What’s keeping you awake at night? Challenges facing trainers in South Africa

Corporate Trainers experience many organizational challenges that require new skills. This qualitative study sought to determine the challenges faced by South African Education Training and Development university students employed as trainers in corporate roles. Findings suggest that trainers require contextual and generic soft skills to meet the requirements of their jobs and that the term trainer embraces a variety of roles of different focus and different status. While there appear to be a common set of problems facing trainers irrespective of location, the interventionist skills and employment policies of the South African government have an important influence on activity in the organization.     

Social and Emotional Functioning of Older Asian American Adolescents

This study identified a constellation of psychosocial problems reported by older Asian American adolescents that was different from their Caucasian peers. When compared to 386 Caucasian American adolescents from the same community, Asian American students performed better academically and reported fewer delinquent behaviors. However, these Asian American youth reported higher levels of depressive symptomatology, withdrawn behavior, and social problems. They also perceived themselves more poorly and were more dissatisfied with their social support. These differences highlight the unique mental health needs of older Asian American youth. Practice recommendations are made that consider traditional Asian values and the role that family members can play in the development of effective treatment plans.     

Socially disadvantaged women's views of barriers to feeling safe to engage in decision-making in maternity care

BackgroundAlthough midwifery literature suggests that woman-centred care can improve the birthing experiences of women and birth outcomes for women and babies, recent research has identified challenges in supporting socially disadvantaged women to engage in decision-making regarding care options in order to attain a sense of control within their maternity care encounters.ObjectiveThe objective of this paper is to provide an understanding of the issues that affect the socially disadvantaged woman's ability to actively engage in decision-making processes relevant to her care.Research designThe qualitative approach known as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to gain an understanding of maternity care encounters as experienced by each of the following cohorts: socially disadvantaged women, registered midwives and student midwives. This paper focuses specifically on data from participating socially disadvantaged women that relate to the elements of woman-centred care-choice and control and their understandings of capacity to engage in their maternity care encounters.FindingsSocially disadvantaged women participants did not feel safe to engage in discussions regarding choice or to seek control within their maternity care encounters. Situations such as inadequate contextualised information, perceived risks in not conforming to routine procedures, and the actions and reactions of midwives when these women did seek choice or control resulted in a silent compliance. This response was interpreted as a consequence of women's decisions to accept responsibility for their baby's wellbeing by delegating health care decision-making to the health care professional.ConclusionThis research found that socially disadvantaged women want to engage in their care. However without adequate information and facilitation of choice by midwives, they believe they are outsiders to the maternity care culture and decision-making processes. Consequently, they delegate responsibility for maternity care choices to those who do belong; midwives. These findings suggest that midwives need to better communicate a valuing of the woman's participation in decision-making processes and to work with women so they do have a sense of belonging within the maternity care environment. Midwives need to ensure that socially disadvantaged women do feel safe about having a voice regarding their choices and find ways to give them a sense of control within their maternity care encounters.     

From violence to alliance: Maroons and white settlers in Jamaica, 1739–1795

During the First Maroon War, violent battles between Maroons and British colonists were frequent and violent. How then, after the peace treaties, did former enemies negotiate their new positions as allies? How did colonists accept this new status quo while balancing it with racial beliefs of the era? This article examines Maroon and colonist efforts to progress in a physically difficult and socially charged environment while living side-by-side with a large enslaved population. Ultimately, some influential planters, as opposed to poorer settlers, came to recognise the mutual benefits this uneasy peace provided. That is not to say these colonists were not fearful of the Maroons but that they recognised the usefulness of the Maroon communities.     

Study-work satisfaction and psychological distress in older university students

In order to study the relationships between work satisfaction and mental health in a group known to be at risk for psychological distress, university students who were somewhat older than usual (n=568, average age 24 years) provided infomiation by questionnaire about their satisfactions from study and paid work, and their level of psychological distress. The measure of study satisfaction was a modified form of Warr et al.'s (1979) Job Satisfaction Scale, and had good reliability. Study satisfaction waslower for undergraduate than for postgraduate students, due to lack of clearly defined identity, less supportive relations with fellow-students and teaching staff, and financial hardship. For all subjects the availability of teacher support predicted study satisfaction, and study satisfaction had a major influence on the students' psychologcal well-being.     

A Weibull Regression Model with Gamma Frailties for Multivariate Survival Data

Frequently in the analysis of survival data, survival times within the same group are correlated due to unobserved co-variates. One way these co-variates can be included in the model is as frailties. These frailty random block effects generate dependency between the survival times of the individuals which are conditionally independent given the frailty. Using a conditional proportional hazards model, in conjunction with the frailty, a whole new family of models is introduced. By considering a gamma frailty model, often the issue is to find an appropriate model for the baseline hazard function. In this paper a flexible baseline hazard model based on a correlated prior process is proposed and is compared with a standard Weibull model. Several model diagnostics methods are developed and model comparison is made using recently developed Bayesian model selection criteria. The above methodologies are applied to the McGilchrist and Aisbett (1991) kidney infection data and the analysis is performed using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Faith‐Based Social Service Organizations and Government Funding: Data from a National Survey*

Objective. The objective of the research reported in this article is to test four hypotheses concerning government funding among faith‐based social service coalitions: that it is positively related to size and organizational professionalism; positively related to attitudes toward government funding; positively related to social activism; and negatively related to organizational religiosity. Method. Our method is the application of OLS and probit analysis to data from a national survey of 656 such organizations. Results. Using three measures of government funding and 12 predictor variables, results are mixed in their support of the size and professionalization hypothesis and generally support the remaining hypotheses. These findings are replicated when we compare coalitions that had and had not applied for government funding. Conclusions. Our findings emphasize that greater religious expressiveness dissuades coalitions from both seeking and receiving government funding, but higher levels of social activism expedite both.     

The Single Assessment Process in Primary Care: Older People's Accounts of the Process

Recent government policies have been active in addressing socialinclusion and active participation of older people in many aspectsof societal life. Independence and well-being animate thesedevelopments and are evident in the emphasis on person-centredservices within the single assessment process for older people(Department of Health, 2002b). Drawing on a feasibility study of the Single Assessment Processas a ‘case-finding’ approach, this paper presentsfindings drawn from older people’s accounts of this experience.These accounts indicate the potential of the process for identifying‘low-level’ need, whilst raising issues of accessto formal services and resource constraint; also they underlinethe importance of understanding how older people seek ways ofmanaging their own health and well-being, whilst continuingto contribute to the social cohesion of society by providingsupport to their peers and to younger generations. Interdependence, it is suggested, rather than dependence shouldunderlie any approach to assessing older people’s needs,if we are to appreciate and build upon the complexity of olderpeople’s strategies for actively managing their lives.