Family Therapy Training: Student And Faculty Perceptions

This study compared the questionnaire responses of 71 faculty and 231 students from 12 university and 10 institute, AAMFT-accredited and non-accredited family therapy training programs. The findings about the preferred type of training program, criteria for program selection, expected student experiences, program policies and interprogram cooperation suggested key differences between universities and institutes as well as important similarities. Non-accredited institutes emerged ashaving significant value differences from other programs in the study. The results also highlighted some of the major issues critical to the continued development of family therapy training.     

Maintaining a family focus: Underlying issues and challenges

More therapists respect and support the idea of family therapy than actually practice it. Reasons have been proffered for this state, but none has considered the therapist's personhood as a variable. This paper explores the possible connection between worker's personality and tendency to underuse the family focused treatment modality. A relationship is made between the therapist's developmental experiences as a parentified child and their impact on choices for favoring less populated frameworks of treatment than family focused approaches. Areas of difficulty are identified and suggestions for assisting staff to increase family focused practice are made.     

Benefits of community meetings in the corporate setting after the suicide of a coworker

When an employee commits suicide, his or her coworkers are confronted unexpectedly with issues related to the sudden traumatic death. Being inundated with questions, grappling with acceptance of the loss, and exploring how this could have happened are factors that can complicate the bereavement process and delay a return to workplace homeostasis. Understanding the dynamics and issues related to grief and bereavement after sudden traumatic death potentially can accelerate the recovery process and promote restoration of workforce normalcy for employees and organizations. This can be significantly important to corporate managers and administrators who must maintain ongoing productivity despite such disruption, while promoting adaptive coping for their employees.     

Efficiency and the Fix Revisited: Informal Relations and Mock Routinization in a Nonprofit Nursing Home

Participant observation in a nonprofit nursing home reveals that informal patterns of work routinization depart markedly from official procedures designed to protect the health and safety of workers and residents. Six aspects of the informal organization of work are found to correspond closely to patterns observed by Roy (1954): the mismatch between time and tasks, the development of new (informal) skills, the institutionalization of rule-breaking, negative effects on quality, the collaboration of shop-level supervision, and workers’ experience of managerial irrationality. However, whereas classic manufacturing studies emphasized upper management's periodic attempts to force compliance to official rules and routines, here upper management engages only in symbolic interventions, collaborating with workers and nursing home residents in the “mock routinization” of work. The article concludes by showing how, in the context of contradictory external workplace regulation, all three parties to the labor process of the contemporary nursing home experience mock routinization as compatible with their own interests.

The intersection of race, poverty and risk: understanding the decision to provide services to clients and to remove children

Studies have found that certain racial groups, particularly the children of African American families, are placed in foster care at a higher rate than children of other races. These families are also sometimes found to be afforded fewer services that might prevent these removals, relative to families of other races. It is unclear why this is so. Poverty has been suspected, and sometimes found, to be the primary cause of the disparity. Lacking in some of these analyses, however, was how risk of future abuse/neglect to the child entered into the decisions and particularly, how assumptions about race, poverty, and risk are factored into the decision-making process. It is important to understand this process if we are to find a way to correct it. The current study addresses this process.     

Searching for realism, structure and agency in Actor Network Theory

Superficially, Actor Network Theory (ANT) and critical realism (CR) are radically opposed research traditions. Written from a realist perspective, this paper asks whether there might be a basis for finding common ground between these two traditions. It looks in turn at the questions of realism, structure, and agency, analysing the differences between the two perspectives and seeking to identify what each might learn from the other. Overall, the paper argues that there is a great deal that realists can learn from actor network theory; yet ANT remains stunted by its lack of a depth ontology. It fails to recognize the significance of mechanisms, and of their dependence on emergence, and thus lacks both dimensions of the depth that is characteristic of critical realism's ontology. This prevents ANT from recognizing the role and powers of social structure; but on the other hand, realists would do well to heed ANT's call for us to trace the connections through which structures are constantly made and remade. A lack of ontological depth also underpins ANT's practice of treating human and non-human actors symmetrically, yet this remains a valuable provocation to sociologists who neglect non-human entities entirely.