Palliative care patients' experiences of healthcare treatment

Kennett C, Payne M. Palliative care patients' experiences of healthcare treatment Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 262–271 © 2009 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. This article reports on a thematic analysis of the opinions of 34 palliative care patients about medical and healthcare treatment expressed in comments, narratives and discussions during a series of facilitated group discussions undertaken as part of training events for medical students. Palliative care patients often have long healthcare careers, which enables them to compare different professionals and services, thus offering a more powerful and complex analysis of patient experience than that obtainable from analysis of complaints or satisfaction surveys, and permits some understanding to be obtained of the attitudes that condition evaluations of services. The patients balanced negative views with positive experiences. They appreciated open, listening, equal and friendly relationships with professionals in which careful explanation fostered their confidence in the overall service. They criticised inflexible services that did not consider their broad needs, and in which relationships with professionals were characterised by busy‐ness and professional distance.     

War and security,women and gender: an overview of the issues

This article addresses the gender division of war and the significance of men and masculinity in processes of militarisation. Three phases of the continuum of war are considered. In periods of war-readiness, societies see a diversion of spending from social provision to the armed forces, accompanied by an increase in patriarchal ideology and authority. The actual waging of wars calls for the delivery of extreme but disciplined violence, and combat training shapes masculinity to this purpose. Armed conflict often involves a massive sexual assault on women. Women have recently intervened internationally to argue that if peace is to be more than a mere cessation of hostilities, ‘security’ must be redefined to mean the satisfaction of human needs, including comprehensive safety for women. Women's peace movements, worldwide, are theorising that gender power relations are significant among the causes of war, and transformative change in how we ‘live’ gender can be a significnt resource for peace.     

The Influence of Union Instability and Union Quality on Children's Aggressive Behavior

We investigate whether mother's poor union quality attenuates the association between union instability and young children's behavioral adjustment. Using data from three waves of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to consider children born to married or cohabiting mothers (N=1,730), we determine that children who have experienced poor union quality between mothers and their partners have higher predicted aggressive behavior scores at age 3, regardless of whether they have experienced union transitions, compared to children who have experienced high-quality, stable unions. Children who have experienced instability in the context of higher-quality unions and relatively less acrimonious dissolutions are similar to children raised in high-quality stable unions in terms of predicted aggressive behavior scores.     

The Emergency of Climate Change: Why Are We Failing to Take Action?

Latane and Darley developed a five-stage model to understand why people do and do not help other people in emergency situations. We extend their five-stage model to explore why people do and do not take action against climate change. We identify the factors that make climate change difficult to notice and ambiguous as an emergency; we explore barriers to taking responsibility for action; and we discuss the issues of efficacy and costs versus benefits that make action unlikely. The resulting analysis is useful on two levels. For educators and policy makers, the model suggests the most efficacious approaches to galvanizing action among U.S. citizens. For social scientists, the model provides a valuable framework for integrating research from diverse areas of psychology and suggests fruitful avenues for future empirical research.     

Nativity and Self‐Assessed Health among Pre‐Retirement Age Hispanics and Non‐Hispanic Whites1

Economic, social and familial resources are known to influence subjective health assessments. We examine the salience of nativity in determining how these resources influence self‐assessed health using a large, nationwide sample of Hispanic and non‐Hispanic white adults. The results indicate that while education, accumulated assets and marital status benefit the physical and emotional health of the native and foreign‐born, family resources and income are significant only for the native‐born. English language proficiency is a significant protective factor for both groups and is especially protective for immigrants. These surprising findings call into question previous studies stressing the positive role of the family in maintaining immigrant health.     

Relation of Goal Setting and Goal Sharing to Performance and Conflict for Interdependent Tasks

Despite the prevalence of goal setting in organizations, researchers have not thoroughly examined the implications of goal setting to work outcomes in interdependent work settings. A field survey (n= 442) assessed the relation of goal setting and goal sharing, the extent to which others are aware of an individual's work goal, to performance and conflict across varying levels of task interdependence. The results of moderated regression analyses demonstrate that in highly interdependent tasks, the use of goal setting resulted in lower performance levels. Moreover, goal setting and goal sharing in highly interdependent tasks resulted in individuals' reporting more somatic symptoms. The results are discussed in terms of clarifying the role of goal setting for interdependent tasks.     

A conceptual framework for evaluating designs for corporate innovation

Innovation is becoming mandatory for an increasing number of organizations in order to sustain competitive advantage. This paper explores how designs for corporate entrepreneurship fit within other dimensions of a strategy configuration. To do this, first, seven innovation-related problems are diagnosed. The specific problem patterns arising in three representative approaches to corporate innovation efforts (internal research and development, joint ventures, and acquisition) are discussed. Next, issues related to strategy configuration are examined. The problem-accommodating characteristics associated with specific environmental domain choices and with two routes to competitive advantage are proposed. Hypotheses that reflect the problem characteristics of innovation approaches with the problem propensities resulting from organizational choices of domain and competitive advantages are offered. Specific directions for future research, as well as the practical applications of these concepts, are discussed.