Psychodynamic Couple Therapy: A Practical Synthesis

This essay reviews the most significant contributions of psychodynamic thought to the field of couple therapy. It distills the work of numerous clinicians and researchers who, though writing from diverse perspectives, share fundamental assumptions and concerns. Rather than emphasizing differences between schools of thought, this paper mines their best contributions in a discussion of five central therapeutic targets: underlying issues, divergent subjective experiences, transferences, projective identification, and acceptance. Two detailed cases illustrate the benefits and techniques for targeting these five therapeutic domains. Video Abstract is found in the online version of the article .     

Declining inter-industry wage dispersion in the US

Industrial effects have long been significant factors in wage inequality. Previous research indicates that wage differentials across industries were increasing through the mid 1980s. Using more recent data, however, we find that the level of inter-industry wage dispersion declined by 36% from 1986 to 2002 despite the continued trend towards increasing inequality in the labor force. This decline in inter-industry wage dispersion is evident across gender and educational groups. Using multilevel growth curve models, our multivariate results indicate that the decline is only weakly related to industrial changes in education, occupation or even productivity despite the fact that the latter variable had been a critical factor in the prior period. Indicators of globalization and downsizing also do not appear to explain this decline. For the more recent period, the most important factors associated with the narrowing of inter-industry wage dispersion are reduced unionization rates and the higher proportion of casual workers. We interpret these results as suggesting that firms may now be less economically obliged to pass on a portion of their rents to broad groups of workers and may instead be engaged in more idiosyncratic processes of negotiation with individual workers based on micro-level sources of bargaining power.     

Generic Processes in Aligning the Multiple Bases of Identity: The Case of Becoming a Ministry Student

Identity theory distinguishes three bases of identity—role, group, and person—but studies have typically focused on one identity at a time. The interrelationship among the multiple bases of identity remains understudied. This study examines the multiple bases of identity individuals engage on their way to becoming ministry students. The results reveal the advantage of examining the multiple bases of identity as subcultural processes, the utility of qualitative research for expanding the empirical scope of identity theory, and the possibility of employing structural symbolic interactionist concepts within a processual symbolic interactionist agenda.     

Urban hazards: spatial ecology and survivorship of a turtle in an expanding suburban environment

Urban Ecosystems - Urbanization poses a threat to long-lived vertebrates, particularly from road mortalities that can threaten population persistence. We studied movements, behavior and...     

Evaluation in the Social Studies

Online role-playing games such as World Of Warcraft represent new participatory cultures in which today's students engage every day. They are appealing to players largely because of the social aspects of game play. Some features of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) can be incorporated into classroom culture to create more dynamic interactions between students and improve both content instruction and civic competence.     

"Chain pooling" model selection for two-level fixed effects factorial experiments

As many as three iterated statistical model deletion procedures are considered for an experiment.Population model coeff cients were chosen to simulate a saturated 2⁴experiment having an unfavorable distribution of parameter values.Using random number studies, three model selection strategies were developed, namely, (1) a strategy to be used in anticipation of large coefficients of variation (neighborhood of 65 percent), (2) strategy to be used in anticipation of small coefficients of variation (4 percent or less), and (3) a security regret strategy to be used in the absence of such prior knowledge     

An analysis of indirect mortality estimation

In this paper the robustness of Brass's child-survivorship indirect mortality estimation technique is investigated. An analytical method is developed for studying the error or bias caused in indirect mortality estimates by poor data, badly chosen model functions, and specific demographic assumptions that are often violated in practice. The resulting analytical expressions give insight into the rationale of indirect methods, the conditions under which they are robust, and the magnitude of errors that occur when specific assumptions are violated.     

The declining significance of race among American men during The latter half of the twentieth century

The extent to which racial minority groups face discrimination in the labor market is the subject of considerable debate. Using William J. Wilson's thesis of the declining significance of race as our theoretical context, we provide further empirical evidence about labor market discrimination by investigating wages among African American, American Indian, Chinese American, Hispanic white, Japanese American, and non-Hispanic white men. We find, during the period before the civil rights movement, that a substantively significant wage disadvantage is evident for these minority groups with controls for observed labor force characteristics. In recent data, these net disadvantages are reduced substantially for each of these groups except Hispanics. With the exception of Hispanics, the results support Wilson's thesis.     

Cultivate your core competencies

Your core competencies make you much more valuable to your organization. Find out ways to nurture and promote those competencies.