Vulnerability and disability: a citizenship perspective

This article discusses vulnerability and disability focusing on inclusion and citizenship, inspired by Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach and Martha Fineman’s vulnerability theory. A public speech held at the 200th anniversary of the Norwegian Constitution is used as an exemplary case. The speaker, a woman with Down syndrome, challenges the Norwegian politic of inclusion. By drawing on perspectives from Nussbaum and Fineman, the article argues that a political concept of the person must emphasize individuals as vulnerable together with a recognition of disability as inherent in humanity. Vulnerability and disability are equally important for building future societies characterized by non-discrimination and equal citizenship.     

Project Employ: engineering hope and breaking down barriers to homelessness

The homeless population in the US has dramatically increased in the past two decades. People who are homeless often lack skills sets such as stress management and social skills, independent living skills, and skills for vocational and leisure engagement. Best practice vocational education and training programs for individuals who are homeless recognize that success in the worker role often hinges on a person's capacity to manage day-to-day living. Life skills and pre-employment training are essential components of vocational programs but no more important than interpersonal skill development including anger management, developing self esteem and motivation, building goal setting capacity, and skills for money management, personal budgeting and self-advocacy. These areas of performance have all been traditionally included in occupational therapy's domain of practice. This article describes Project Employ, a grant funded supportive employment program that has grown out of collaboration between Duquesne University's Department of Occupational Therapy and Bethlehem Haven, an emergency shelter and residential recovery program and primary service provider for homeless people in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The purpose of this article is to describe the history, structure and outcomes of Project Employ.     

Instructions for Authors

Instructions for Authors

Instructions for Authors     

Smooth Estimation of the Reliability Function

Problems with censored data arise quite frequently in reliability applications. Estimation of the reliability function is usually of concern. Reliability function estimators proposed by Kaplan and Meier (1958), Breslow (1972), are generally used when dealing with censored data. These estimators have the known properties of being asymptotically unbiased, uniformly strongly consistent, and weakly convergent to the same Gaussian process, when properly normalized. We study the properties of the smoothed Kaplan-Meier estimator with a suitable kernel function in this paper. The smooth estimator is compared with the Kaplan-Meier and Breslow estimators for large sample sizes giving an exact expression for an appropriately normalized difference of the mean square error (MSE) of the two estimators. This quantifies the deficiency of the Kaplan-Meier estimator in comparison to the smoothed version. We also obtain a non-asymptotic bound on an expected ₁-type error under weak conditions. Some simulations are carried out to examine the performance of the suggested method.     

Navigating human rights across the life course

Issues related to human rights have increasingly moved to the forefront of professional concern in recent years. Despite this, there has been minimal attention paid to exploring how changing human needs across the lifespan impact upon human rights. This paper takes a broad look at human rights issues that occur across the life course, and uses examples of life course transitions to illuminate issues related to moral rights and human rights. The examples include family formation, raising children, adolescent maturation in the context of youth offending and grandparents parenting their grandchildren. Each example explores the contestable rights and responsibilities of children, young people and adults and the ways in which these are negotiated within the context of the family.     

Into adulthood: a follow-up study of 718 young people who were placed in out-of-home care during their teens

In this study, national register data were used to analyse long‐term outcomes at age 25 for around 700 Swedish young people placed in out‐of‐home care during their teens. The sample consisted of 70% of all 13‐ to 16‐year olds who entered out‐of‐home care in 1991. Results revealed a dividing line between young people placed in care for behavioural problems and those placed for other reasons. Young woman and men from the first group had – in comparison with peers who did not enter care – very high rates of premature death, serious involvement in crime, hospitalizations for mental‐health problems, teenage parenthood, self‐support problems and low educational attainment. Young people who were placed for other reasons had better outcomes, but still considerably worse than non‐care peers. Young women tended to do better than young men, regardless of reasons for placement. Very high rates of hospitalizations for mental health problems were found among young people placed for behavioural problems. Breakdown of placement was found to be a robust indicator of poor long‐term prognosis.     

Religiosity and preferences for life-prolonging medical treatments in African-American and white elders: a mediation study

Research on end-of-life treatment preferences has documented robust racial differences, with African-Americans preferring more life-prolonging treatment than Whites. Although little research has attempted to explain these racial differences systematically, speculation has centered on religiosity. We examined a dimension of religiosity frequently invoked in end-of-life research-guidance by God's will-as a potential mediator of racial differences in such treatment preferences. Three hundred African-American and White men and women aged 60 or older participated in a 35-minute telephone interview that elicited preferences for four common life-prolonging treatments in each of nine health scenarios. The questionnaire included the five-item God's will (GW) scale, a health conditions checklist, a depression measure, and sociodemographic questions. GW mediated racial differences at least partially for most treatments and in most health scenarios. Implications are discussed for understanding end-of-life treatment preferences and why races tend to differ.