SOCIAL AND FAMILIAL ASPECTS OF ATTEMPTED AND COMPLETED SUICIDE OF YOUNG PEOPLE IN VICTORIA

A prospective study of youth suicide was carried out to determine the causes of the dramatic increase of suicide rates in males 15 to 25 years of age. Comprehensive information was collected through coronial enquiries on all 148 cases of completed youth suicide in Victoria during a 16 month period. Similar data were obtained through in-depth interviews of 105 hospitalised and 101 non-hospitalised attempters. In this paper only social and familial aspects of youth suicide are covered. Whilst the family setting of youth who attempted or completed suicide was similar to that of the general population, a higher proportion were homeless or living alone. Contrary to common assumptions, family relationships were much closer among completed than among attempted suicides. The unemployment rates were not higher than in all young people, and few subjects named unemployment as cause, but a relatively high number of them were neither studying nor looking for work. A high proportion of those who completed suicide had prior contact with the police. In conclusion, social factors do not significantly affect suicidal behaviour in young people.     

Tackling and Mitigating Health Inequalities – Policymakers and Practitioners ‘Talk and Draw’ their Theories

In the context of a long‐standing academic acceptance of the socially structured nature of health inequalities, there has been a growing literature that critically examines policies that aim to reduce them. This has demonstrated inadequate policy assessment of the nature of the problem of health inequalities and correspondingly partial solutions that privilege interventions that focus on individual lifestyle solutions over more structural approaches. Much of the research that has been undertaken in this field to explore competing theories of inequalities has analyzed national policy documents or the views of senior policy advisers rather than practitioners. This study uses Raphael’s ‘seven discourses of the social determinants of health’ to understand the implicit theories of health inequalities of both practitioners and policymakers working within a single health care system as they talk about different policy typologies. To help penetrate potentially well‐rehearsed discourses about health inequalities, it tests a visual method of stimulating discussion about how different types of policy might operate to narrow/widen existing gaps in outcomes. Building on Raphael, it finds that individuals’ theories of health inequalities contain co‐existing although not synthesized material and behavioural explanations and that, although the social patterning of material disadvantage was recognized, the role of power and politics is underplayed. Variations between participants did not align with role (policy/practice) and using visual methods to represent the impact of different policy types on health inequalities, though challenging for participants, stimulated reflection about a subject matter that has otherwise become rather stagnant.     

Urbanization impacts on land snail community composition

Urbanization has tremendous impacts on most native species. This is especially true in land snails, which are surprisingly understudied organisms. Due to their low mobility and dispersal potential, land snails are valuable indicators of ecosystem disturbance. For this study, land snails were collected in 54 city parks along an urban gradient to understand impacts of urbanization on snail communities. Sampled parks include small extensively landscaped downtown parks, neighborhood and community parks, district parks, and large nature parks, each with variable vegetation, soil characteristics, disturbance regimes, and human activities. Sampling recovered 12,153 individual snails, representing 20 families, 43 genera, and 95 species. Seven new Tennessee state and 87 new county occurrences were recorded. Five non-native and one extra-limital non-native species were found, four of which are new Tennessee state records. Results show that urbanization greatly alters land snail community structure. Nature and district parks have significantly greater species richness, species diversity and species evenness than community, neighborhood, and downtown parks. Degradation of parks, distance from the park to the commercial city center and percent of coarse woody debris accounted for most of the variation between park types. Non-metric multidimensional scaling and pairwise Jaccard indices indicate that downtown snail communities are more similar whereas snail communities in nature parks are more distinct. This suggests that urbanization promotes homogenization among land snail communities. We also show that this homogenization is thus far driven mainly by synanthropic, broadly adapted native species rather than non-native snail species.     

Turf disputes within federal systems: Leadership amidst enforceable checks and balances

Organizational leadership is a complex set of interdependent processes that occur within specific contexts. This article explores the case of leadership within a federal system where the members have legally enforceable powers, they operate within a system of checks and balances, there is no single “boss,” and the goal is not solely efficiency. Federal systems provide alternative mechanisms for managing change and organizational leadership. Terms are defined to derive a model of turf disputes. This model is applied to the historical case of the “turf war” between a U.S. President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the U.S. Senate over his 1937 attempt to “pack” the U.S. Supreme Court. This leads to a more general discussion of turf disputes and their occurrence. They are manifestations of underlying, unresolved authority-task gaps which become virtual-like organizational arrangements. The LAMPE (Leadership, Authority, Management, Power, and Environments) theory of organizational leadership appears to be appropriate for analyzing organizational leadership in federal systems.     

Is ‘Candidacy’ a Useful Concept for Understanding Journeys through Public Services? A Critical Interpretive Literature Synthesis

Across the public sector there is concern that service uptake is inequitably distributed by socio‐economic circumstances and that public provision exacerbates the existence of inequalities either because services are not allocated by need or because of differential patterns of uptake between the most and least affluent groups. A concept that offers potential to understand access and utilization is ‘candidacy’ which has been used to explain access to, and utilization of, healthcare. The concept suggests that an individual's identification of his or her ‘candidacy’ for health services is structurally, culturally, organizationally and professionally constructed, and helps to explain why those in deprived circumstances make less use of services than the more affluent. In this article we assess the fit of candidacy to other public services using a Critical Interpretive Synthesis of three case studies literatures relating to: domestic abuse, higher education and environmental services. We find high levels of congruence between ‘candidacy’ and the sampled literatures on access/utilization of services. We find, however, that the concept needs to be refined. In particular, we distinguish between micro, meso and macro factors that play into the identification, sustaining and resolution of candidacy, and demonstrate the plural nature of candidacies. We argue that this refined model of candidacy should be tested empirically beyond and within health. More specifically, in the current economic context, we suggest that it becomes imperative to better understand how access to public services is influenced by multiple factors including changing discourses of deservedness and fairness, and by stringent reductions in the public purse.