BULIMIA: THE TRANSGENERATIONAL VIEW*

Within families presenting with bulimia, there exist interactional patterns that can be said to enable, and perpetuate, the binge-eating and purging symptoms of the identified patient. A transgenerational treatment method is proposed, which not only intervenes in ongoing dysfunctional patterns, but also provides a frame for creating a therapeutic metaphor (“legacy”) to direct the therapy. Rationale and stages of the treatment process are outlined, and a case example is given to illustrate use of the transgenerational frame.     

Emergency contraceptive pills: a 10-year follow-up survey of use and experiences at college health centers in the mid-Atlantic United States

The authors conducted a 10-year follow-up study using a telephone survey to investigate the availability of emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs) at college health centers in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. They also examined related issues, such as distribution procedure, existence of a written protocol, personnel involved, contraindications, follow-up procedures, methods of advertising, staff attitudes, changes in distribution over the past 10 years, and availability if ECPs become over-the-counter. Of the 119 completed responses, 58 schools (49%) reported distributing ECPs. The most common reasons schools listed for not distributing ECPs (n = 61, 51%) were religious convictions, understaffing, and lack of funding. Major changes in ECP distribution over the past 10 years related primarily to the number of schools distributing ECPs, protocol in ECP distribution, and advertising for ECP services.     

The impact of prison hospice: collaboration among social workers and other professionals in a criminal justice setting that promotes care for the dying

This study reports on a qualitative national telephone survey with coordinators of 14 prison hospice programs in 11 states. The rationale behind the survey was to learn about interdisciplinary collaboration between social work and criminal justice, using prison hospice as an exemplar of this collaboration. In addition to learning that all prison hospices in the study operate using an interdisciplinary team model and that most report high quality collaboration on the hospice team, the following additional five themes emerged: administrators and wardens are very supportive while correctional staff provides mixed support to team and program; greater collaboration with those outside prison hospice is critical; collaboration through prison hospice has a positive impact on dying prisoners; collaboration through prison hospice has a positive impact on prisoner volunteers; and, collaboration through prison hospice has a positive impact on the entire culture of the prison.     

“Me,the street,and a backpack”: employment,income, and physical capital in rural recovery

ABSTRACT

Recovery capital is a framework for understanding individuals’ resources for recovery from substance misuse. In a qualitative analysis of rural individuals in recovery (N = 49), the role of physical capital emerged prominently across ten focus groups. Participants highlighted the effects of employment status, income, and other forms of physical capital directly, as well as indirect effects through changes in human capital. Negative cultural capital components, in the form of stigma and employment discrimination, were described as barriers to physical capital acquisition and successful recovery. Based on these findings, we discuss rural recovery challenges and propose a model of recovery capital interactions.     

KIDS OR CASH? EXPLORING CHARTER SCHOOL RESPONSES TO DECLINING GOVERNMENT REVENUES

While the literature is extensive on school districts' revenue sources, less research has been done on the impact of donations on school district funds. In this paper, we extend the theoretical literature on crowding out of private donations by government grants for one type of nonprofit firm, namely charter schools. The theoretical model leads us to focus on the key relationships among fundraising effort, enrollment (which is tied to federal and state funding) and donations. Using a dataset on Texas charter schools we adopt a two-stage approach to examine the empirical relationship between changes in nondonor revenues and the donations received by charter schools. Like the extensive empirical estimates of the effects of government grants on donations for other types of nonprofit firms, we find evidence of crowding-out with respect to our sample of charter schools. We also find a significant, positive effect of fundraising on donations with a $1 increase in fundraising associated to a $0.58 increase in donations, a pattern consistent with overinvestment in fundraising. Enrollments exhibit a robust inverse relationship to changes in nondonor revenues. (JEL H00, H32, H50)     

ADHD and Brain Anatomy: What Do Academic Textbooks Used in the Netherlands Tell Students?

Studies of brain size of children classified with ADHD appear to reveal smaller brains when compared to ‘normal’ children. Yet, what does this mean? Even with the use of rigorously screened case and control groups, these studies show only small, average group differences between children with and without an ADHD classification. However, academic textbooks used in the Netherlands often portray individual children with an ADHD classification as having a different, malfunctioning brain that necessitates medical intervention. This conceptualisation of ADHD might serve professional interests, but not necessarily the interests of children.     

Toward General Principles for Resilience Engineering

Maintaining the performance of infrastructure-dependent systems in the face of surprises and unknowable risks is a grand challenge. Addressing this issue requires a better understanding of enabling conditions or principles that promote system resilience in a universal way. In this study, a set of such principles is interpreted as a group of interrelated conditions or organizational qualities that, taken together, engender system resilience. The field of resilience engineering identifies basic system or organizational qualities (e.g., abilities for learning) that are associated with enhanced general resilience and has packaged them into a set of principles that should be fostered. However, supporting conditions that give rise to such first-order system qualities remain elusive in the field. An integrative understanding of how such conditions co-occur and fit together to bring about resilience, therefore, has been less clear. This article contributes to addressing this gap by identifying a potentially more comprehensive set of principles for building general resilience in infrastructure-dependent systems. In approaching this aim, we organize scattered notions from across the literature. To reflect the partly self-organizing nature of infrastructure-dependent systems, we compare and synthesize two lines of research on resilience: resilience engineering and social-ecological system resilience. Although some of the principles discussed within the two fields overlap, there are some nuanced differences. By comparing and synthesizing the knowledge developed in them, we recommend an updated set of resilience-enhancing principles for infrastructure-dependent systems. In addition to proposing an expanded list of principles, we illustrate how these principles can co-occur and their interdependencies.     

Using Generational Intelligence to Examine Community Care Work between Younger and Older Adults

Exploring the factors that contribute to sustainable forms of an intergenerational relationship is becoming an important conceptual and practical challenge, not least because of the growing need for an aged care workforce that is both motivated and suitably trained. Generational intelligence is a means of examining interaction between younger and older people which has been applied to community care settings. Dimensions of generational intelligence include recognising and valuing generational differences, finding common ground, plus negotiating social and practical outcomes from the situation. A case study plus a series of qualitative interviews are used to examine the value of this approach both as a means of exploring the processes involved in generational exchange and in providing recommendations for work preparation and training. It is suggested that intergenerational relations have been a missing factor in the understanding of sustainable care and that in future, service delivery should not simply be analysed as comprising professional and lay perspectives but also as containing generationally distinctive perspectives that require negotiation.     

Is the BasicsCard “shaming” Aboriginal people? Exploring the differing responses to welfare quarantining in Cape York

As part of the Cape York Welfare Reform Trial (CYWRT), which has been running in the remote Aboriginal towns of Aurukun, Hope Vale, Mossman Gorge and Coen since 2008, Family Responsibilities Commissioners have the unprecedented ability to quarantine welfare payments. Critics claim this “BasicsCard,” which cannot be spent on alcohol, tobacco, pornography or gambling, brings shame to Aboriginal people – marking them as dependants, deemed incapable of responsible spending. Evaluations of the CYWRT paint a more complicated picture. While many of the “spectators” of the CYWRT report “welfare reform stigma,” the “subjects” themselves are more positive. This paper draws on ethnographic research in Hope Vale to argue that these categories overlap with loosely defined, porous social groups that developed during the town's mission past, described as the “engaged” and “embedded” Hope Valers, respectively. The engaged group tends to be more aware of and sensitive to the views of the dominant society and to subscribe to its “ideology of respectability.” Meanwhile, the latter group tends to adhere to a more egalitarian “ideology of relatedness,” and do not experience the shame, even when their own welfare is quarantined, because the behaviours that trigger quarantining are normalised within their highly circumscribed domain.