CURRICULUM CHANGES TO MEET CHALLENGES: PREPARING MFT STUDENTS FOR MANAGED CARE SETTINGS

Fledgling therapists who graduate from family therapy traning programs will have to navigate the world of managed care. In this article, faculty of University of San Diego share changes in its accredited training program that prepare students for practice in an increasingly multidisciplinary world where health maintenence organizations and other versions of managed care predominate. The paper touches on contextual issues, provides a detailed outline of coursework presenting basic knowledge and skills involved in clinical pracice in a managed care environment, and comments on clinical placements and the challenge of helping the next generation of clinicans "fit" into the future of health care delivery while maintaining their unique identity as family therapists.     

Risk,Media, and Stigma at Rocky Flats

Public responses to nuclear technologies are often strongly negative. Events, such as accidents or evidence of unsafe conditions at nuclear facilities, receive extensive and dramatic coverage by the news media. These news stories affect public perceptions of nuclear risks and the geographic areas near nuclear facilities. One result of these perceptions, avoidance behavior, is a form of "technological stigma" that leads to losses in property values near nuclear facilities. The social amplification of risk is a conceptual framework that attempts to explain how stigma is created through media transmission of information about hazardous places and public perceptions and decisions. This paper examines stigma associated with the U.S. Department of Energy's Rocky Flats facility, a major production plant in the nation's nuclear weapons complex, located near Denver, Colorado. This study, based upon newspaper analyses and a survey of Denver area residents, finds that the social amplification theory provides a reasonable framework for understanding the events and public responses that took place in regard to Rocky Flats during a 6-year period, beginning with an FBI raid of the facility in 1989.     

Household Headship Among Married Women: The Roles of Economic Power, Education, and Convention

Household headship historically has been equated with being the main economic provider of the household, a position usually occupied by men. This paper uses a change in the United States Census definition of household headship to examine whether headship for married women is associated with being the primary breadwinner in a marriage versus other non-economic explanations. According to microdata from the 1990 United States Census, women who are the main income providers in a marriage are much more likely to be household heads than women in co-provider marriages. There also is support for an egalitarian ideology explanation; that is, when both spouses are highly educated, the wife is more likely than the husband to be household head net of her relative economic independence in that marriage. Yet the force of convention remains strong given the low prevalence of headship among married women. The new census definition was meant partly to reflect the changing economic status of women. However, the reality is that conventional gender behaviors persist in household headship.     

The Disintegrating Effects of Equality: A Study of a Failed International Merger

In the literature on M&A and social justice, equality is regarded as an important principle to facilitate social integration. This article debates what happens when the equality principle is operationalized; from intentions in the pre‐merger process to the distribution of resources and decision‐making rules in the post‐merger process. In a merger between two state‐owned telecoms corporations in the Scandinavian countries, we found that the principle of equality had the reverse effects on social integration to that predicted in the literature. Instead of facilitating the social integration process, the equality principle led to perceptual and structural fallacies negatively influencing social integration. We suggest that these disintegrating effects were particularly strong because this was an international merger between two state‐owned firms of unequal size.     

Politics,Plurality and Problemsheds: A Strategic Approach for Reform of Agricultural Water Resources Management

Starting from the assessment that past efforts at reform in agricultural water management in developing countries have achieved very little, this article argues that a fundamental change is required in the approach to policy and institutional transformation if the present deadlock in the internalisation of ecological sustainability, human development/poverty alleviation and democratic governance into the ‘core business’ of water bureaucracies is to be overcome. ‘Social engineering’ approaches need to be replaced by ‘strategic action’ approaches that acknowledge the inherently political character and the plurality of actors, institutions and objectives of water management — a perspective operationalised here around the notions of ‘problemshed’ and ‘issue network’.     

Investigating the Acquisition,Generalization, and Emergence of Untrained Verbal Operants for Mands Acquired Using the Picture Exchange Communication System in Adults With Severe Developmental Disabilities

This study compared the total amount of training time and total number of trial blocks for individuals with severe developmental disabilities to acquire mands under control of unconditioned establishing operations and mands under control of transitive conditioned establishing operations for manual sign and for the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS). Also examined was the generalization of mands across settings and communicative partners, as well as the emergence of untrained tacts and intraverbals for mands acquired using PECS. Mands for preferred items and for items needed to complete a chained task were acquired more rapidly and in fewer training blocks for PECS than for manual sign. Moreover, mands established using PECS generalized across settings and communicative partners. Finally, untrained tacts and intraverbals using PECS were shown to emerge for some of the participants following PECS training. These results suggest that PECS may be a viable alternative communication system for adults with severe developmental disabilities who have little or no history of systematic instruction and limited imitative repertoires.     

A model for the spread and control of citrus tristeza virus disease

Citrus Tristeza Virus (CTV) causes a most destructive citrus disease in many parts of the world. The strategy for controlling the disease in Israel is based on the eradication of virus-infected trees, detected by an immunological method. A model for the spread and control of CTV is described. The disease spread depends on an infection rate parameter and on a detection coefficient. Both parameters vary with time. Simulation of the model under different conditions assists us to make decisions regarding the control of CTV disease.