Splitting and Emotional Regulation in Partner Violence

Interventions with victims of partner violence can become stymied until the clinician recognizes and accepts client vacillations as integral to the work. Appraisals and decisions that are reached in a therapy session may appear to be reversed or forgotten once the client returns home. Treatment strategies that focus on emotional regulation and splitting can help strengthen client awareness of contradicting beliefs, thereby strengthening self-efficacy and problem-solving.     

Evaluation of Support Groups for Child Abuse Prevention: Outcomes of Four State Evaluations

ABSTRACT

Parent support groups have grown in popularity as a strategy for preventing child maltreatment, but there have been few evaluations of these groups. The purpose of this paper is twofold. One goal is to identify some of the major challenges in the evaluation of parent support groups and to provide strategies for minimizing these potential difficulties. The second goal is to illustrate successful evaluations of parent support groups (i.e., the Circle of Parents® program) in four states. Three of these states used a retrospective pretest method. Outcomes indicated positive performance across all domains of functioning, as measured by a self-report questionnaire. Strengths and limitations of the evaluations are discussed, and recommendations for future evaluations are provided.     

Estimates of coverage of the population by sex,race, and age in the 1970 census

Several estimates of total net underenumeration and of net census errors by sex, race (white, Negro-and-other-races, Negro), and age (five-year groups) in the 1960 and 1970 Censuses, for the total population of the United States, derived by the methods of demographic analysis, are presented. The different data, procedures, and assumptions employed in developing the various estimates are described briefly, and the findings are then discussed in terms of a”preferred” set of estimates. The preferred set of estimates of corrected population for 1970 combines estimates for persons under age 35 based directly on birth, death, and migration statistics, estimates for females aged 35 to 64 based on the Coale-Zelnik estimates (white) for 1950 or the Coale-Rives estimates (Negro) for 1960, estimates for males aged 35 to 64 based on the use of expected sex ratios, and estimates for the population 65 and over based on”Medicare” enrollments and expected sex ratios. These estimates indicate an overall net underenumeration of 5.3 million persons or 2.5 percent in 1970, as compared with 5.1 million or 2.7 percent in 1960, and a net underenumeration of 1.9 percent for whites and of 7.7 percent for Negroes in 1970, as compared with 2.0 percent and 8.0 percent, respectively, in 1960. As in 1960, undercoverage in 1970 was greatest for Negro males (9.9 percent); net error rates exceeded 12 percent in each age group 20 to 49 and reached 17 to 19 percent at ages 25 to 44. All sex-race groups showed marked increases between 1960 and 1970 for children under ten and marked declines at ages ten to 24. Equally reliable estimates of population coverage cannot be prepared for states and smaller geographic units or for the population of Spanish ancestry.     

Evaluating the Impact of Statewide Anti-Tobacco Campaigns: The Massachusetts andCalifornia Tobacco Control Programs

Despite more than 30 years of public health programs to reduce tobacco use, smoking is still the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. In response to this continuing epidemic, voters in California (1988), Massachusetts (1992), Arizona (1994), and Oregon (1996) approved ballot initiatives that established statewide tobacco control programs funded by cigarette excise tax revenues. Evaluating these innovative public health interventions is important, both to improve existing programs and to guide other states in developing and implementing similar interventions. In this paper we describe the methods being used to evaluate the statewide anti-tobacco campaigns in California and Massachusetts, and review the findings of process and outcome evaluations of both programs.
Our review suggests that both programs have had a substantial impact on the public's health by reducing cigarette consumption and stimulating the development of policies to reduce environmental tobacco smoke exposure. However, it does not appear that either program has reduced smoking initiation among adolescents. Our evaluation suggests three problems in program implementation that future anti-tobacco campaigns must avoid in order to produce long-term, sustained effects: (1) the gradual erosion of program funding by the state legislatures and governors; (2) the lack of a consistent, supportive constituency within state government; and (3) inconsistency in campaign themes, messages, and programs. We conclude by offering recommendations to correct these problems so that statewide cigarette-tax-funded anti-tobacco campaigns can realize their potential to become one of the most effective public health interventions available.     

Perceived benefits and psychosocial outcomes of a brief existential family intervention for cancer patients/survivors

This study assessed a range of benefits from participation in a brief existential intervention consisting of a semi-structured videotaped interview with cancer patients and their families designed to illuminate a life legacy for the family (the Life Tape Project [LTP]). Results indicated the majority reported intervention-specific benefits, especially in the areas of symbolic immortality (passing on personal values and philosophy), self-reflection and growth, and improved family cohesion and communication. Participants, particularly those who had perceived their cancer as a threat of death, serious injury, or threat to their physical integrity, and responded with intense fear or helplessness, also reported more general reductions in mood disturbance, improvements in aspects of well-being (including overall quality of life), satisfaction with the understanding they received, and enhanced cancer-related posttraumatic growth. In short, the LTP is a brief, inexpensive, existential intervention that can yield broad positive psychosocial changes for a majority of participants.     

In Defence of a Modern Medical Model: Purism and Eclecticism in Family Therapy*

Family therapists criticise the ‘medical model’ for relying on linear causality, focusing on pathology rather than health processes and tending to coerce the family into preconceived models. These criticisms might be legitimately levelled at 19th Century models but not at modern medical models which include the circularity of general systems theory, attention to ecological field, and understanding of reciprocal influences of many factors such as emotions, antibodies, genetic endowment, nutrition, interpersonal relations, environmental stress, and symbiotic micro-organisms. This modernised medical model is consistent with modern family therapy theory which integrates general systems theory, ecological theory, communication theory, small group process, role theory and metaphoric communications. Family therapy purists define themselves by contrasting their differences with ‘the medical model’. Eclecticists tend to be practitioners who use broad theoretical frames of reference and commonsense, straight-forward, direct intervention where it is likely to work but will resort to indirect, metaphoric or paradoxical intervention for the more complex and resistant family.