Therapeutic Use of Fact Sheets in Family Therapy with Children and Adolescents With Functional Somatic Symptoms

Functional somatic symptoms signal distress and reflect an activation of the body's stress‐regulation systems. Many different types of stressors – physical, emotional or both – may activate the body's stress‐regulation systems. If stress‐related disruptions are extreme or are not limited in time, functional somatic symptoms may emerge, signalling that the body remains in a state of activation and somatic distress. In this paper, we describe the development of therapeutic fact sheets, which are used as part of our multimodal, family‐based, rehabilitation intervention for children and adolescents presenting with functional somatic symptoms. The fact sheets provide information about functional somatic symptoms – including their assessment and treatment – from a stress‐system framework. They are used in the context of a family intervention to facilitate engagement with the family and to reduce parental anxiety and reactivity. Whilst the fact sheets were initially developed for parents, over time we found that the sheets were also useful in managing anxiety in the medical and school systems. A key goal of this article is to share this resource with other clinicians working with children/adolescents with functional somatic symptoms.     

Rates of missing responses in personal digital assistant (PDA) versus paper assessments

This article describes rates of missing item responses in personal digital assistant (PDA) assessments as compared to paper assessments. Data come from the evaluation of a classroom-based leisure, life skills, and sexuality education program delivered to high school students in Cape Town, South Africa. Analyses show that the paper assessments had much higher rates of missing-ness than PDA assessments. This association is moderated by item order. Certain analyses also suggest that paper assessments have higher rates of missingness for items pertaining to participants' sexual behavior. Implications of these results for evaluation research will be discussed.     

The geriatric social worker and his self-awareness

Abstract

Hospice and palliative care services have become an established part of Australian health care in the last decade. Multi-disciplinary teams are usually a feature of such services and social workers are common members of such teams. Yet the exact extent of their use and role in these programs has not been investigated previously. The author conducted a survey of 53 social workers working in such programs and at the same time, another questionnaire was also sent to service directors in all 134 Australian programs about their utilisation and perception of social workers. This article reports the results of both surveys. The results show that a third of the programs employed social workers, but the social workers themselves reported a number of difficulties: nurses are often the dominant occupational group and role-blurring amongst team members is common. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the social work profession.     

A Sociological Overview of Cortisol as a Biomarker of Response to the Social Environment

Cortisol is a stress hormone that is reactive to social stress and thus should be of use to sociologists interested in understanding specific processes related to the broad category of “threats to the social self”. In this paper I use cortisol as a case study to explore the utility of biomarkers for elucidating the relationship between the social environment and human biology. I focus on cortisol because it is a stress hormone that reacts in particular to social stress, and therefore could be of special interest to sociologists. I first discuss the relationship between the social environment and cortisol response. Then I briefly review sociological literature that uses cortisol as a measure. Finally, I provide an overview of how to use cortisol in research projects. This overview addresses some of the basic questions that are typically asked by social scientists who are considering taking cortisol measures in their own work.     

Contextualizing Cultural Orientation and Organizational Citizenship Behavior

This research attempts a more contextualized approach to examining organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Borrowing from theory in international and cross cultural management as well as organizational behavior, context is conceptualized as multi-level and as a shaper of meaning and variability in employee citizenship behaviors. By centralizing the unique socio-cultural, political and historical national context (i.e., omnibus context) of Lebanon at the core of our theorizing, we hypothesize, contrary to previous research, a positive relationship between idiocentrism and employee engagement in organizational citizenship behaviors. Furthermore, we explore the influence that unit level OCB (i.e., discrete context) has on the idiocentrism–OCB relationship. Our analysis confirms the positive relationship between idiocentrism and OCB in this unique context. In addition, our cross-level analysis suggests that in workgroups with higher levels of unit level OCB, idiocentrism is more strongly related to employee engagement in OCB. The findings highlight the value added in contextualizing research on OCB and employee behavior in general.     

How are employees of the nonprofit sector motivated? A research need

This article reviews research on motivation of employees in the nonprofit sector, with a major emphasis on the motivation of teachers and hospital nursing staff. Although both areas are widely researched in the nonprofit sector, empirical motivation research conducted in schools and hospitals is certainly not extensive. Nevertheless, based on these limited research findings, we derive potential hypotheses for future research in schools and hospitals.