Helping partnerships that facilitate recovery from severe mental illness

The intent of this study was to learn how consumers experience helping partnerships that assist them in recovery to inform families, professionals, and peers about meaningful actions and strategies that promote the healing process. In-depth interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample of 10 individuals who had a self-reported diagnosis of severe mental illness. Using the phenomenological research process, helping partnerships and how they develop were described. Six key themes emerged from the data and included Networks of Helping Partnerships, Teaching-Learning, Spirituality, Creative Drive, Time, and Medication Adherence. Characteristics and behaviors of helping partners were identified, as well as structures that promoted their development. Educating the public, consumers, and mental health professionals about how to promote recovery, the role of spirituality and creativity, the benefits of medication and therapy, and the impact of learning on progressing through recovery can go a long way toward eliminating the mystery and fear associated with mental illness.     

Effects of child health on parents’ relationship status

We used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to estimate the effect of a child's poor health on the presence of thefather. We investigated whether parents lived in the same household 12-18 months after the child's birth and whether their relationships changed along a continuum (married, cohabiting, romantically involved, friends, or not involved) during the same period. We found that within this short period, having a child with poor health decreased the probability that the parents lived together by 10 percentage points. It also increased the probability that their relationship status moved in the direction of less involvement by 6 percentage points. These results indicate that children's health and family structure jointly shape children's long-term health and economic trajectories.     

Social Return on Investment of an Innovative Employment Option for Persons with Developmental Disabilities

Common Ground Co‐operative (CGC) provides training, administrative, and job coach support to five social enterprises for which persons with developmental disabilities are the non‐share‐capital partners. This study examines the use of social return on investment (SROI) as a means of determining the value of program impacts related to quality‐of‐life changes for enterprise partners and their families. The process of conducting this SROI analysis is described and analyzed in terms of its utility in employment services for persons with developmental disabilities.     

The impact of culture on best-practice production/operations management

Significant work has been completed in arriving at what have been put forward as `best practices' for a variety of facets of production/operations management (POM). Organizations are becoming global in their operations. In this environment, there is a desire to learn from this 'proven' best practice and to use the generic ideas, concepts and techniques 'world-wide'. However, it is becoming apparent from a range of fragmented evidence that 'best practices' developed and successful in one context are not necessarily directly transferable to a comparable alternative. More detailed examination suggests that national culture has a significant role to play in determining the precise nature of a best practice in POM, and how universal it might be in its application. This paper examines structures within which to view facets of POM in order to identify one that will facilitate exploration of cultural issues. There follows an identification of what might be considered to be an appropriate range of cultural dimensions along which POM best practices may be considered. A review of the evidence from the literature of cultural impacts on aspects of POM is presented. This is used to support the development of a generic framework to examine this interface more comprehensively.     

Generating Probabilistic Spatially-Explicit Individual and Population Exposure Estimates for Ecological Risk Assessments

Exposure to chemical contaminants in various media must be estimated when performing ecological risk assessments. Exposure estimates are often based on the 95th-percentile upper confidence limit on the mean concentration of all samples, calculated without regard to critical ecological and spatial information about the relative relationship of receptors, their habitats, and contaminants. This practice produces exposure estimates that are potentially unrepresentative of the ecology of the receptor. This article proposes a habitat area and quality-conditioned exposure estimator, E[HQ], that requires consideration of these relationships. It describes a spatially explicit ecological exposure model to facilitate calculation of E[HQ]. The model provides (1) a flexible platform for investigating the effect of changes in habitat area, habitat quality, foraging area, and population size on exposure estimates, and (2) a tool for calculating E[HQ] for use in actual risk assessments. The inner loop of a Visual Basic program randomly walks a receptor over a multicelled landscape--each cell of which contains values for cell area, habitat area, habitat quality, and concentration--accumulating an exposure estimate until the total area foraged is less than or equal to a given foraging area. An outer loop then steps through foraging areas of increasing size. This program is iterated by Monte Carlo software, with the number of iterations representing the population size. Results indicate that (1) any single estimator may over- or underestimate exposure, depending on foraging strategy and spatial relationships of habitat and contamination, and (2) changes in exposure estimates in response to changes in foraging and habitat area are not linear.     

Slippery discrimination: a review of the drivers of migrant and minority housing disadvantage

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to identify housing disadvantages faced by migrants and ethnic minorities; the legal, policy and market forces that shape them; how they have developed over time; how they are manifest nationally and locally; and how they are being responded to locally by those concerned with mitigating them. The paper thereby intends to provide a foundation to inform future research and policy and to engage with local actors to develop ways of overcoming migrant housing disadvantage and challenging discrimination. The paper finds that the interplay of legal changes, which have increasingly differentiated migrants since the 1940s, and shifting housing markets, has driven exclusion of migrants and minorities such that considerable disadvantage is revealed by analysis of census data. However, attention to local specificity provides evidence of positive responses. Examples are presented in relation to access to affordable housing, enactment of homelessness duties and community actions. Methodologically, this paper highlights the importance of simultaneous consideration of migration and ethnicity as markers of difference and exclusion, and the potential of co-production approaches for socially meaningful research concerned with inequalities.