Six Step Therapeutic Process to Facilitate Forgiveness of Self and Others

This theoretical article postulates a six step therapeutic process to facilitate forgiveness of self and others. The purpose of this article is to provide therapists with the therapeutic process that can be used to assist clients who are working through forgiveness and self-forgiveness. The combination of several therapeutic methods in a specific order might be effective in assisting clients to work through the forgiveness process in a systematic way. A case example that chronicles a client’s experience while working through forgiveness is provided. Lastly, a discussion of implications for practice and further research questions are presented.     

Music education in remote aboriginal communities

These papers deal with some of the complex cultural and pedagogical issues involved in the delivery of a secondary-school music education program to remote Aboriginal communities. The papers outline the history of the program, the challenges in its delivery and some of the prospects for its future.     

An analysis of safety culture attitudes in a highly regulated environment

Culture is a complex construct in organizations, consisting of attitudes, perceptions, values and beliefs, which must necessarily be set in context. Many authors imply that culture is organization-wide and common to all employees. In terms of safety culture, the organizational context may determine its salience and likelihood of affecting behaviour, especially in a highly regulated environment such as the nuclear industry. This study investigates the components of safety culture and how it varies in a highly-regulated nuclear power plant. A 60-item questionnaire measuring safety attitudes and values was administered anonymously to 1550 employees at two plants in the UK nuclear industry, with a 64.7% mean response rate. Principal components analyses revealed six factors conceptually common to shop floor and management (supervisor/manager/professional) groups for both plants, relating to: management style and communication; responsibility and commitment; risk-taking; job satisfaction; complacency; and risk awareness. A canonical discriminant analysis of the items suggested that the data could distinguish three employee groups. The implications of these findings and the proposal that there are two or more safety cultures in the organization is discussed.     

Testing the association between health status amd an environmental index

The design and analysis of a study to examine the association between a time series response collected on n subjects and an index are presented. Applications of this methodology to environmental health studies such as investigations into the relationship between air pollution levels and daily respiratory symptoms are indicated     

Research Training and Professional Social Work Education: Developing Research‐Minded Practice

The movement towards developing practice more firmly grounded on empirical research has, arguably, been one of the most significant international trends in social work during the past decade. However, in the UK the implications of this trend for pedagogical practices and the design of educational programmes have still to be fully explored. This paper reports on the findings of a repeated cross‐sectional survey of MSW students in Queen's University Belfast which focused on their perceptions of the value of research training to professional practice. The study, conducted over a four year period, explored students' awareness of the relationship between research and practice and their readiness to engage with research training. The findings suggested that the majority of students perceived research training as a valuable component of professional development. However, the study also found a level of scepticism among students about its practical utility along with some resistance towards actively embracing a research agenda. The paper evaluates the significance of these findings for developing research and evidence‐based practice as integral components of the new degrees in social work in the UK and for social work education programmes in other countries aiming to develop research‐minded practice.     

Compound adaptive GPU design for clinical trials

In clinical trials, several competing treatments are often carried out in the same trial period. The goal is to assess the performances of these different treatments according to some optimality criterion and minimize risks to the patients in the entire process of the study. For this, each coming patient is allocated sequentially to one of the treatments according to a mechanism defined by the optimality criterion. In practice, sometimes different optimality criteria, or the same criterion with different regimes, need to be considered to assess the treatments in the same study, so that each mechanism is also evaluated through the trail study. In this case, the question is how to allocate the treatments to the incoming patients so that the criteria/mechanisms of interest are assessed during the trail process, and the overall performance of the trial is optimized under the combined criteria or regimes. In this paper, we consider this problem by investigating a compound adaptive generalized Pólya urn design. Basic asymptotic properties of this design are also studied.