Family Therapy: A Phenomenological and Active Directive Approach

Because the most popular forms of family therapy, psychodynamic and systems-oriented therapy, appreciably fail to consider family members as individuals in their own right, a phenomenological-humanistic view of families who come for therapy would serve to correct this oversight. The particular phenomenological view espoused by those who do client-centered family therapy, however, is too passive and neglects some of the realities of human disturbance. A "third force" in family therapy is therefore outlined in this paper, which combines a phenomenological-humanistic approach with a highly active-directive attempt to help family members surrender their misperceptions of themselves and others and to make profound philosophic changes in their intrapersonal and interpersonal attitudes and behaviors. As an example of this kind of phenomenological and active-directive approach, some of the principles and practices of rational-emotive therapy (RET) are outlined and applied to family counseling.     

The effects of physical activity and sedentary behavior on cognitive health in older adults

Physical activity has been shown to be positively associated with cognitive health, but the mechanisms underlying the benefits of physical activity on cognitive health are unclear. The present study simultaneously examined two hypotheses using structural equation modeling (SEM). The depression-reduction hypothesis states that depression suppresses cognitive ability and that physical activity alleviates dysphoric mood and thereby improves cognitive ability. The social-stimulation hypothesis posits that social contact, which is often facilitated by socially laden physical activities, improves cognitive functioning by stimulating the nervous system. Sedentary behavior in the absence of physical activity is expected to exert an inverse relationship on cognitive health through each of these hypotheses. Community-dwelling elders (N = 158) were administered a variety of measures of cognition, depression, social support, and physical activity. SEM techniques provided partial support for the social-stimulation hypothesis and depression-reduction hypothesis. Implications for treating depression and improving cognitive functioning are discussed.     

Power inequalities

This paper aims to give determinate sense to the claim that there are inequalities of power by outlining a procedure in terms of which individual acts of power can be measured. Noting that problems in the definition and measurement of power are closely related, the paper criticizes one analysis of power which defines the notion in purely causal terms. It argues that such a definition inevitably leads to difficulties in quantifying power, and is in any case deficient. Power is instead defined by reference to the notion of coercion, where this idea is itself explicated in terms of threats. A measure of power is developed from this definition, so that power is quantified by the degree of deprivation that one person can impose upon another. The paper concludes by noting that an adequate measure of power at the social level depends upon inter-personal welfare comparisons, but that this does not mean that the idea of power inequalities cannot be given determinate sense.     

Community exercise program for older adults recovering from hip fracture: a pilot study

Community-based rehabilitative exercise programs might be an effective means to improve functional outcomes for hip-fracture patients. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a community exercise program (CEP) for older adults recovering from hip fracture. Twenty-five older adults (mean age 80.0 +/- 6.0 years; 24 women; 71 +/- 23 days post-hip fracture) participated in this pilot study (17 exercise, 8 control). The CEP involved functional stepping and lower extremity-strengthening exercises. Control participants received only standard outpatient therapy. Measures of functional mobility, balance confidence, falls efficacy, lower extremity strength, and daily physical activity were evaluated at baseline and at 16 weeks. Improvements for self-reported physical activity, mobility, balance, and knee-extensor strength were observed for the CEP group. This study demonstrated that a CEP is beneficial for community-dwelling older adults post-hip fracture.     

An exact density-based empirical likelihood ratio test for paired data

The Wilcoxon rank-sum test and its variants are historically well-known to be very powerful nonparametric decision rules for testing no location difference between two groups given paired data versus a shift alternative. In this title, we propose a new alternative empirical likelihood (EL) ratio approach for testing the equality of marginal distributions given that sampling is from a continuous bivariate population. We show that in various shift alternative scenarios the proposed exact test is superior to the classic nonparametric procedures, which may break down completely or are frequently inferior to the density-based EL ratio test. This is particularly true in the cases where there is a nonconstant shift under the alternative or the data distributions are skewed. An extensive Monte Carlo study shows that the proposed test has excellent operating characteristics. We apply the density-based EL ratio test to analyze real data from two medical studies.     

Nonparametric Bayes factors based on empirical likelihood ratios

Bayes methodology provides posterior distribution functions based on parametric likelihoods adjusted for prior distributions. A distribution-free alternative to the parametric likelihood is use of empirical likelihood (EL) techniques, well known in the context of nonparametric testing of statistical hypotheses. Empirical likelihoods have been shown to exhibit many of the properties of conventional parametric likelihoods. In this paper, we propose and examine Bayes factors (BF) methods that are derived via the EL ratio approach. Following Kass and Wasserman (1995), we consider Bayes factors type decision rules in the context of standard statistical testing techniques. We show that the asymptotic properties of the proposed procedure are similar to the classical BF's asymptotic operating characteristics. Although we focus on hypothesis testing, the proposed approach also yields confidence interval estimators of unknown parameters. Monte Carlo simulations were conducted to evaluate the theoretical results as well as to demonstrate the power of the proposed test.