EFFECTS OF A FAMILY-ORIENTED TRAINING EXPERIENCE ON THE ROLE OF THE PHYSICAL THERAPIST

This article describes ways in which a family-oriented psychologist contributed to a reconceptualization of the appropriate role for the physical therapist in patient care. The article identifies aspects of the changing role of the physical therapist, specifically its expansion to include skilled psychosocial interaction with patient and family for the purposes of reassurance, support and instruction. A primary shift involved changing from focus on the individual and his or her disability to focus on the patient in the context of his or her family. The article briefly describes elements of appropriate psychological training which can be incorporated successfully in a physical therapy educational experience, and concludes with a case example illustrating the basic points relevant to this type of interdisciplinary collaboration.     

Research Note—A Pilot Cyber Counseling Course in a Graduate Social Work Program

Cyber counseling is a new and growing medium for offering mental health services to children and youth. However, there is a lack of identification of the core competencies required to provide effective online counseling. A school of social work, in partnership with a national service agency providing online counseling to children and youth, developed and offered a 13-week course to participating MSW social work students and agency staff. The development of online counseling competencies was assessed through individual interviews with participants and a content analysis of online posts. Participants scored well in areas of assessment and intervention. Challenges were identified in relationship building within an online environment.     

Disseminating Effective Community Prevention Practices: Opportunities for Social Work Education

In the United States about 17% of adolescents meet diagnostic criteria for mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders. Six million young people receive treatment services annually for mental, emotional, or behavioral problems. These problems affect 1 in 5 families and cost $247 million annually (O'Connell, Boat, & Warner, 2009). Some strategies for preventing mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders in young people have been developed, tested, and found to be effective in preventing the onset, persistence, and severity of psychological disorders, drug abuse, and delinquency. Unfortunately, tested and effective prevention policies, programs, and practices are not widely used (O'Connell, Boat, & Warner, 2009). This paper highlights recent advances in prevention science and describes some opportunities and challenges in advancing the use of science-based prevention in communities. The chapter concludes by exploring the potential role of social work education in developing a workforce ready to increase community access to effective prevention strategies.     

Reintegration upon return: insights from Ecuadorian returnees from Spain

Using the ECM2 survey data on Ecuadorian migrants returning from Spain, we investigate the determinants of reintegration upon return. We study how the migration experience, but also the before‐ and after‐migration characteristics, correlate with migrants’ outcomes upon return. We adopt a broad conception of reintegration, considering jointly labour market‐related outcomes that proxy for structural reintegration and subjective indicators that provide insights on sociocultural reintegration. The determinants of these two types of outcomes appear to be different: reintegration indeed encompasses multiple dimensions which cannot be captured by a single indicator. Our results suggest that return assistance programmes’ efficiency in helping reintegration could be improved by (I) targeting, ex‐ante, returnees who plan to launch their own business, and, ex‐post, the most vulnerable workers (women, older returnees, unemployed), and (ii) facilitating the labour market integration of foreign‐educated returnees. They also call for further research to better understand the consequences of these programmes.     

Marital Status and Social Well-Being: Are the Married Always Better Off?

This study uses pooled cross-section time-series data, over the years 1982, 1992 and 2000, to estimate the impact of various restrictive abortion laws on the demand for abortion. This study complements and extends prior research by explicitly including the price of obtaining an abortion in the estimation. The empirical results show that the real price of an abortion has a statistically and numerically significant negative impact on abortion demand. Over the period 1982–2000 approximately 20% of the decline in the incidence of abortion was due solely to the increase in the real price of obtaining an abortion. A state Medicaid funding restriction of abortion and a parental involvement law reduce the abortion demand, but a state waiting period and a mandatory counseling law have no statistically significant impact on the abortion demand. The empirical results also provide support for the hypothesis that increases in abortion costs not only reduce the number of abortions, but also reduce the number of pregnancies by altering women’s sexual/contraceptive practices.

RELATIVISM AS A CULTURAL INFLUENCE ON TWENTIETH CENTURY DECISION MAKING

Culturally determined norms are seen as guides to the subjective components in the decision process. An understanding of normative elements in choicemaking must therefore begin with an analysis of the culture relevant to the decision. Ways in which the Western twentieth-century intellectual and cultural climate have influenced the ability of modern managers to make value-laden decisions are examined. Implications of relativism for management decision making along with the influences of relativistic decision making on organizational health also are discussed.