Auditory status and experiences of abuse among college students

Studies that explore experiences of abuse among deaf or hard of hearing college students are sparse and usually focus on lifetime experiences rather than the college years. A random sample of more than 1,000 college students at a campus in Upstate New York provided the data for this study. An institute for the deaf or hard of hearing was one of the colleges at the university and provided a unique opportunity to explore experiences among this demographic. Victimization rates and experiences by auditory status--deaf and hard of hearing or hearing--were examined. Binomial regression analyses were employed and findings indicated a significant association with being deaf or hard of hearing and physical and psychological abuse at the hands of a partner. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.     

Parenting: Can Skills be Learned?

The effectiveness of parent education courses conducted in the northern suburbs of Sydney was assessed in terms of Hereford's Parent Attitude Scale after norms for this area had been established. The results indicated that on completion of these courses participants had greater confidence in their abilities as parents, were more aware of the influence of environment on their children and had a more trusting relationship with their children. Kavanagh doubted the relevance of a course such as PET to parents of lower socioeconomic status—these parents have also been shown to score lower on the PAS. However in this study participants who scored lowest initially improved most, showing that the course is reaching those who are not very well informed about childrearing.     

Assessing Perceptions of Synergistic Health Risk: A Comparison of Two Scales

Two approaches to measuring perceptions of synergistic risk were compared, one using the traditional Likert scale, the other using an anchored, relative scale. Perception of synergistic risk was defined as rating the combined hazard as more risky than each of its constituent single hazards. In a within-subjects design, a convenience sample from the community (N= 604) rated three hazard combinations and their constituents: Driving while Intoxicated (familiar, high synergy), Radon and Smoking (unfamiliar, high synergy), and Smoking and Driving (familiar, low synergy), on both scales. The relative scale was expected to be a more sensitive measure of synergy than the Likert scale. The effects of item order (single hazards rated first versus combined hazards rated first) were examined between subjects. Driving while Intoxicated was perceived by the large majority of participants as a synergistic risk on both scales, but neither of the other two combined hazards were rated synergistically on either scale. The relative scale demonstrated a slight advantage over the Likert scale, and presenting the single hazards first for the relative scale produced more synergistic ratings. It is recommended that anchored, relative scales be used to measure synergy and that single hazards be presented prior to the combined hazards when using relative scales.     

The “Good Enough” Fit: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis as Culturally Sensitive Practice

This paper examines the impact of the gender, race, class, and culture of the three participants in the patient-therapist dyad and the patient-therapist-supervisor triad, and how these similarities and differences reflect the unconscious cultivation of transferences and internalizations. The analyst's skills, art, experience, and relative freedom from conventional assumptions are important, and the main problem for analyst and supervisor is to meet the challenge to our analytic selves posed by conventional assumptions, which are compromises regarding culturally sensitive issues that derive from the ever-present dominant culture and its ideologies.     

The Onset of Working Memory in Infants

We used an optimized configuration of the delayed‐response task to explore the ability of young infants to remember which of 2 locations was correct across 12 trials after a 1‐ to 2‐sec delay. Performance improved with age, particularly after 5.5 months. These findings suggest an onset of appreciable working memory for many infants in the middle of their 6th month.     

Markets,contingency and preferences: contemporary managers’ narrative identities1

We explore work identity amongst managers, a key group in the ‘new’ capitalism. Some existing accounts of such workplace identities emphasize new ‘cultures of control’, others focus on new requirements and possibilities of individual autonomy through reflective identity formation, while others identify a crisis in workplace identity formation. Focusing on these issues, we analyse the career narratives of 136 managers and show that our empirical data do not neatly fit any existing models. Managers’ career stories were dominated by a ‘market’ narrative, in which they placed themselves as strategic actors making choices in a social world constituted by market‐like interactions. We show that the market narrative frames how managers understand risks to their careers arising from the contingent actions of firms, and how it provides a space for managers to reflectively identify their preferences and pleasures. We consider the consequences of this analysis for contemporary understandings of work and identity.     

Taking the class to the community with service-learning: gerontological macro social work practice

In an effort to infuse gerontological content throughout a BSW curriculum, the College of Mount St. Joseph developed community partnerships with agencies that serve older adults. These partnerships led to specific "out-of-class" assignments in a macro social work practice class using a service-learning approach. The development and implementation of those assignments in the agency settings are described using Polvika's Conceptual Model for Community Interagency Collaboration. The successful outcomes are described in terms of the community partnership, services and benefits provided, and the degree of satisfaction by the agencies, students, and faculty with this pedagogical method.