Social Justice Manifest: A University–Community Partnership to Promote the Individual Right to Housing

This article examines an ongoing university–community relationship that fuses innovative technology delivery, university-outreach research, and social work practice/research education into a unique, collaborative intervention to reduce homelessness. In doing so, we apply a social justice framework to homelessness, arguing that housing is a right rather than a privilege. In the case study, a university, in partnership with a local homeless coalition, maintains a management information system to collect and analyze real-time data on homelessness in the community. The overarching social justice intention of this partnership is to improve client outcomes for homeless individuals by producing community-based research to inform policy decisions for governmental and organizational partners.     

Depression and Missed Work among Informal Caregivers of Older Individuals with Dementia

Although providing informal care can negatively affect caregiver emotional health and lead to depression, the association between caregiver depression and missed work is unknown. We use data from the National Longitudinal Caregiver Survey to examine the relationship between caregiver depression and missed work among informal caregivers for older veterans with Alzheimer’s disease or vascular dementia. Two-part models are used to estimate the expected hours of work missed among working caregivers. Caregiver depression is statistically significantly associated with the likelihood and amount of time missed at work, resulting in an average of an extra half-day of work missed per month. While the effect of caregiver depression on work missed is modest, it represents another possible benefit from interventions to support caregivers.     

Fertility planning status: united states, 1965

Data concerning the planning circumstances of the interval preceding each pregnancy, collected from a national sample of 4810 married women, are used to establish the fertility planning status of each respondent as one of five classes: (1) never-pregnant; (2) number failure; (3) at least one timing failure; (4) at least one timing success; (5) neither success nor failure. For the ever-pregnant women who intended no more children, 32 percent of the exposed were number failures and 62 percent of the rest were timing failures. For the ever-pregnant women who intended more children, 67 percent of the exposed were timing failures. Women not exposed to the risk of timing failure because they claimed to want all of their pregnancies as soon as possible had similar characteristics to women reporting failures; accordingly the reliability of their reports is suspect. The probabilities of failure are well-patterned by race, religion and education: higher for Blacks than for Whites; within the latter, higher for Catholics than for Non-Catholics; and inversely related to education, except among White Catholics. Although uniformly high, the proportions classified as failures are probably under-estimates of the true values for completed families, because of misreporting and continuing exposure to risk, subsequent to interview.     

Bullying behaviour in secondary schools: what roles do teachers play?

Teachers have an important role to play in the management and prevention of bullying. Although many anti‐bullying programmes advocate a ‘whole school approach’, they tend to focus on student‐student behaviours and rarely examine the nature of other relationships which exist in the school. This study examines bullying between students and teachers at two time points. Thirty per cent of students said they were bullied by teachers at both times. Numbers reporting they bullied teachers were 28 per cent and 16 per cent, respectively. The paper explores the important role that teachers play in dealing with bullying in a school setting by modelling appropriate behaviours and dealing with it effectively. If teachers are victimised by or engage in bullying students this has implications for the ethos within the school and may also impact on the success of anti‐bullying programmes. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Search for a New OPAC: Selecting an Open Source Discovery Layer

In early 2011, an Indiana University Libraries task force was charged with selecting an open source discovery layer to serve as the public interface for IU's online catalog, IUCAT. This process included creating a rubric of core functionality and rating two discovery layers based on criteria in four main categories: general features and functionality; authentication and account management; export and share; and search functionality and results display. The article includes information about our rubric and the two discovery layers reviewed, Blacklight and VuFind, as well as a discussion of the priorities of the task force. The article concludes with future steps and anticipated highlights for IUCAT.     

Paper Versus Electronic Medical Records: The Effects of Access on Physicians' Decisions to Use Complex Information Technologies*

This study examines physicians' responses to complex information technologies (IT) in the health care supply chain. We extend individual‐level IT adoption models by incorporating a new construct: system accessibility. The main premise of the study is, when faced with a decision between alternate IT systems, individual users tend to select and make use of the technology or system that is most readily accessible. We discuss both physical and logical dimensions of accessibility as they relate to adoption of electronic medical records (EMR). Physical accessibility refers to the availability of computers that can be used to access EMR, while logical accessibility refers to the ease or difficulty of logging into the system. Using data from a survey of 199 physicians practicing in a large U.S. hospital, we show that, when deciding between the paper chart and EMR, accessibility is an important consideration in a physician's decision to use the system. Both dimensions of accessibility act as barriers to EMR use intentions through their indirect effect on physicians' perceptions of EMR usefulness and ease of use. Logical access also has a direct effect on EMR use intentions. We conclude that accessibility is an important factor that limits acceptance of complex IT such as EMR.