Demanding hosts and ungrateful guests – the everyday drama of public transportation in three acts and academic prose

In their own view, public transportation companies make a very hospitable offer to commuters: if you are ready to travel with us, we will take you for a reasonable price nearly anywhere, every day and almost at any time of the day, under good conditions of comfort and safety. Please, step onboard. But commuters resist being reduced to the thankful guests of their commuting service providers. Commuting is an experience whose rhythm structures daily lives. It is not an innocuous in-between-doors passage, but a social practice intertwined with the routines bound to the home, workplace, and places of leisure which they commute to and from. Commuting routines are a constitutive part of commuters’ lives. Correspondingly, commuters own their commuting space. They do not own it in terms of legal ownership, although they possess a valid ticket; they own it via the degree to which they are at home in their routines and intuitively know through the senses and feelings produced through the normal flow of daily practices, that they are on their own home turf. Home is more than the physical space of the house; it is an embodied perception of a familiar cultural space which is organized in such a way that one has some control and responsibility over. Because commuters grant transportation companies daily access to the intimacy of their homes, they are hosting the companies, not the opposite. Public transportation hospitality is thus a tension-filled drama, co-produced by transportation companies and commuters. In this drama managerial routines meet routines of daily life, legal definitions of ownership meet practice-based ones, and organizational hospitality stands against individual hospitality. Our claim is that the fact that each party considers itself to be the host of the other, the prevailing situation consequently frames the provision and experience of public transportation services as a drama: the drama of hospitality.     

Challenges of Depression and Suicidal Ideation Associated With Aging With HIV/AIDS: Implications for Social Work

As the number of older adults with HIV/AIDS increases, new challenges are emerging that threaten their ability to age with this disease. Threats of particular concern are depression and suicidal ideation. Studies show that those aging with HIV/AIDS have a number of stressors that tax their coping mechanisms, increasing vulnerability to depression and suicidal ideation. These stressors can be categorized into three areas. First, there are psychosocial stressors that can contribute to depression. Second, there are health and biochemical stressors that can contribute to depression, as well as compromise cognitive abilities needed to adapt to such stressors. Third, cognitive stressors may create predispositions to depression. In particular, certain cognitive abilities needed to cope with depression and suicidal ideation may be compromised by aging with HIV/AIDS. A model of these stressors is provided for didactic purposes, as well as to suggest implications for social work practice and research.     

Addressing Ethnicity in Social Care Research

This article surveys recent developments in relation to the dimensions of ethnicity and ethnic disadvantage in social policy research and practice, with a focus on social care. While there has been limited increase in attention to ethnicity within general policy discussion and increasing sophistication within specialist debates, advances in theory and methodology have largely failed to penetrate the research mainstream, let alone policy or practice. This is a long‐standing problem. We advocate more focused consideration of ethnicity and ethnic disadvantage at all levels. Failure to do so creates the risk of social policy research being left behind in understanding rapid changes in ethnic minority demographics and patterns of migration, with increasing disadvantage to minorities.     

Marital Therapy — My Style

Recipes often evolve over time and can become enshrined by chefs. I have set out my recipe on marital therapy reflecting the collected cooking wisdom of generations. My instructions and information will enable a therapist as chef to create special dishes for a variety of occasions.     

The NUDIST qualitative data analysis system

Most computer approaches to qualitative data analysis have concentrated on coding and retrieval of text. This paper describes a research project which set out to support a range of methods for the analysis of unstructured data, with emphasis on the building and testing of grounded theory. It resulted in software whose innovations include: a) No limit to the number of coding categories and sub-categories, and no limit to the number of times a given text passage can be coded; b) The use of separate document and indexing databases, interrelated and of unlimited flexibility; c) Comprehensive hypermedia-like browsing tools for both document and indexing databases; d) Ability to search for words and lexical patterns occurring in text and to combine this with indexing of the text; e) Ability to handle off-line textual and non-textual data as well as on-line data; f) Ability to record textual comments in indexing categories — a memoing facility for emerging ideas and categories; g) Support and exploitation of hierarchical indexing systems; h) Mechanisms for creating new indexing categories out of existing ones, relating them to the data documents, and using them for further analyses. New goals of the project are to provide a number of artificial intelligence based information structuring and reasoning facilities which can be used to aid the organization and retrieval of qualitative data, and to extend the present capabilities of the software to express and test new ideas, concepts, generalizations and hypotheses about the data.     

Developing and transferring behavioral technologies for children and youth

Behavioral researchers have developed a variety of technologies for improving the capacities of children and their caregivers. Despite the availability of behavioral technologies for children and youth, their widespread adoption and sustained use has been limited. Characteristics for appropriate (e.g., sustainable, effective) technologies for children and youth are suggested here, and strategies for research and development of these methods are described. This paper outlines the process of transferring behaviorial technologies including the phases of awareness, interest, assessment, trial, implementation, maintenance, and reinvention. Finally, issues implicit in the process of transferring behavioral technologies for children and youth are discussed.     

Culture and Causality: An Anthropological Comment

Anthropology's unique contribution to a discussion of causality is rooted in its specialization in culture rather than in methodological protocols for bolstering our confidence in correlations. This is so because causal arguments are inherently interpretive and, moreover, because human actors themselves operate in terms of meaning. The best interpretive models direct analytic attention to contexts of meaning and motivation. Because these meanings lie inside of people's heads, the interpretation of causality in these terms demands that the validity of analyses be argued for in terms of logical coherence based on highly localized criteria. As with all explanations of human behavior, demographic explanations are as a consequence open to constant reformulation based on new information and the never‐ending search for coherence.