The Post-Hospital Mental Patient and Family Therapy: Prospects and Populations*

Changes in the pattern of delivery of mental health services have led to dramatic increases in the number of patients discharged from mental hospitals. These post-hospital mental patients represent a new challenge to the field of family therapy. Of the approximately 1 million patient admissions to state and county mental hospitals, general hospitals, and private psychiatric hospitals, over 380,000 are married, and more than half of the remaining patients are estimated to be living with family. Almost 135,000 admissions receive family therapy during their hospitalization, and an estimated 650,000 mental patients will return to their families upon discharge.     

Varieties of touching in greetings: Sequential structure and sex-related differences

The functional significance of structural and sex-related differences in greeting behavior was analyzed through systematic observation of naturally-occurring contact-greetings. Ss were 152 greeting dyads, composed of airline travelers and their greeters. Greeting sequences were found to contain one or more of seven discrete types of behavioral components. Type of greeting varied with location in sequence and sex-composition of dyad. The handshake, mutual-lip-kiss, and face-kiss occurred early in greeting sequences, whereas hand-to-upper-body was the characteristic terminating act. Male-male dyads typically engaged in a brief, mutual handshake. In contrast, female-female and cross-sex dyads displayed relatively longer contacts, composed of mutual-lip-kisses, mutual-face-contacts, embraces, and hand-to-upper-body touches.The authors would like to thank Susan Greenbaum and Neil Salkind for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Joe Lucke for his assistance in the data analysis.     

The power of inertia

The connected “package” of practices and relationships which make up an art world, such as the world of music making, creates a powerful inertia, since it is always easier to use the already present elements of the package. Innovation is possible and occurs whenever people are willing to go to the trouble of doing things the hard way. I've explained some of these ideas in a slightly different form in (Becker 1982).     

Client Expectations About Counseling and Involvement During Career Counseling

A within-counselor design was used in which the authors analyzed audio recordings of career counseling interviews with clients who had relatively positive and relatively negative expectations about counseling. Both of the clients who had relatively positive expectations about counseling were rated significantly higher on a global measure of level of involvement.     

Conflicts over farming practices in Canada: the role of interactive conflict resolution approaches

An increasing number of articles in professional and scientific journals, as well as in the public press, give evidence to a rising number of conflicts that exist in rural communities. These conflicts arise from changes in farming practices, the increasing number of large-scale production units, resource use, and demographics. Fair, effective and efficient approaches to resolve these conflicts are of increasing interest and importance. An interactive conflict resolution (ICR) approach that focuses on communication and positive social interactions may be a preferred approach for resolving conflicts. The role of ICR approaches in addressing conflicts arising from farming and agri-business practices is presented and discussed in this paper. The paper posits that ICR approaches are efficient from an economic as well as a social perspective and that they provide the greatest potential to realize socially optimal outcomes from a both a theoretical and practical perspective.     

Why do nonprofit managers accumulate surpluses,and how much do they accumulate?

Most theories of nonprofit behavior assume that nonprofit managers run surpluses only temporarily and that managers choose a budget level equal to expected revenues. In reality, equity accumulations have intrinsic value to nonprofit managers, and equity balances of nonprofits do grow over time. The authors discuss the tax treatment of nonprofits under U.S. tax laws, present existing theories of nonprofit behavior, and consider the reasons a prudent nonprofit manager might wish to earn and retain surplus funds. Data from a 1983 national sample of nonprofits are used to show that a large majority of nonprofits earned surpluses in 1983, that surprisingly few nonprofits had surpluses close to the zero level, and that the size of a nonprofit's surplus was related to its equity and asset holdings.