Physician-Assisted Suicide and Midwest Social Workers: Where Do They Stand?

ABSTRACT

Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is explicitly legal in five states and by court decision in one. Legislative bills have been introduced in other states including Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. This quantitative study was designed to understand Midwest, hospice and palliative care at end-of-life social workers’ attitudes toward PAS, preferred terminology, perception of preparedness for the implementation, and awareness of PAS legislation in their state. Sixty-two social workers from Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin completed an anonymous online survey. The results indicated that over one-half of the participants supported PAS legislation and is consistent with previous research on social workers across the country. While there was a range of perceived preparedness for implementation, a majority felt moderately to very prepared. Professional and personal values as well as professional experience influenced their perceived preparedness. Few social workers had accurate awareness of PAS legislation in their state or had attended workshops/events for further education or as a policy advocate. To practice competently and advocate at all levels of practice, hospice and palliative care at end-of-life social workers’ need to understand their own attitudes and values toward PAS and pursue additional education around this ethical issue.     

Perpetuum Mobile: Substance, Force and the Sociology of Translation

Going after means taking up a position with regard to something and the active pursuit of that same thing. It is the critical move par excellence , but also an act of appropriation. This essay suspends the urge to go after in preference for an exploration of the trajectory of that body of texts known as the sociology of translation. The figure of the perpetuum mobile is put into circulation through these texts in order to trace some of their more unusual and unfamiliar connections. These include a whole series of parallels with seventeenth century classical philosophy and with nineteenth century 'social energetics'. Connections are drawn out by using three 'test signals', which are sent on through the ANT canon: substance, force and time. Pivotal to each is the sense of how very different events and apparently diverse territories can be brought into contiguity, or folded up together. This contiguity needs to be performed rather than described , placed in translation rather than simply presented . The chapter concludes by tracing a way from the strange folds of ANT to the equally peculiar forms of early Psychology.     

Feminism,Post-feminism,and Young Women’s Reactions to Lena Dunham’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Girls</Emphasis>

This article explores how women in a junior-level Women and Sexuality class taught at a large US research university make sense of the HBO television show Girls. Data come from essays written in spring 2013 by 28 students in response to the first three episodes of Girls. The students’ essays illustrate their ability to actively respond to the show’s portrayal of women’s lives in a nuanced rather than one-dimensional way. The most common topics in these essays were the show’s portrayal of male dominance in relationships, female sexual agency, female body disciplines, and the costs women pay for sexual activity. The essays illustrate how the students mobilize feminist and post-feminist frames, both singly and jointly, as well as the difficulties involved in trying to separate these frames from each other in either media texts or women’s lives. In addition, the data shed light on the struggles young women face in dealing with gendered expectations for sexuality, femininity, and body discipline in contemporary neoliberal society.     

Socio-economic factors and family size as determinants of marital dissolution in Italy

This is an analysis of marital dissolution in Italy, with a focus on the life events and socioeconomic factors that put individuals at high risk of a marital breakup. The author notes that Italian society still largely conforms to traditional conjugal models and attitudes toward cohabitation and divorce. "Women most exposed to the risk of marital disruption seem to be those who married very young, who have had no more than one child, who are better educated, who have full-time jobs and who reside in large towns in the north-west of Italy. In addition, a woman who cohabits with her partner before marrying him is more likely to separate than a woman entering marriage directly."     

Compulsive gambling and the law: From sin to vice to disease

The idea that compulsive gambling is a disease is in direct conflict with the dominant view in the law that gambling is a vice. Under the traditional view individuals who gamble to excess are morally weak and deserving of punishment. The recognition of pathological gambling as an official mental disease or disorder by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 created an irreconcilable contention: American law never punishes an individual for being sick. The conflict can be seen in every area of the law and even between judges sitting in the same courtroom. The most dramatic disputes have been over the insanity defense; but, the disease argument has been raised, sometimes successfully, in other criminal cases, to mitigate sentencing, in attorney disbarments, tax cases, bankruptcies, divorces, personal injury claims, and, most significantly, in claims against casinos. The legal disputes will spread and become even more heated as the disease diagnosis becomes more generally accepted.     

The Potential Impact of an Anthrax Attack on Real Estate Prices and Foreclosures in Seattle

This article provides a methodology for the economic analysis of the potential consequences of a simulated anthrax terrorism attack on real estate within the Seattle metropolitan area. We estimate spatially disaggregated impacts on median sales price of residential housing within the Seattle metro area following an attack on the central business district (CBD). Using a combination of longitudinal panel regression and GIS analysis, we find that the median sales price in the CBD could decline by as much as $280,000, and by nearly $100,000 in nearby communities. These results indicate that total residential property values could decrease by over $50 billion for Seattle, or a 33% overall decline. We combine these estimates with HUD's 2009 American Housing Survey (AHS) to further predict 70,000 foreclosures in Seattle spatial zones following the terrorism event.     

On the relation between ‘visual research methods’ and contemporary visual culture

One of the most striking developments across the social sciences in the past decade has been the growth of research methods using visual materials. It is often suggested that this growth is somehow related to the increasing importance of visual images in contemporary social and cultural practice. However, the form of the relationship between ‘visual research methods’ and ‘contemporary visual culture’ has not yet been interrogated. This paper conducts such an interrogation, exploring the relation between ‘visual research methods’ – as they are constituted in quite particular ways by a growing number of handbooks, reviews, conference and journals – and contemporary visual culture – as characterized by discussions of ‘convergence culture’. The paper adopts a performative approach to ‘visual research methods’. It suggests that when they are used, ‘visual research methods’ create neither a ‘social’ articulated through culturally mediated images, nor a ‘research participant’ competency in using such images. Instead, the paper argues that the intersection of visual culture and ‘visual research methods’ should be located in their shared way of using images, since in both, images tend to be deployed much more as communicational tools than as representational texts. The paper concludes by placing this argument in the context of recent discussions about the production of sociological knowledge in the wider social field.     

Visible Minorities and Majority Giving

We examine if the presence of minority individuals in the community affects the decision to give to charities by majority individuals. We focus on two giving decisions by the majority population. The first is giving to any charitable organization; the second is giving to organizations geared to international causes. We also examine these two decisions when the sample is split into religious and non-religious individuals. We find that the larger the proportion of minorities in a given community, the less likely that members of the majority group give to charity in general—supporting the idea that heterogeneous communities deter outreach—but the more likely they are to give to international causes, giving credence to Allport’s ‘contact’ hypothesis.