Burnout and Death Anxiety in Hospice Social Workers

Hospice work has been regarded as particularly stressful due to the complexity inherent in the provision of end-of-life care. Burnout and death anxiety are especially relevant to hospice social workers because they regularly function in a high-stress, high-loss environment. The purpose of this study was threefold: to determine the prevalence of burnout and death anxiety among hospice social workers; to examine associations between burnout and death anxiety; and to explore the factors which may contribute to the development of death anxiety and burnout. Participants completed four items: the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS), the Death Anxiety Questionnaire (DAQ), a demographic questionnaire, and a set of open-ended questions. Findings indicate that mean scores on the subscales of the MBI-HSS ranged from the low to moderate range and that a strong positive correlation existed between death anxiety and the depersonalization subscale of the MBI. Three key themes emerged from the qualitative data: (a) personal interest in hospice social work developed through a variety of ways; (b) although death anxiety decreased from exposure and understanding of the death process, there was increased death anxiety surrounding working with certain patients; and (c) burnout was primarily related to workload or difficult cases.     

Adolescent Emotion Socialization: A Longitudinal Study of Friends' Responses to Negative Emotions

Although peer influences are thought to be critically important to adolescent development, there is a paucity of research investigating the emotion socialization practices that take place between adolescents. This longitudinal study evaluated close friends' responses to negative emotion using a newly developed assessment tool of peer emotion socialization, you and your friends. Adolescent participants (N = 205) exhibiting a range of internalizing and externalizing problems between 11 and 17 years of age were assessed and re‐evaluated two years later. Participants were asked to rate the frequency with which their friends responded to them by encouraging, distracting, matching, ignoring, overtly victimizing, and/or relationally victimizing their emotions. The results indicated high levels of internal consistency and moderate levels of long‐term stability. Close friends most often responded supportively to the participants' emotional displays, but these responses differed by gender. Also, friends' emotion socialization responses were concurrently and predictively associated with participant problem status. This study contributes to a better understanding of the processes by which adolescents' emotions are socialized by their friends and has important implications for future prevention and intervention efforts.     

Long Distance Psychoanalysis

This article describes a psychoanalytic treatment that was conducted, in large part, by telephone. In this case, the dilemma of how to make contact with a schizoid patient without intruding intensifies when treatment shifts to the phone. The patient's dissociated feelings of dependence are enacted in the transference-countertransference dynamic. A holding environment is re-established, enabling dissociated experience to be integrated. The telephone's simultaneous separateness and connection provide a transitional space in which to work on ambivalence about dependency. The patient moves from communicating through dissociative projections, enactments and physical contact toward verbal symbolic communication.     

Oil Spill Disruption and Problem Drinking: Assessing the Impact of Religious Context among Gulf Coast Residents

Population Research and Policy Review - While a wide body of research has indicated that social resources may be enhanced through religious practice, few studies have explored how social resources...     

Networks Versus Need: Drivers of Urban Out-Migration in the Brazilian Amazon

As urbanization rates rise globally, it becomes increasingly important to understand the factors associated with urban out-migration. In this paper, we examine the drivers of urban out-migration among young adults in two medium-sized cities in the Brazilian Amazon—Altamira and Santarém—focusing on the roles of social capital, human capital, and socioeconomic deprivation. Using household survey data from 1,293 individuals in the two cities, we employ an event history model to assess factors associated with migration and a binary logit model to understand factors associated with remitting behavior. We find that in Altamira, migration tends to be an individual-level opportunistic strategy fostered by extra-local family networks, while in Santarém, migration tends to be a household-level strategy driven by socioeconomic deprivation and accompanied by remittances. These results indicate that urban out-migration in Brazil is a diverse social process, and that the relative roles of extra-local networks versus economic need can function quite differently between geographically proximate but historically and socioeconomically distinct cities.     

Population Trends as a Counterweight to Central City Decline, 1950–2000

The share of metropolitan residents living in central cities declined dramatically from 1950 to 2000. We argue that cities would have lost even further ground if not for demographic trends such as renewed immigration, delayed childbearing, and a decline in the share of households headed by veterans. We provide causal estimates of the effect of children on residential location using the birth of twins. The effect of veteran status is identified from a discontinuity in the probability of military service during and after the mass mobilization for World War II. Our results suggest that these changes in demographic composition were strong enough to bolster city population but not to fully counteract socioeconomic factors favoring suburban growth.     

Evaluating Climate Migration

Climate change will negatively impact human communities and ecosystems, including driving increased food insecurity, increased exposure to disease, loss of livelihood and worsening poverty. Recent climate debates have focused attention on climate migrants, people who are displaced by the ecological stresses caused by climate change. To date, these debates have focused a great deal of attention on state security issues and have left the gender implications largely unexplored. In this article we examine the securitization of climate migration debates through gender lenses. We find that gender helps reveal and focus attention on the human security implications of climate migration and offers a useful discourse for climate policymaking.