Consumer participation in the employment rehabilitation process: contextual factors and implications for practice

Rehabilitation models of practice have emerged that offer persons' with disabilities opportunities to have an active role in the work entry or re(entry) process. Despite the growth and interest in empowering client involvement in practice, consumer views on the determinants of participation are not fully understood. Thus, consumer feedback on using a self-directed approach to employment rehabilitation was elicited to identify factors integral to their participation in the process. Focus groups were conducted with 35 adult consumers with developmental, mental health, physical and learning disabilities to gain insights into their involvement in a participatory approach to find employment. Content analysis of data revealed barriers and facilitators, which hindered or enabled consumer involvement in the vocational service process. This article discusses the importance of considering issues across the rehabilitation system, practice and lived contexts when implementing participatory approaches in vocational rehabilitation settings.     

Worker perceptions of organizational support and return-to-work policy: associations with post-injury job satisfaction

This study evaluates the psychometric properties of an industry-based employee measure of employer responses to injuries (i.e., organizational support and return-to-work policies) and explores the relationship of these variables to post-injury job satisfaction. Survey data were collected from 1438 employees with work-related injuries in 13 construction companies and 13 transportation companies. Factor analyses supported the two-factor structure of the scale, and both organizational support and return-to-work policies were independently associated with post-injury job satisfaction. The results suggest a need for understanding organizational responses to injuries, employee perceptions of injury response, and the impact of both on organizational outcomes.     

Cutting Edge Issues in Social Work Research

Correspondence to Ian Shaw, Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3WT, Wales. E-mail: shawif{at}cardiff.ac.uk Summary Taking the panel report on social work submissions to the British2001 Research Assessment Exercise as a starting point, I commenton some of the central questions facing social work research.These include social work research methodology; social work'srelationship to science; the relationship between social workpractice and research; governance and research ethics; buildingresearch capacity; and establishing research quality. I outlineaction that is needed by social work academics and researchers,social work agencies and government departments.     

Safety in commercial aviation—The long-term trends

The Technical Department of IATA is primarily responsible for presenting coordinated airline views to governments, and government organizations like the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), on airline requirements for ground-based facilities such as airports, air traffic control, communications, meteorological services, and so on. The objective is always to improve the safety, efficiency and economics of the airlines' commercial services.

All these activities involve the issue of safety to some degree or other. However, about 12 years ago IATA decided to establish a separate safety activity in order to give more explicit attention to the overall safety level of the industry. This paper outlines IATA's safety activities, some of the conclusions which have been drawn, the steps being taken to improve the past safety record, and the prospect of success in this activity.     

Time use and leisure: Subjective and objective aspects

This paper utilizes data from the 1981 Canadian Time Use Pilot Study and from a small Halifax time-budget study to look at subjective and contextual dimensions of leisure for women and men. The Canadian study (n=2685) had information on the time spent in daily activities as well as on the settings and social contexts of those activities. The Halifax study included similar time-budget information on 60 married couples, but also incorporated subjective ratings of all diary events in terms of perceived work or leisure. Using subjective weightings from the Halifax study, estimates of subjective leisure were made for different categories of daily activity and for different Canadian population subgroups. Hypercodes were used to look at the effect of social roles on leisure time, and the AID procedure was used to analyze the contextual dimensions of leisure for men and women. The results show that objective activity and well as subjective leisure vary by population subgroup. Constraints to leisure include being female, being employed, having children, and, to some degree, being married. Of the contextual dimensions, subjective leisure was shown to be influenced primarily by type of objective activity. Location, time of day and day of the week also influenced leisure designations, but to a lesser extent. This study suggests the potential usefulness of subjective weightings of activities in order to gain a greater understanding of leisure patterns and participation.     

Towards Balancing Power in Domestic Violence Relationships Rejoinder

Based on four years of extensive work on domestic violence issues with both survivors and perpetrators within their Family Safety Program, the authors argue that Wileman and Wileman's suggestion that women could learn skills to “effect positive change” in their relationships is both inappropriate and potentially dangerous. We further argue that to label such “skills” as “empowering” merely endorses a stance that is “more of the same” for the woman. That is, the woman may only learn more about taking responsibility for change, which is a position in which she is already well entrenched, often to her ultimate disadvantage.     

Scheduling a multi-stage production system with startup delays

The problem treated is that of multi-stage scheduling as affected by the interdependence of successive stages. An algorithm is developed which incorporates startup delays as analytical functions of cycle times and production rates at adjacent stages. This is accomplished in part by imposing integer multiple restrictions on the relationship between the cycle times at adjacent stages. Total cost is then minimized for a given set of integer multiples.     

Assessing quality in mental health care. The United Kingdom experience

Quality assessment in mental health services is undergoing change in the United Kingdom following the introduction of market reforms. Traditionally, service quality was monitored by professional practitioners with reference to user satisfaction. This became formalized, and the two main forms of quality assurance currently used are outlined. However, the government is concerned that this may be inadequate for the monitoring of quality standards, specified in contracts between service purchasers and providers, and that existing systems provide an insufficient indication of service outcome. As a consequence, the government financed the development of a new set of health outcome scales. The importance of these scales are discussed.