A Descriptive Study of Home Modifications for People with Dementia and Barriers to Implementation

This study describes home environmental features, safety issues, and health-related modifications in a community dwelling sample of 82 elderly people with dementia. Main barriers to the accessibility of the homes were steps, both inside and outside the house. The majority of the caregivers had made home modifications, which pertained mainly to physical limitations. Home modifications to support cognitive deficits were made to a lesser extent. The main barrier to the implementation of home modifications to accommodate the care recipient's memory loss was skepticism about their usefulness. Regarding the removal of physical barriers, financial constraints were most frequently mentioned.     

Understanding the Challenges to Providing Disabilities Services and Rehabilitation in Rural Alaska: Where Do We Go From Here?

American Indians/Alaska Natives (AI/AN) suffer from some of the highest rates of health and mental health-related disabilities. Despite high rates of disabilities experienced among this population, services available to treat the disabilities are extremely limited, especially within the rural Alaska context. Additionally, limited research exists regarding the perceived barriers to receiving disability services, the importance of treating disabilities within one's own community, and individual and community-level strengths that exist to help cope with the lack of services. This article attempts to bring awareness to these issues, as well as propose tangible solutions to help mitigate the barriers.     

Going Against the Historical Grain: Perspectives on Gendered Occupational Identity and Resistance to the Breakdown of Occupational Segregation in Two Manufacturing Firms

This article discusses a process of restructuring of working practices within two manufacturing firms with respect to its implications for gendered occupational segregation. A contextualized, historically situated analysis is presented, which is cast within debates on the nature of gendered occupational identity, equality initiatives and arenas of power and influence for women and men, within what were traditionally male‐dominated organizational contexts. Such an analysis serves to highlight the significance of the new restructuring in sweeping away 150 years of practice and embedded ‘ways of doing things’ and offers explanations for the actions of contemporary men and women in opposing what were seen by management and the trade union as emancipatory changes.     

Adolescent Females' Security with Parents Predicts the Quality of Peer Interaction.

This study examined the association between security with parents and the quality of interactions between adolescent best friends. Thirty-six girls and their best friends, between the ages of 15 and 18 years, were recruited to participate in the study. They were videotaped while discussing unresolved problems each adolescent had experienced in her life. Security with parents and peers, self-esteem, and locus of control were assessed with questionnaires. There were three main findings. Girls high in security with respect to their parents had higher positive interaction scores in the videotaped task, higher self-esteem, higher internality scores, and less feelings of unknown or powerful others control than those low in security. Dyads in which both girls were high in security with respect to their parents had higher total positive interaction scores than those dyads in which at least one girl was low in security. Best friends were significantly concordant with respect to security with parents and peers as well as their positive interaction scores during their own task and their friend's task. Findings are discussed with respect to attachment theory.     

Unions,seniority, and public choice

This paper examines the implications of granting a seniority-based system to a union whose behavior is determined by a median voter rule. It is shown that the union will negotiate a sequence of wages that will contract union employment in each period. The model then is extended to include an active role for the firm. It is shown that when the firm has the opportunity to resist unionization, the union will not allow union employment to fall below some lower bound. This lower bound is then a steady-state equilibrium.     

On the Measurement of Job Risk in Hedonic Wage Models

We examine the incidence, form, and research consequences of measurement error in measures of fatal injury risk in U.S. workplaces using both Bureau of Labor Statistics and National Intitute of Occupational Safety and Health data. Of the various measures examined the NIOSH industry risk measure produces implicit value of life estimates most in line with both economic theory and the mode result for the existing literature. Because we find non-classical measurement error that differs across risk measures and is not independent of other regressors, innovative statistical procedures need be applied to obtain statistically improved estimates of wage-fatality risk tradeoffs.     

Creativity and Learning Jazz: The Practice of “Listening”

This article is about interaction, culture, and creativity. The ethnographic setting is a set of jazz performance classes at a California university. Although I write about jazz music, the reader need not have a background in studying or performing jazz (or music in general) to understand this article. In the title of the article, the term “practice” refers to (1) “listening” as a culturally specific communicative practice, and (2) the practice (a.k.a. rehearsal) of that culturally specific version of “listening”. I document and analyze how jazz instructors communicate with students about group interplay during musical performance. Extrapolating from this focus, I suggest some ways that contemporary linguistic anthropology can contribute to theories of creativity, focusing on the role that cultural norms of interaction defined by a particular activity play in constraining or shaping creative processes.