Developing and testing a satisfaction survey for nursing home residents: the Ohio Experience

Input from consumers has become an important part of quality improvement in long-term care and for consumer decision-making. This paper documents the development of the Ohio Nursing Home Resident Satisfaction Survey (ONHRSS) through a partnership of state government, research, and industry experts. The instrument was tested and refined through two waves of data--a pretest phase and later with statewide data. Exploratory and confirmatory analyses with statewide data identified eight primary factors along with an underlying, secondary Global Satisfaction factor. Reliability of the domains ranged from .69 to .95. Recommendations for further refinement and testing of the instrument are discussed along with policy and practice implications.     

Loss and grief: The experience of transition to residential aged care

There is growing recognition of the experience of non-death-related loss and grief. One unexplored area of non-death-related loss and grief is associated with older people’s transition from home to residential aged care (RAC). This paper reports findings from a qualitative study that explored the experiences of people living in RAC, carer-relatives of people living in RAC and RAC staff. Using theories of loss and grief, the paper identifies features of the transition to RAC that are associated with unresolved loss and maladaptation to changed circumstances, and the types of support that would mitigate these. Using a series of focus groups with both residents and carer-relatives, as well as staff, the study found that residents and their families need more support to negotiate the multiple, often necessarily hasty decisions and bureaucratic requirements associated with transitioning to RAC, while simultaneously experiencing loss and grief. The types of support that families would welcome from service providers include facilitating shared decision making, valuing family and community carer expertise and providing practical information and assistance to fulfil administrative obligations.     

Living with dementia,interdependence and citizenship: narratives of everyday decision-making

This article argues that interdependent relationships are key in realising inclusion and citizenship for people living with dementia. We focus on decision-making as one aspect of everyday life which reflects opportunities and challenges associated with citizenship. Accounts of everyday decision-making from people living with dementia provide insight into strategies for negotiating responsibilities as they shifted with dementia. An inductive, secondary data analysis developed decision narratives from the data of 61 interviews conducted in the United Kingdom. The interviews were with 12 people with a diagnosis of dementia plus their nominated care-partner in a qualitative study which focused on information management and sense of self. The secondary data analysis identified strategies for inclusion, emphasising relational interdependency amidst challenges. The five-stage framework of an Ethic of Care positions this interdependency as a response to barriers to inclusion and citizenship. Interdependency, therefore, emerges as key to realising relational citizenship.     

An increase in song pitch of eastern great tits (Parus minor) in response to urban noise at Seoul,Korea

Urban Ecosystems - Anthropogenic noise may mask effective vocal signal transmission by birds, particularly in notes occurring in lower frequencies. Previous studies have shown a correlation of...     

Women Who Work: The limits of the neoliberal feminist paradigm

This article examines Ivanka Trump's Women Who Work, arguing that it represents the newest permutation of the neoliberal feminist subject. After providing an overview of the recent emergence of neoliberal feminism, I explain why the book should be considered part of the wider cultural landscape in which this variant of feminism has increasingly become commonsensical. I then turn to demonstrate how Women Who Work construes the ideal female subject not only as generic human capital but also incites her to invest in herself constantly, where activities ranging from professional workshops through hobbies to friendships are understood as practices that appreciate the value of the self. The conversion of women into generic rather than gendered human capital remains, however, incomplete, since the ideal of a happy work–family balance continues to serve as a push back to the wholesale erasure of traditional notions of sexual difference. Finally, I highlight that neoliberal feminism is erasing other long‐standing divisions and political differences. Not only does the private–public divide collapse, but so, too, does the distinction between one's private self and one's public enterprise as the self itself becomes an enterprise. This dual process of collapse and reconfiguration shapes the newest neoliberal feminist subject, the main protagonist of Trump's Women Who Work.     

A League of Gentlemen: The Institute of the Motor Industry

The article first examines how a Victorian discourse of gentlemanliness has been used by the professions to support a claim to moral and intellectual superiority. In Bourdieusian terms, this allowed an emerging professional class to accumulate a stock of cultural capital that differentiated them from entrepreneurship and commerce. However, there has been dramatic increase in occupational groups claiming professional status. This includes the use of signifiers of gentility and respectability such as charters, coats of arms and prestigious headquarters. The particular artefacts produced by the Institute of the Motor Industry (IMI), a professional body that represents car dealers and repair shops, are examined and related to Theodor Adorno’s concept of the culture industry wherein social markers have become manufactured effects that can be exchanged. They have thus been emptied out of meaning as a claim to gentlemanly status has been reduced to the possession of certain objects rather than a set of particular behaviours.     

The Importance of Identity in Policy: The Case For and Of Children

This article draws out one of the core reasons why children should be conceived as active agents in research, particularly policy‐related research. The main thesis is that policy inevitably projects and, to an extent, constitutes the subject identities of its intended objects — in this case, that of ‘children’. Drawing on several bodies of theory — the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, identity theory, ‘governmentality’ and theories of discourse — the article shows why not incorporating children’s voices is a problem for social policy, and suggests that the impact of their exclusion has the potential to render policy both inappropriate and non‐responsive.     

Clinical Social Work and Psychoanalysis: Introduction to the Special Issue

As clinical social work developed in America it was highly influenced by the concepts and techniques of psychoanalysis and many of its practitioners became interested in seeking psychoanalytic training. More and more psychoanalysts are now coming from a background in clinical social work due to the development of a network of interdisciplinary training institutes and the opening of the Institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association to non-medical candidates. This special issue considers how psychoanalysis may be affected as more of its practitioners and contributors come from a background in clinical social work. This introduction reviews the history of the development of clinical social work and outlines the issues related to “lay analysis” in this country.

Some indications of limits to framing the policy preferences of the civically engaged: Interplay of social capital,race attitudes,and social justice frames

Our experiment, which tested support for a hypothetical social welfare program, found that the civically engaged as a whole were resistant to social justice framing employing universalistic versus particularistic standards. We suggest the lack of a framing effect was due to the use of a preexisting, shared “symbolic racism” frame. Social justice framing did succeed for those whose attitudes toward symbolic racism were ambivalent or neutral. Other factors including sex, income level, political participation, and ideology significantly influenced choice. These results provide some indications of limits to experimental framing of policy preferences of the civically engaged in their institutional settings.