Conversation takes two: understanding interactions with people with dementia

The term ‘person-centred’ underpins dementia policy and approaches to support people with dementia. However, ‘person-centredness’ remains hazy, and words and definitions matter greatly when they are at the heart of defining what happens in people’s lives. Drawing on data from an ongoing project, this article suggests that conversations which include a person with dementia can elucidate how ‘relational’ support is enacted in practice and the implications this can have on our understanding of ‘person-centredness’. Identities are shaped in part through how we speak to people, and how they speak to us. This is particularly pertinent to the aims of ‘person-centredness’. A conversation analytic approach to dementia support may therefore move us towards seeing ‘personhood’ as jointly constructed and reconstructed through interactions with others.     

Body Image and Body Change Strategies Within Friendship Dyads and Groups: Implications for Adolescent Appearance‐based Rejection Sensitivity

Appearance‐based rejection sensitivity (appearance‐RS) consists of concerns about, and expectations of, rejection because of one's appearance (Park). This study examined dyadic‐ and group‐level friendship characteristics as correlates of early adolescents' appearance‐RS. Using subgroups of an initial sample of 380 participants, appearance‐RS was examined within best friend relationships (N = 132, M_age = 13.84) and friendship groups (N = 186, M_age = 13.83). Overall, best friends were similar in their appearance‐RS, body dissatisfaction, restrictive dieting, appearance‐conditional self‐worth, appearance values, and self‐rated attractiveness. Similarities between individuals and their friendship groups were consistent with the findings for dyads, except for self‐rated attractiveness and dieting. Appearance‐RS was higher in adolescents whose best friends and friendship groups reported greater restrictive dieting and appearance‐conditional self‐worth. In general, associations did not differ for boys and girls, but having a higher proportion of boys in the friendship group was associated with lowered appearance concerns.     

Power and Policy Making

POLICY MAKING IN BRITISH GOVERNMENT: AN ANALYSIS OF POWER AND RATIONALITY BY Brian Smith.
COMPARATIVE PUBLIC POLICY: THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL CHOICE IN EUROPE AND AMERICA by Arnold Heidenheimer     

The sex offender in Minnesota

J. Dudley Chapman, D.O.: The Feminine Mind and Body. Philosophical Library, New York, 1967. 325 pages. Price $6.95.

Eric W. Johnson: Love if Sex In Plain Language. J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia and New York, 1965. 68 pages. Price $2.95.

Sophia J. Kleegman and Sherwin A. Kaufman: Infertility in Women. F. A. Davis Company, Philadelphia, 1966.

Richard H. Klemer, Ph.D. (ed.): Counseling in Marital and Sexual Problems. A Physician's Handbook. Williams &; Wilkins Co., Baltimore, 1965. 309 pages. Price $9.75.

Hans Lehfeldt, M.D. and Henry Guze, Ph.D.: Psychologic Factors in Contraceptive Failure. Fertility and Sterility, 17: 1, January 1966, 110–115.

Alexander Lowen: The Betrayal of the Body. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1967, 307 pages. Price $6.95.

Douglas Murphy, M.D., and Editha F. Torrano, M.D.: Donor Insemination. Fertility and Sterility, 17: 2, March‐April 1966, pp. 273–277.

Sam Blum. What Every Nice Boy Knew About Sex. B. Geis Associates‐Random House, New York, 1967.

Frank H. Netter, M.D.: Endocrine System and Selected Metabolical Diseases. Vol. IV, The Ciba Collection of Medical Illustrations. Guest Editor: Peter H. Forsham, M.D. Ciba Pharmaceutical Company, Summit, N.J., 1965. 287 pages. Price $ 22.00

Hyman Spotnitz and Lucy Freeman: The Wandering Husband. Prentice‐Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1964. 224 pages. Price $4.95.

Russel Trainer: The Lolita Complex. Citadel Press, New York, 1966. 315 pages. Price $6.95.     

Children's Covid-19 writing and drawings and the existential imperative to educate for uncertainty

The Covid-19 pandemic provokes a pedagogic crisis: education is ill-adapted to accommodate multiple uncertainties in students' lives. We examine how pandemic uncertainty is registered in a global collection of writing and drawing from 4 to 17-years-old, during the 2020 lockdowns. The study engages with Biesta's (2021) philosophical work on 'world-centred education', offering empirical examples from the collection that goes beyond the immediacy of everyday lives. We identify educational implications: acknowledging students' present experiences of the world; a slowing of pedagogical tempo; supporting students to navigate desires and fears; a language for expressing uncertainty; and engaging students in ethical and existential difficulty.     

The comfort of strangers: social work,modernity and late Victorian England—Part I

In these two related articles the history of social work in late Victorian England is understood by aligning it not with self-consciously held ideologies of, say, bourgeois capitalism, patriarchy, evangelical Protestantism, or liberal humanism, but with the complex cultural system of modernity. It is hoped to problematize both the genealogy and the substance of early social work that now so decisively shapes our interpretations of the influences of late Victorian philanthropy. The history of social work has to be treated seriously if we are to properly understand the present day situation in terms of modernity and investigate its orientation more thoroughly. This first paper offers a history of social work which draws attention to the imbrications of a secular modernity and how its governing ideas, texts and discourses of the time influence philanthropy. It examines dominant modernist themes that had a significant impact on the emergence of social work and the important role of the Charity Organization Society. It is suggested that these themes form part of a shared European heritage. Whilst the influences of modernity on social work are likely to have been uneven, there were common conditions faced by people in Europe and shared developments that gave way to the rise of social work in the nineteenth century.     

Equal opportunity in the U.S. Navy: perceptions of active-duty African American women

In 1989, the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center (NPRDC) developed a service-wide survey to assess the equal opportunity climate of the Navy. This survey, known as the Navy Equal Opportunity/Sexual Harassment Survey (NEOSH), is administered to a random sample of Navy women and men every two years. Each year the survey has been administered, results have indicated that African American women are the least satisfied with the equal opportunity climate of the Navy than any of the other aggregated groups. In an effort to explain and expand upon the findings of the NEOSH, NPRDC organized a group of facilitators in 1995 to conduct focus groups of African American Navy women. The present study is based on data from these focus groups. The women in this study exemplify what some researchers refer to as the “double whammy” phenomenon: disadvantaged because of both their race and gender. The data also lend support to theories of tokenism. An interesting finding is that regard-less of how dissatisfied the African American women were about the equal opportunity climate in the Navy, they still viewed job opportunities to be better in the Navy than in the civilian sector. Recommendations from focus group participants for improving the Navy EO climate are presented. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1987. She served in the U.S. Army for six years, and also serves on the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, the councils of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, and the Peace and War Section of the American Sociological Association. Among her publications is a book titled, To Serve My Country, To Serve My Race: The Story of the Only African American WACs Stationed Overseas During World War II, New York University Press, 1996. He earned his doctoral degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the United States International University. During his naval career, he has written numerous articles and technical reports on equal opportunity, sexual harassment, race relations, and quality of life issues.     

Sweet-Talking the Fourth Branch: The Influence of Interest Group Comments on Federal Agency Rulemaking

Students of politics have identified a variety of actors whoappear to influence the federal bureaucracy's implementationof public policy, including Congress, the president, and interestgroups. These lines of research, however, have often portrayedinterest groups as actors with indirect influence (who, forexample, work through or with Congress), rather than assessingthe direct influence of interest groups on bureaucratic policyoutputs. I conduct a test of direct interest group influenceby analyzing an original data set composed of 1,444 interestgroup comments in reaction to forty federal agency rules. Ifind, contrary to the expectations of the extant literature,that the formal participation of interest groups during rulemakingcan, and often does, alter the content of policy within the"fourth branch" of government. I conclude that those who voicetheir preferences during the notice and comment period rulemakingare often able to change government policy outputs to bettermatch their preferences.     

Inequalities in English child protection practice under austerity: A universal challenge?

The role that area deprivation, family poverty, and austerity policies play in the demand for and supply of children's services has been a contested issue in England in recent years. These relationships have begun to be explored through the concept of inequalities in child welfare, in parallel to the established fields of inequalities in education and health. This article focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and out‐of‐home care and child protection interventions. The work scales up a pilot study in the West Midlands to an all‐England sample, representative of English regions and different levels of deprivation at a local authority (LA) level. The analysis evidences a strong relationship between deprivation and intervention rates and large inequalities between ethnic categories. There is further evidence of the inverse intervention law (Bywaters et al., 2015): For any given level of neighbourhood deprivation, higher rates of child welfare interventions are found in LAs that are less deprived overall. These patterns are taking place in the context of cuts in spending on English children's services between 2010–2011 and 2014–2015 that have been greatest in more deprived LAs. Implications for policy and practice to reduce such inequalities are suggested.     

Projection techniques for nonlinear principal component analysis

Principal Components Analysis (PCA) is traditionally a linear technique for projecting multidimensional data onto lower dimensional subspaces with minimal loss of variance. However, there are several applications where the data lie in a lower dimensional subspace that is not linear; in these cases linear PCA is not the optimal method to recover this subspace and thus account for the largest proportion of variance in the data.Nonlinear PCA addresses the nonlinearity problem by relaxing the linear restrictions on standard PCA. We investigate both linear and nonlinear approaches to PCA both exclusively and in combination. In particular we introduce a combination of projection pursuit and nonlinear regression for nonlinear PCA. We compare the success of PCA techniques in variance recovery by applying linear, nonlinear and hybrid methods to some simulated and real data sets.We show that the best linear projection that captures the structure in the data (in the sense that the original data can be reconstructed from the projection) is not necessarily a (linear) principal component. We also show that the ability of certain nonlinear projections to capture data structure is affected by the choice of constraint in the eigendecomposition of a nonlinear transform of the data. Similar success in recovering data structure was observed for both linear and nonlinear projections.