Training Mental Health Professionals on Ethical Issues and HIV/AIDS

This report describes the importance of ethics training for mental health professionals working with persons infected or affected by HIV/AIDS. We first describe three major ethical dilemmas (confidentiality, duty to warn, and suicide) faced by mental health providers serving persons with HIV/AIDS, and the legal and clinical aspects of these dilemmas. We present data from the South Texas AIDS Training Project describing the types of mental health professionals who have attended workshops on ethical issues and HIV/AIDS. Finally, we report observations about the impact of the ethics training sessions on the participants' knowledge and attitudes.     

An Examination of Cross‐Racial Comparability of Mother‐Child Interaction Among African American and Anglo American Families

This study examined the cross‐racial comparability of maternal quality of assistance and supportive presence coded from a video protocol using data from the Infant Health and Development Program for low‐birth‐weight, premature 30‐month‐olds and their mothers. Evidence of equivalence of measures is necessary before comparisons can be made across groups. Multiple‐group mean and covariance structures analysis was used to demonstrate the invariance of the measures and make comparisons for Anglo American and African American treatment and comparison groups of dyads. Comparisons across groups indicated similar variances and correlation between child and maternal behavior. Differences were found between the mean scores, with Anglo American treatment families scoring the highest.     

Promising research and methodological approaches for health behavior research with homeless persons

High-risk health behaviors have high prevalence among homeless persons prompting substantial research on health behavior and behavior change strategies within the population. Previously, much of this research focused solely on the target behavior without consideration of contextual factors that may contribute to the behavior or that may inhibit behavior change. We describe three overlapping trends in homeless health behavior research – longitudinal, qualitative, and participatory – which consider the link between the context of homelessness and health behavior. These approaches contribute to the understanding of the social determinants of health behavior and health and demonstrate opportunities for intervention beyond the individual level.     

Time,history and the making of the industrial middle class: the story of Samuel Smith

This article uses the politics of time to explore the making of the industrial middle class. It argues that anxieties about the decline of industry and the future of liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century fuelled a small explosion in life writing, prosopography and popular history. Accounts combined anecdotes about everyday life and reminiscences of the great civic age in a network of texts that attempted to recreate the associational life of the industrial middle class and present it as the foundation of national progress. However, slips in time between retrospection, nostalgia, memory and history reveal the complexity of late-Victorian anti-industrialism and the tensions in liberalism between a political culture that was inclusive and open and a social world that was not. The article combines a deep reading of the autobiography of the cotton magnate and liberal politician Samuel Smith alongside popular local history and collective biography. In so doing it shows how life stories were consciously composed as history, intent on shaping the provincial middle class as a historical force at a time of uncertainty about the future of industry and of liberalism.     

Weak Identification in Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Designs

In fuzzy regression discontinuity (FRD) designs, the treatment effect is identified through a discontinuity in the conditional probability of treatment assignment. We show that when identification is weak (i.e., when the discontinuity is of a small magnitude), the usual t-test based on the FRD estimator and its standard error suffers from asymptotic size distortions as in a standard instrumental variables setting. This problem can be especially severe in the FRD setting since only observations close to the discontinuity are useful for estimating the treatment effect. To eliminate those size distortions, we propose a modified t-statistic that uses a null-restricted version of the standard error of the FRD estimator. Simple and asymptotically valid confidence sets for the treatment effect can be also constructed using this null-restricted standard error. An extension to testing for constancy of the regression discontinuity effect across covariates is also discussed. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Children's Emotional Responses to a Paediatric Hospital Atrium

This paper illuminates children's emotional responses to an atrium in a contemporary Canadian paediatric hospital. It draws on a focused analysis of data elicited in a qualitative study that explored patients' perspectives on the design and architecture of the atrium. Children were involved in all phases of the project either as consultants on the research methods or participating in interviews and taking photographs of the space. The atrium consists of a main lobby with a high windowed ceiling, brightly coloured elevators with exposed mechanisms, information desks, a large fountain and food venues. Children expressed a range of emotions associated with the space. The findings demonstrate children's ability to identify multi‐faceted issues related to hospital design and affirm their rights to participate in decisions regarding spaces that purportedly are designed for them.     

Teaching Note—BSW Students’ Experiences With an MBSR Assignment and the Five Facets of Mindfulness

BSW students appear to be under increasing levels of stress. In response to concerns about students’ well-being, we developed a three-credit-hour self-care elective. This article explores students’ participation in the primary assignment of the course, a modified version of mindfulness-based stress reduction. We also present empirical findings of an exploratory study examining students’ mindfulness and their subjective experiences with the assignment. Results support the usefulness of mindfulness-based stress reduction assignments in supporting BSW students’ well-being. This kind of assignment may also contribute to the development of the first social work competency, “demonstrate ethical and professional behavior,” (Council on Social Work Education, 2015, p. 7) through an increase in self-reflective and self-regulation skills.     

Infant Mortality Rate as a Measure of a Country’s Health: A Robust Method to Improve Reliability and Comparability

Researchers and policymakers often rely on the infant mortality rate as an indicator of a country’s health. Despite arguments about its relevance, uniform measurement of infant mortality is necessary to guarantee its use as a valid measure of population health. Using important socioeconomic indicators, we develop a novel method to adjust country-specific reported infant mortality figures. We conclude that an augmented measure of mortality that includes both infant and late fetal deaths should be considered when assessing levels of social welfare in a country. In addition, mortality statistics that exhibit a substantially high ratio of late fetal to early neonatal deaths should be more closely scrutinized.     

Changing a Leopard's Spots: A New Research Direction for Organizational Culture in the Operations Management Field

Operations Management (OM) research on organizational culture has to change to be able to inform practice. Currently, organizational culture research in OM is largely confined to narrow topical and methodological niches and culture is most frequently used as an explanatory variable in quantitative, survey‐based research. We argue that the relegation of culture to this niche is due to self‐imposed methodological blinders that hobble the OM field. We then present four research imperatives to reinvigorate organizational culture research within our field. We urge OM scholars to view culture as a dynamic concept that can be influenced, to adopt alternative methods, to use non‐traditional data sources, and to rethink assumptions about dependent variables. We also identify gaps in the current knowledge and new research questions for the OM domain. We conclude that the field of OM could greatly expand its understanding of organizational culture and in so doing greatly improve business practice, but that to do so will require a change in the culture of the operations management research community.