Exploring crisis and its effects on workers in child protective services work

An inquiry into child welfare protective services workers’ perceptions and experiences in the United States was conducted in order to examine their perceptions of crisis and crisis intervention, and the emotional impact of working with children who endured significant maltreatment. As there is presently little research that has explored these issues specifically from the point of view of the workers, a qualitative grounded theory approach was utilized. Four themes emerged from the data: workers perceived crisis as a result of biopsychosocial breakdown; workers routinely triage when faced with crises; workers are subject to vicarious traumatization; and workers’ personal lives are affected by their work. The findings add to an existing body of knowledge about secondary trauma in child welfare by providing information about the investigative workers’ subjective experience of it. This research adds a unique contribution to understanding workers’ subjective experience of crisis on the job, how it manifests, and whether they feel knowledgeable in the area of crisis intervention.     

An Integrated Accounting for Firms,Job Positions and Employment

ABSTRACT: Using flow analyses for the various population areas and the social accounting that may be developed using the data from these analyses, enables us to better comprehend labour market dynamics. This comprehension is taken a step further if we interrelate this accounting system to that of the productive system. This paper deals with the more limited task of formulating an integrated accounting system for firms, job positions and employment, in order to clarify the concepts of an individual‘s stay in the employment area — both on a stay-by-stay basis and throughout the course of his or her entire working life — and that of mobility. The paper similarly touches on problems found in measuring flows, discusses the concept of definitive exit and its analytical relevance, and finally examines some recent Italian contributions on the topics of birth and death rates amongst firms and employment flows.     

A Self-Psychological Perspective on Chronic Illness

It is becoming increasingly common to encounter patients seeking psychotherapy for symptoms resulting from chronic illness. Regardless of the specific diagnosis, chronic illness is a phenomenon with deep implications for disruption of self-states and narcissistic injuries. Working with chronically ill patients presents many challenges to the patient and the therapist, ranging from acute grief and loss to a reworking of unresolved developmental issues. This paper explores the use of a self-psychological perspective in the treatment of chronic and terminal illness. Approaching treatment from a self-psychological perspective, psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be successfully utilized in conjunction with supportive therapy.     

Doing Disability Research: activist lives and the academy

The relationship between the academy and the disability movement is a problematic one. Disability researchers based in the academic world who align themselves with the social model of disability face contradictory aims and values in attempting to challenge dominant modes of research production in ways that signify the importance of the agendas of disabled people. It could be argued that research that involves people with the label of 'learning difficulties' [1] creates further points of contention. In this paper we do two things. First, we re-present a paper given at a conference on the performing arts of people with 'learning difficulties', where the audience was made up of performers, workers, providers and researchers. This paper attempted to be accessible, theoretical, political and practical. Secondly, we reflect upon this paper in relation to seven points of analysis that emerge at the boundaries of disability politics and disability research. We argue throughout that real efforts must be made to bridge these boundaries in ways that augment disability theory and politics together.     

An integrated tool to support engineers for WMSDs risk assessment during the assembly line balancing

This paper wants to present an integrated approach to Line Balancing and Risk Assessment and a Software Tool named ErgoAnalysis that makes it easy to control the whole production process and produces a Risk Index for the actual work tasks in an Assembly Line. Assembly Line Balancing, or simply Line Balancing, is the problem of assigning operations to workstations along an assembly line, in such a way that the assignment be optimal in some sense. Assembly lines are characterized by production constraints and restrictions due to several aspects such as the nature of the product and the flow of orders. To be able to respond effectively to the needs of production, companies need to frequently change the workload and production models. Each manufacturing process might be quite different from another. To optimize very specific operations, assembly line balancing might utilize a number of methods and the Engineer must consider ergonomic constraints, in order to reduce the risk of WMDSs. Risk Assessment may result very expensive because the Engineer must evaluate it at every change. ErgoAnalysis can reduce cost and improve effectiveness in Risk Assessment during the Line Balancing.     

Passing through: queer lesbian film and Fremde Haut

Expanding the horizons of lesbian film, Fremde Haut is located within three broad frames: the cross-dressing genre, the New Queer Cinema (NQC) movement, and an Accented or diasporic film aesthetic. While strong connections exist between the cross-dressing film and NQC, less addressed are the links between the New Queer and the Accented yet these are of more radical, that is queerer, potential. Through Fremde Haut, this article illustrates how intimately tied to race and nation, gender and sexuality are, to reveal the accented as queer and the queer as accented. Ultimately, what is distinguished is the potency of a new "quare" cinema.     

Caring for vulnerable populations: curricula in U.S. internal medicine residencies

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) encourages internal medicine training programs to include specific curricula devoted to health care issues of vulnerable populations. Our aim was to determine the prevalence of curricula involving selected vulnerable populations among U.S. Internal Medicine residencies. We conducted a survey of Program Directors of all US Internal Medicine Residencies assessing whether the program had a curriculum for six vulnerable populations (racial and ethnic minorities, non-English speaking patients, lesbians, gay men, victims of domestic violence and patients with substance abuse problems). Most residencies address substance abuse and victims of domestic violence, while there remains a lack of dedicated teaching on other vulnerable populations, including lesbians, gay men, racial and ethnic minorities and non-English speaking patients.     

An Ecological Framework for Sexual Minority Women’s Health: Factors Associated With Greater Body Mass

In recent years, many studies have focused on the body of sexual minority women, particularly emphasizing their larger size. These studies rarely offer theoretically based explanations for the increased weight, nor study the potential consequences (or lack thereof) of being heavier. This article provides a brief overview of the multitude of factors that might cause or contribute to larger size of sexual minority women, using an ecological framework that elucidates upstream social determinants of health as well as individual risk factors. This model is infused with a minority stress model, which hypothesizes excess strain resulting from the stigma associated with oppressed minority identities such as woman, lesbian, bisexual, woman of color, and others. We argue that lack of attention to the upstream social determinants of health may result in individual-level victim blaming and interventions that do not address the root causes of minority stress or increased weight.