. The result of this analysis showed that the relations between gender, marital status, and income and attitudes toward woman were statistically significant. All three hypotheses were statistically supported. This result indicated that employees’ marital status and (monthly) income significantly predicted their scores of attitudes toward woman in a positive direction. Besides, employees’ gender significantly predicted their scores of attitudes toward woman in an inverse direction. Future research can focus on investigating the effects of the attitudes toward women on other elements (e.g., performance, motivation, job satisfaction) or a wider sample to reach more generalized results.     

Infants' Ability to Distinguish Between Intentional and Accidental Actions and Its Relation to Internal State Language

The experiment reported here investigated infants' concept of intention, as well as the relation among intention understanding, general productive vocabulary, and internal state language production during the 2nd year. Results from an imitation task indicated that 18‐month‐olds are better able to differentiate between intentional and accidental actions than 14‐month‐olds. Although there was no relation between infants' performance on the intention task and their general productive vocabulary, internal state language production at 30 months was predicted by infants' ability to differentiate between intentional and accidental actions about a year earlier. These findings shed light on the developmental progression of infants' concept of intention, as well as on the continuity between infants' understanding of intentional action and their ability to use internal state words.     

Multimodal hub location and hub network design

Through observations from real life hub networks, we introduce the multimodal hub location and hub network design problem. We approach the hub location problem from a network design perspective. In addition to the location and allocation decisions, we also study the decision on how the hub networks with different possible transportation modes must be designed. In this multimodal hub location and hub network design problem, we jointly consider transportation costs and travel times, which are studied separately in most hub location problems presented in the literature. We allow different transportation modes between hubs and different types of service time promises between origin–destination pairs while designing the hub network in the multimodal problem. We first propose a linear mixed integer programming model for this problem and then derive variants of the problem that might arise in certain applications. The models are enhanced via a set of effective valid inequalities and an efficient heuristic is developed. Computational analyses are presented on the various instances from the Turkish network and CAB data set.     

Traumatic Bereavement and Mindfulness: A Preliminary Study of Mental Health Outcomes Using the ATTEND Model

This article presents a quasi-experimental study of a mindfulness-based intervention for traumatically bereaved individuals using a single group with pre-test and post-test design. The intervention consists of the ATTEND model, which is comprised of the following elements practiced by the clinician: attunement, trust, therapeutic touch, egalitarianism, nuance, and death education. The study is based on the charts of 42 clients seeking grief counseling at a mental health agency viewed retrospectively. Participants’ intake scores on the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R), which measures trauma symptoms, and 25-item Hopkins Symptom Checklist (HSCL-25), which measures depressive and anxious symptoms, were compared to their scores after an average of 14.64 hours of counseling. Paired samples t tests showed a statistically significant decline in trauma symptoms on the IES-R, and in anxious and depressive symptoms on the HSCL-25. These results provide preliminary support for the use of this mindfulness-based approach for difficulties associated with traumatic bereavement, though more extensive research is needed to determine the effectiveness of this approach.     

Braving Human Suffering: Death Education and its Relationship to Empathy and Mindfulness

Social workers are likely to encounter clients dealing with traumatic grief and death in their practice. Though death education has gained in popularity and acceptance, few social work students receive coursework in this area and many are unprepared to deal with their clients' and their own emotions regarding death and grief. Though death-related content may evoke provider avoidance, mindfulness and empathy may help regulate provider emotions and responses. This United States-based study evaluates the effectiveness of experiential death education on mindfulness and empathy. Measures in three separate cohorts were given at the beginning and end of the course. Results show statistically significant increases on the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire and the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy, indicating that such a course may be effective in increasing both mindfulness and empathy in social work students and those in related fields.     

The Impact of Family of Origin on Social Workers from Alcoholic Families

This study draws on the experience of six social workers who are adult children of alcoholics, to demonstrate that childhood learned responsibility and the capacity for attachment are translated into later professional acuity. The place of resilience in developing an understanding of the linkages between the experiences of adult children of alcoholics and social workers is examined and the consequences for social work practice and the education of social workers is outlined. Undeniably, prior life experience impacts on practice. Less well understood is the positive impact of negative experience. In the case of social workers who are adult children of alcoholics we argue that being part of an alcoholic family may significantly contribute to, rather than detract from, later practice competence.     

Social Exchange and The Progression of Sexual Relationships in Emerging Adulthood

Research has extensively examined matching on race and other characteristics in cohabitation and marriage, but it has generally disregarded sexual and romantic relationships. Using data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we examine the tempo of key transitions in the recent relationships of young adults aged 18 to 24. We focus on how the racial mix of partners in relationships is associated with the timing to sex, cohabitation, and marriage. We find evidence that relationships between white men and minority women proceed more rapidly than relationships involving other racial combinations from romance to sexual involvement and from sexual involvement to cohabitation. Our findings have important implications for social exchange perspectives on mate selection.