Abstracts

Gerson, M. J. & Barsky, M. For the new family therapist: A glossary of terms. American Journal of Family Therapy .
Gunderson, J. G., Kerr, J. & Englund, D. W. The families of borderlines. Archives of General Psychiatry .
Mandelbaum, A. Family characteristics of patients with borderline and narcissistic disorders. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic .
Liddle, H. H. On teaching a contextual or systemic therapy: Training content, goals and methods. American Journal of Family Therapy .
Pope, K. S., Schover, L. R. & Levenson, H. Sexual behavior between clinical supervisors and trainees: Implications for professional standards. Professional Psychology .
Robinson, B. & Thurnher, M. Taking care of aged parents: A family cycle transition. The Gerontologist .
Watzlawick, P. & Coyne, J. C. Depression following stroke: Brief, problem-focused family treatment. Family Process .     

Abstracts

Hare-Mustin, R. T. A feminist approach to family therapy.
Krasner, J.D. (Editor). Special Issue: Psychotherapy with elder and dying persons.
Orten, J. D. Organizing concepts in family therapy.
Robinson, D. O. The medical-school spouse syndrome: Grief reaction to the clinical years.
Westbrook, M. T. The reactions to child-bearing and early maternal experience of women with differing marital relationships.     

Does Marxism allow for the magical side of things? Magical realism and a comparison between one hundred years of solitude and the house of the spirits

This paper examines Magical Realism from a few different angles. Does this genre arise out of socio‐economic conditions in the Third World, distinguishing it from the cultural conventions of First World Postmodernism? Can the fiction of Magical Realism capture complex social and historical realities? Put another way, are the conventions of Magical Realism compatible with Marxism? Can a Marxist framework incorporate mystery and magic? I deal with these issues both theoretically and by way of a comparison between two well known Latin American novels ‐ One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. These two novels are shown to be quite dissimilar in their use of Magical Realist techniques.     

Responding to student mental health concerns in social work education: reflective questions for social work educators

In this paper, we explore ways in which social work educators might respond to students who report that mental health issues underlie their difficulty in meeting core competencies, or otherwise use the language of mental health to describe their struggles to succeed in social work programs. We discuss various trends in policy responses in Canada, the US, the UK, and Ireland. While there are general policy trends, it is clear that responding to these kinds of issues requires the development of highly flexible and situated policy processes that can respond to student realities, concern for students’ rights and privacy, and an awareness of potential discrimination against students. These processes also need to meet the specificities of practicums, particular institutional policies, the mandates of relevant professional bodies, and the precise local legislative framework that shapes these situations. Given these varying contexts, in this conceptual paper, we used a framework on disability that is informed by critical theory to engage existing school policies and propose a set of reflective questions that can guide schools of social work to create an overall responsive environment. These reflective questions are designed to help social work educators balance the rights and needs of students with the professional and institutional demands that students meet core competencies in their education.     

Race-of-interviewer effects and survey questions about police violence

ABSTRACT

This research uses binary logistic regression to test for a connection between the race of interviewer and race of respondent on five questions in the General Social Survey about the use of physical force by the police. Results indicate two instances of race-of-interviewer effect: (1) black respondents were more likely to voice disapproval about whether the police can strike a citizen trying to escape when speaking to a black interviewer, and (2) white respondents were less likely to voice approval of police striking an adult male citizen in the presence of a black interviewer. Secondary findings indicate that education is consistently significant regardless of race of respondent and the survey question, while social class, sex, age, and region are significant in only limited scenarios.     

Foreign Domestic Workers and Home-Based Care for Elders in Singapore

As with other developed nations where rapid population aging has led to increasing health care and social care burdens, Singapore has searched for ways of paying for and providing long-term care for its increasing numbers of elders. The Singapore state, faced with the prospect of one-fifth of the population aged 65 or older by 2030, has reinforced its basic principle of rendering the family the “primary caregiving unit” and home-based care as the highly preferred option for eldercare. Our paper demonstrates why, despite the range of alternative care arrangements available or emerging on Singapore's eldercare landscape, the employment of live-in foreign domestic workers as care workers for the elderly has become one of the more common de facto modes of providing care for the elderly. In this context, we discuss the politics of eldercare in the privatized sphere of homespace and conclude with policy implications relating to the employment of foreign domestic workers as caregivers for the elderly.     

The Poisson Maximum Entropy Model for Homogeneous Poisson Processes

Our main interest is parameter estimation using maximum entropy methods in the prediction of future events for Homogeneous Poisson Processes when the distribution governing the distribution of the parameters is unknown. We intend to use empirical Bayes techniques and the maximum entropy principle to model the prior information. This approach has also been motivated by the success of the gamma prior for this problem, since it is well known that the gamma maximizes Shannon entropy under appropriately chosen constraints. However, as an alternative, we propose here to apply one of the often used methods to estimate the parameters of the maximum entropy prior. It consists of moment matching, that is, maximizing the entropy subject to the constraint that the first two moments equal the empirical ones and we obtain the truncated normal distribution (truncated below at the origin) as a solution. We also use maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) methods to estimate the parameters of the truncated normal distribution for this case. These two solutions, the gamma and the truncated normal, which maximize the entropy under different constraints are tested as to their effectiveness for prediction of future events for homogeneous Poisson processes by measuring their coverage probabilities, the suitably normalized lengths of their prediction intervals and their goodness-of-fit measured by the Kullback–Leibler criterion and a discrepancy measure. The estimators obtained by these methods are compared in an extensive simulation study to each other as well as to the estimators obtained using the completely noninformative Jeffreys’ prior and the usual frequency methods. We also consider the problem of choosing between the two maximum entropy methods proposed here, that is, the gamma prior and the truncated normal prior, estimated both by matching of the first two moments and, by maximum likelihood, when faced with data and we advocate the use of the sample skewness and kurtosis. The methods are also illustrated on two examples: one concerning the occurrence of mammary tumors in laboratory animals taking part in a carcinogenicity experiment and the other, a warranty dataset from the automobile industry.