Disabling Ideology in Health and Welfare - the case of occupational therapy

In this paper it is argued, on the basis of an analysis of data from interviews with practitioners, that the rhetoric of partnership and the 'holistic' approach employed by Occupational Therapists is to be understood as an ideology which serves the occupation's professionalising project. It functions to distinguish Occupational Therapy from other health and welfare specialisms, to perpetuate the notion that disability is an individual problem to which professional intervention can provide the solution, and to ascribe responsibility for any perceived failure in therapy to the client rather than the practitioner.     

From recognition to support: Community development workers in the United Kingdom

This paper discusses the main findings of a major survey ofUK community development workers. The authors also point tosome serious weaknesses facing the community development professionin the United Kingdom that are preventing it from gaining greaterrecognition. Following a review of community development inthe United Kingdom in recent years, its activities and strategiccontexts, the paper highlights three key themes: occupationalinstability and employment, equality issues, training and support.Given the UK policy context, in which considerable emphasisis being given to the importance of involving communities, thearticle argues that policymakers and community development organizationshave a responsibility to find ways of ensuring that the knowledge,skills, and techniques of community development are better understoodand supported.     

Buehler confidence limits and nesting

The Buehler 1 –α upper confidence limit is as small as possible, subject to the constraints that its coverage probability is at least 1 –α and that it is a non‐decreasing function of a pre‐specified statistic T. This confidence limit has important biostatistical and reliability applications. Previous research has examined the way the choice of T affects the efficiency of the Buehler 1 –α upper confidence limit for a given value of α. This paper considers how T should be chosen when the Buehler limit is to be computed for a range of values of α. If T is allowed to depend on α then the Buehler limit is not necessarily a non‐increasing function of α, i.e. the limit is ‘non‐nesting’. Furthermore, non‐nesting occurs in standard and practical examples. Therefore, if the limit is to be computed for a range [α_L, α_U]of values of α, this paper suggests that T should be a carefully chosen approximate 1 –α_L upper limit for θ. The choice leads to Buehler limits that have high statistical efficiency and are nesting.     

Individual Differences in Hand Movements During Deception

This article addresses the influence of 2 personality traits on making hand movements during deception, namely public self-consciousness and ability to control behavior. It was hypothesized that especially individuals with high public self-consciousness and individuals who are skilled in controlling their behavior would make fewer hand movements during deception compared to truth-telling. A total of 56 participants were interviewed twice; in one interview they told the truth and in the other interview they lied. Before the interviews the participants completed a personality inventory to measure their levels of public self-consciousness and ability to control their behavior. The results supported the hypotheses. Some implications of these findings are discussed.     

Steady-State Solutions to PBPK Models and Their Applications to Risk Assessment I: Route-to-Route Extrapolation of Volatile Chemicals

Although analysis of in vivo pharmacokinetic data necessitates use of time-dependent physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models, risk assessment applications are often driven primarily by steady-state and/or integrated (e.g., AUC) dosimetry. To that end, we present an analysis of steady-state solutions to a PBPK model for a generic volatile chemical metabolized in the liver. We derive an equivalent model that is much simpler and contains many fewer parameters than the full PBPK model. The state of the system can be specified by two state variables-the rate of metabolism and the rate of clearance by exhalation. For a given oral dose rate or inhalation exposure concentration, the system state only depends on the blood-air partition coefficient, metabolic constants, and the rates of blood flow to the liver and of alveolar ventilation. At exposures where metabolism is close to linear, only the effective first-order metabolic rate is needed. Furthermore, in this case, the relationship between cumulative exposure and average internal dose (e.g., AUCs) remains the same for time-varying exposures. We apply our analysis to oral-inhalation route extrapolation, showing that for any dose metric, route equivalence only depends on the parameters that determine the system state. Even if the appropriate dose metric is unknown, bounds can be placed on the route-to-route equivalence with very limited data. We illustrate this analysis by showing that it reproduces exactly the PBPK-model-based route-to-route extrapolation in EPA's 2000 risk assessment for vinyl chloride. Overall, we find that in many cases, steady-state solutions exactly reproduce or closely approximate the solutions using the full PBPK model, while being substantially more transparent. Subsequent work will examine the utility of steady-state solutions for analyzing cross-species extrapolation and intraspecies variability.