FOCUSED SUPERVISION SEEN THROUGH A RECURSIVE FRAME ANALYSIS*

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in the literature addressing family therapy training and supervision (Liddle, Breunlin, & Schwartz, 1988; Morris & Chenail, 1995; Selekman & Todd, 1995; Thomas, 1994). Most of this literature, however, focuses on theory rather than prctice. This paper presents a study of solution-focused therapy's model of supervision, which we have labeled focused supervision. This supervisory process is conceptualized as a conversation during which supervisor and supervisee engage in a dialogue that mutually shapes the meaning of the experience. This study attends to the actual words spoken and utilizes recursive frame analysis to get closer to the talk of a focused supervisory session.     

Interview with Howard E. Gruber

Howard E. Gruber is currently Adjunct Visiting Professor of Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. He is one of the world's foremost experts on the creative process. Gruber was educated at Brooklyn College and at Cornell University, Ithaca, USA, where he received a Ph.D. in 1950 in psychology. His interest in the history of science, particularly in the work of Charles Darwin, led to several important discoveries about the creative process and to additional study of developmental psychology in Geneva, Switzerland with Jean Piaget.Gruber taught at Queens University (Canada) and at the University of Colorado, USA. He was Chair of the Psychology Department in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, New York and Co-director at the Institute for Cognitive Studies of Rutgers University, USA. From 1983 to 1988 he was Professor of Genetic Psychology at the University of Geneva. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Ford Foundation for Higher Education.Gruber's book, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (2nd ed.) (1981) received the Phi Beta Kappa Award for books in science, was recognized by the New York Times Book Review as one of the seven best books of the year, and was nominated for the National Book Award. The Essential Piaget (1977/1995) (written and edited with Jacques Vonèche) is considered the most authoritative anthology of Piaget's work. Gruber's most recent book, co-authored and co-edited with Doris B. Wallace, is Creative People at Work: Twelve Cognitive Case Studies (1989).     

H-likelihood: problems and solutions

In recent issues of this journal it has been asserted in two papers that the use of h-likelihood is wrong, in the sense of giving unsatisfactory estimates of some parameters for binary data (Kuk and Cheng, 1999; Waddington and Thompson, 2004) or theoretically unsound (Kuk and Cheng, 1999). We wish to refute both these assertions.     

President Nixon sees a ‘cover up’: Public relations in federal agencies

Early in his first term. President Nixon initiated an effort to make major cuts in the number of personnel of federal agencies engaged in public relations as well as in the agencies' public relations budgets. He described those public relations employees as “covered up pretty properly.” His goal was to “get the public relations complement in each Department reduced by 50 per cent regardless of what they are officially called.” This article reports on the origin, implementation and denouement of President Nixon's war on public relations in public administration at the federal level of government.     

Union survival strategies for the twenty-first century

Clearly, the necessary changes in the law and culture will not come easily or quickly. But, transcending all forms of these labor market segments is a set of concerns that arguably should spur a search for common ground between labor and management. The proliferation of automated technologies, together with the continuing impact of foreign competition with cheap labor markets, has led some to predict that, over the next quarter century, we will witness the elimination of the blue-collar, mass assembly-line worker from the production process.¹⁴ Moreover, the theory that those losing jobs in the manufacturing sector will be generally absorbed into the service sector is losing currency as it is becoming clear that service jobs are, themselves, not invulnerable either to offshore outsourcing (e.g., telephone operators, data processors) or to automated technology (e.g., bank tellers, office secretaries). Nor is it realistic to expect the new “knowledge sector” to absorb more than a fraction of the unemployed and underemployed casualties of this transformation. As a result, the widening gap between the haves and have nots will only continue to grow. As the trend accelerates, certain possibilities for a labor-management accommodation emerge. For one thing, although corporations may be enjoying short-term gains from present wage stagnation, downsizing, outsourcing, and casting off of permanent employees, the longer term effects include a work force with considerably diminished consumer purchasing power. In some industries, corporations are already acknowledging the adverse effects of this trend. Furthermore, as employers are contributing into pension funds on behalf of fewer and fewer “employees,” the forced savings pool that has for many years constituted a primary financing source of capital investments in our economy, will gradually be depleted.¹⁵ At the same time as employers are coming face to face with the disadvantages of the union-free environment they have so long sought, employers are also rediscovering the contributions to productivity, quality, and efficiency that can be gained from a truly empowered work force with an independent voice in the workplace. All of this should lead an enlightened management to place less currency on resisting unionization and other legitimate forms of independent employee representation, and to join labor in advocating strong labor standards and effective labor law for all four of the labor market segments that exist today and will exist tomorrow. The authors wish to convey their deep appreciation for the invaluable contributions to this paper made by David Silberman of Bredhoff & Kaiser and Craig Becker, Associate General Counsel, Service Employees International Union. Another version of this paper was published in Labor Lawyer.     

Conditional maxima and inferences for the truncated exponential distribution

This paper derives the conditional distribution of the maximum given the sample total for a random sample from the truncated exponential distribution. Based on that result, the paper develops tests or associated confidence intervals for the truncation parameter θ with another parameter θ assumed unknown.     

Social Isolation and Lethal Violence Across the Metro/Nonmetro Divide: The Effects of Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Poverty Concentration on Homicide*

Abstract This study extends the macro‐level criminological research tradition by examining the links between socioeconomic disadvantage, poverty concentration, and homicide in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan U.S. counties. Most research in this tradition has tested structural theories using urban areas as the unit of analysis. This “urban bias” has resulted in a limited understanding of the social forces driving violence in nonmetropolitan areas. To partially address this problem, we link the literature on the spatial and social organization of nonmetropolitan communities with the social isolation perspective from the urban poverty literature. We hypothesize that the spatial concentration of poverty drives up rates of homicide in both metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas regardless of levels of socioeconomic disadvantage. Negative binomial regression for 1,746 nonmetropolitan and 778 metropolitan counties suggest that both socioeconomic disadvantage and poverty concentration elevate homicide in metropolitan areas. However, in nonmetropolitan counties only socioeconomic disadvantage has a significant impact. We conclude by discussing the implications of these differential findings for the social isolation perspective.     

Immigrants' Language Skills: The Australian Experience in a Longitudinal Survey

This article is concerned with the determinants of English language proficiency (speaking, reading and writing) among immigrants. It presents a model of immigrant destination language proficiency based on economic incentives, exposure to the destination language, and efficiency in second language acquisition. A unique data set, the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia, is used to test the model. This survey had three waves, at about six months, eighteen months and three‐and‐a‐half years after immigration. The analyses are performed by wave, type of language skill and gender using probit analysis. Bivariate probit analysis is used across waves. The hypotheses are supported by the data. The bivariate probit analysis indicates a positive correlation in the unexplained component that declines with time between waves, suggesting a “regression to the mean” in the unobserved components of English language proficiency.