An Obstacle Race: A Case Study of a Child's Schooling in Australia and England

This account of the struggle by a 'disabled' child to experience a normal education, to lead a normal life, is the basis for a critique of science and the professions, for her struggle has been against those specialists who shape our ideologies, the high priests of the religion of science. Her story reveals the deep-seated prejudices of our society, prejudices which derive from the increasing domination, since the sixteenth century, of a mechanistic, phallogocentric scientism which, in the name of reason, denies individuality, creativity, spirituality, variability, defining and thus condemning those suffering physical or perceptual disabilities beyond the pale. They are deemed 'unnatural', 'negative', 'abnormal' through recourse to a narrow, mechanistic and artificial view of nature. A disabled child sets out on the race through life weighed down by ruthless handicappers but in her triumph shows how ignorant the medical model is of humanity and how restrictive our schools are of creativity. Her success questions our most deeply-rooted assumptions.     

Academic incentives for students can increase participation in and effectiveness of a physical activity program

The authors sought to determine whether a greater academic incentive would improve the effectiveness and student adherence to a 12-week voluntary exercise program designed to decrease students' percentage of body fat. They randomly assigned 210 students to 1 of 2 groups with different academic reward structures. The group with the greater reward structure showed better exercise adherence and lost more body fat than those without the additional incentive. These findings suggest that an academic incentive can increase overall student adherence to a voluntary exercise program and can boost the effectiveness of the program in a university environment. The findings also have potential implications for on-campus promotion of physical activity.     

Toward a standard of care for child ADHD: implications for marriage and family therapists

In this article, we briefly review the etiology of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and describe the most current scientifically supported theory about the nature of this disorder. Based on the research literature, several organizations have established standards of care for its diagnosis and treatment, which involves a multimodal strategy for treatment at the biological, individual, family, school, and community levels. Assessment and treatment guidelines are provided for Marriage and Family Therapists (MFTs), and specific areas of competency are proposed for MFTs who are working with children who have ADHD.     

Gambling Screens: Does Shortening the Time Frame Affect their Psychometric Properties?

Gambling screening tools such as the South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS) and a DSM-IV Screen for Gambling Problems (NODS) developed by the National Opinion Research Council have psychometrically validated lifetime and past-year versions. As research questions often dictate shorter time intervals, researchers have adapted the time frames of these instruments to their specific purposes without examining whether changing the time frame affects the psychometric properties. In this study, 3-month versions of SOGS and NODS were administered to a sample of 80 pathological gamblers (59 men, 21 women, mean age 44) seeking treatment at a state-funded facility. The 3-months versions had good internal consistency, good convergent validity with each other, with gambling behaviors assessed via the timeline followback method, and with measures of impulsivity. The 3-month versions also showed good discriminant validity with demographic variables and a measure of verbal IQ. Together the data indicate that shortening the time frame to 3 months does not seem to have adverse effects on the psychometric properties of SOGS and NODS. Thus these adapted versions could profitably be used for shorter time intervals, including as pre/post-treatment and follow-up measures in treatment outcome studies.     

"We just happen to live here": two social workers share their stories about Oregon's Death with Dignity Law

This article is written more like a conversation with the reader rather than a strictly academic piece. The purpose is to share from a more personal perspective the unique circumstances and challenges faced by two social workers in Oregon as they grappled with the Death with Dignity Law. The law has been in effect for six years and a May 2004 decision from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court allowed the law to remain a legal end-of-life option. Each writer has a unique voice on the process of social work involvement in practice, research, and policy since the law was originally passed in 1994.     

The role of public health improvements in health advances: The twentieth-century United States

Mortality rates in the United States fell more rapidly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than in any other period in American history. This decline coincided with an epidemiological transition and the disappearance of a mortality "penalty" associated with living in urban areas. There is little empirical evidence and much unresolved debate about what caused these improvements, however. In this article, we report the causal influence of clean water technologies--filtration and chlorination--on mortality in major cities during the early twentieth century. Plausibly exogenous variation in the timing and location of technology adoption was used to identify these effects, and the validity of this identifying assumption is examined in detail. We found that clean water was responsible for nearly half the total mortality reduction in major cities, three quarters of the infant mortality reduction, and nearly two thirds of the child mortality reduction. Rough calculations suggest that the social rate of return to these technologies was greater than 23 to 1, with a cost per person-year saved by clean water of about dollar 500 in 2003 dollars. Implications for developing countries are briefly considered.     

Correlates of Mental Hospital Admission Status

The legal admission status (voluntary v. involuntary) of patients admitted to a state mental hospital was compared with the patients' willingness to enter the hospital, social resources, dangerousness, and management within the hospital. The legal admission status was found to be strongly associated with a willingness to enter, but there is much continued resistance and coercion associated with hospital admission. Indices of social power were not related to legal admission status with the exception that blacks were disproportionately admitted involuntarily.
The only significant finding about legal status and judgments of dangerousness was that people judged to be dangerous to self were more frequently admitted as voluntary. Legal status was not significantly related to time prior to gaining ground privileges or discharge from the hospital.     

The Impact of Interdisciplinary Teams on Organizational Relationships

Based upon research in an alcoholism treatment organization, the study explores the impact of interdisciplinary team treatment on organizational participants and structure. The findings suggest that alternate organizational arrangements are necessary for organizations which use the team method. The implications of team treatment for professionals were confounded because of power relationships within the organization. Role bargaining between professionals was observed to be virtually non-existent because of the dominance of a single discipline. A surprising finding was the extent to which supervisory personnel were disadvantaged in the study. Caution is suggested for those organizations most likely to adopt the team method, large public health organizations.     

Cultural and Class Values In Family Process

Based on the sociological research of Kohn (1977), several clinical and theoretical perspectives on the family are criticized for paying insufficient attention to class and cultural distinctions both in constructing normative images of the family and in conceptualizing therapeutic intervention. It is suggested that the "democratic" model of healthy family interaction is, to some degree, class- and culture-specific so that sociologically undifferentiated views of the family are likely to prove ethnocentric. Family therapists are therefore urged to be attentive to sociodynamic as well as psychodynamic factors present within both family and therapeutic interactions.