THE INTERPERSONAL DYNAMICS AND TREATMENT OF DUAL TRAUMA COUPLES

Many trauma survivor dyads pose intense challenges for couples and marital therapists. Interpersonal reactivity, transference, emotional withdrawal, and associated responses complicate these difficult yet often rewarding cases. Unique aspects and interpersonal dynamics of these couples include specific themes, characteristics, and patterns. Treatment approaches focus on the systemic influences of trauma on interpersonal dynamics and offer interventions to challenge disruptive interactions, attend to the original traumas, and develop healthy relationship patterns.     

The coordination of short-run decision-making with long-range planning

The dichotomy of short-run and long-run decision-making in economic enterprises has gained widespread acceptance, both in practice and in the related literature despite the inherent interdependence of these decisions. The problem addressed in this paper deals with the proper coordination of short- and long-run planning. Structuring the overall decision problem of the firm as a dynamic programming problem, we find that a natural decomposition into long- and short-range planning results. In this decomposition, all decisions which must be made in the first segment of the planning period are allocated to the short-run decision-makers and all subsequent decisions to the long-range planners. Though several formats have been suggested in the literature for linking short- and long-run plans, most notably the use of shadow prices and of targets or quotas, we find that from a conceptual viewpoint these are inadequate mechanisms and that the proper connection involves the dynamic programming return function.     

Practical scheduling for call center operations

A practical spreadsheet-based scheduling method is developed to determine the optimal allocation of service agents to candidate tour types and start times in an inbound call center. A stationary Markovian queueing model with customer abandonment is employed to determine required staffing levels for a sequence of time intervals with varying call volumes, handling times, and relative agent availabilities. These staffing requirements populate a quadratic programming model for determining the distribution of agent tours that will maximize the fraction of offered calls beginning service within a target response time, subject to side constraints on tour type quantities. The optimal distribution is scaled to reflect the total number of scheduled agents, and a near-optimal integer solution is derived using rounding thresholds found by successive one-dimensional searches. This novel approach has been successfully implemented in large service centers at Qwest Communications and could easily be adapted to other operational environments.     

Military leadership: A context specific review

The purpose of this article is to review the literature on military leadership and highlight research opportunities for leadership scholars. The review uses a context specific approach and turns to a simplified version of Hunt's (Hunt, J. G. (1991). Leadership: A new synthesis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage) extended multilevel leadership model as a template to examine the many facets of military leadership. The military leadership literature is stratified into the systems, organizational, and direct levels of leadership with an examination of studies on the critical tasks and individual capabilities required at each level. Additionally, studies on organizational culture and effectiveness at each level are addressed. The article emphasizes that the military is undergoing substantial change as it adjusts to the changing nature of war and a fluid world situation. Based on trends in the military, the review concludes with several general recommendations for future research.     

Privacy and profitability in the technological workplace

VI. Conclusion New communications technology inevitably creates new problems of privacy; think of the introduction of telephones (when party lines were common), faxes (which can lie in a room accessible by many people before reaching the addressee), and cell phones (which allow bystanders to hear one side of seemingly confidential communications). Computer monitoring of performance, e-mails, and Internet access are no different in this regard. Each development requires adjustments. I thank Holly Newell of the University of South Carolina Law School Class of 2004 for her diligent research on and editorial assistance with this article.     

Pathways to recovery after substance abuse treatment: leaving a life of crime behind

Changes in criminal activity following substance abuse treatment were examined among 941 individuals. The estimated cost to society of crimes committed in the 6 months prior to intake was used to classify participants into three groups: no-, low-, and high-cost. Logistic regression was used to predict criminal activity at 6 and 24 months following intake as a function of (a) intake status, (b) treatment, and (c) outcome status and changes. The three groups varied significantly at intake and what predicted subsequent criminal activity. Treatment effects on criminal activity were mediated by the extent to which treatment reduced substance use. Outcomes were also predicted by other factors (e.g. housing, employment, medical problems, psychological distress, and social support). The results support the need for multidimensional assessments for predicting the risk of illegal activity, the need for reassessments following treatment, and the value of addressing other problems in reducing subsequent criminal activity.