Reports of Conferences,Institutes, and Seminars

In the span of four weeks, from late March to early April 2008, three important technical services conferences were held: the Electronic Resources & Libraries Conference, the New England Technical Services Librarians Conference, and the North Carolina Serials Conference.     

Educating Effective Social Workers for a Changing Society: Social Policy

The author examines how social policy analysis can be taught so that it is change-related rather than past-oriented. This is done by utilizing a scheme including the concepts of adequacy, effectiveness, and efficiency, which can be applied to both existing and new programs. Subconcepts are utilized to incorporate current concerns, including racial-ethnic aspects, and the analytical framework is linked to the decision-making process.     

The United States Book Exchange

Abstract

Serials Review visits the United States Book Exchange in Cleveland, Ohio. The staff of this nonprofit organization supplies back issues to over 2,000 member libraries in addition to nonmember libraries in the United States and the world. The tour will examine how this exchange is organized and how electronic access to journal literature has changed its emphasis. Serials Review 29:318–320.     

Assessing the Tongzhi Label: Self-Identification and Public Opinion

Tongzhi is one of several Chinese terms that refer to individuals who are attracted to the same sex. Using data from two different surveys in Hong Kong, this research note examines how the term tongzhi coexists with other terms. We investigate the prevalence of self-identification as tongzhi, and we explore the extent to which using the term tongzhi influences public attitudes toward gay people and gay rights. Activists began popularizing the term tongzhi in the late 1980s, but less than one third of the participants in our 2008 survey of sexual orientation minorities (n = 728) described themselves as tongzhi. Using a split-ballot experiment in a 2013 public opinion poll (n = 831), we found that attitudes toward gay people and gay rights were not significantly impacted by whether questions were phrased in terms of tongzhi or the main alternative term tongxinglianzhe. We discuss how our findings can enrich understandings of earlier research and illuminate avenues for future study.     

Dimensions of mental health: Life satisfaction,positive affect,anxiety and depression

Psychological well-being and psychological distress are often regarded as distinct, if not orthogonal dimensions of mental health. Based on analyses in this paper, we consider the distinction misleading. Four dimensions seem worth measuring in general population surveys: life satisfaction, positive affect, anxiety and depression. Furthermore, one of the well-being dimensions, life satisfaction, is quite strongly correlated with a distress dimension, depression. A person is unlikely to be both satisfied with life and depressed, but may be satisfied and anxious. The paper is based on convergent validity (exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses) and divergent validity assessments of a range of widely used measures, which were included in the Victorian Quality of Life Panel Survey, 1987.     

Responsibility and management strategies in child sexual abuse: a comparison of child protective workers, nurses, and police officers

This study identifies the attitudes of professionals toward the attribution of responsibility for sexual abuse and strategies for case management. Several variables, including the victim's gender, social status of the perpetrator, use of physical force, one's professional discipline, and past history of childhood victimization, were found to influence professionals' attitudes.     

Communicating Actionable Risk for Terrorism and Other Hazards⋆

We propose a shift in emphasis when communicating to people when the objective is to motivate household disaster preparedness actions. This shift is to emphasize the communication of preparedness actions (what to do about risk) rather than risk itself. We have called this perspective “communicating actionable risk,” and it is grounded in diffusion of innovations and communication theories. A representative sample of households in the nation was analyzed using a path analytic framework. Preparedness information variables (including content, density, and observation), preparedness mediating variables (knowledge, perceived effectiveness, and milling), and preparedness actions taken were modeled. Clear results emerged that provide a strong basis for communicating actionable risk, and for the conclusion both that information observed (seeing preparedness actions that other have taken) and information received (receiving recommendations about what preparedness actions to take) play key, although different, roles in motivating preparedness actions among the people in our nation.