Testing Respite Effect of Work on Stress Among Mothers of Children with Special Needs

Extant research is ambivalent about whether or not working outside the home provides mothers of children with special needs a buffer against the stressful effects of caregiving. The empirical evidence of a respite effect is based primarily on small, non-probability samples. The study reported here used a large nationally representative sample of families from the National Survey of American Families (NSAF) and analysis that addressed the biasing effects of simultaneity between the dependent variable (parent stress) and employment. Results produced are consistent with a caregiver-specific respite effect from work, at least among mother caregivers of older children who were not concerned that working will have negative effects on their child’s well-being and who worked regular shifts in higher level occupations.     

Entscheiden und Gestalten für Pflegekräfte: Die „Kür“ der institutionellen Altenarbeit

Limited financial resources and the establishment of standards of care define the work of employees in the care for the elderly. The residents, their family members and the employees share the aim of individual care which exceeds the bottom quality, the priority aim of executive-staff. In order to provide individual care it is essential for nursing-staff to have potential capacities for decision-making and participation. To empirically investigate the situation concerning decision-making and participation, I conducted guided interviews with nursing-staff and executive-staff in a residential home for the elderly in Linz. Amongst others the results show a massive area of conflict, which is based on the different constructions of care work by nursing-staff on the one hand and executive-staff on the other hand.     

Correspondence

This article encourages elementary teachers to offer opportunities for their students to critically analyze maps as part of powerful geography instruction in order to help them become well-informed and civic-minded citizens. The article reviews challenges to powerful geography instruction, including traditional geography textbooks and pedagogy and the additional efforts needed to encourage students to examine maps critically and identify distortions and biases. Teachers may introduce critical map reading by having students create and analyze their own maps of familiar places and create a safe classroom environment for questioning maps. The article suggests teachers encourage critical thinking with maps by using a variety of projections, such as conformal, equal area, and “upside down” maps which portray different perspectives, distortions, and biases, ask students to compare land areas on different maps, and determine the value of different maps. Finally, the article describes the effectiveness of several strategies the author uses with preservice elementary teachers in a social studies methods course to help them consider the cartographer's influence on maps, the distortions and biases in maps, and the strengths and weaknesses of various maps they might use in elementary classrooms.     

Rank-order choice-based conjoint experiments: Efficiency and design

In a rank-order choice-based conjoint experiment, the respondent is asked to rank a number of alternatives of a number of choice sets. In this paper, we study the efficiency of those experiments and propose a D-optimality criterion for rank-order experiments to find designs yielding the most precise parameter estimators. For that purpose, an expression of the Fisher information matrix for the rank-ordered conditional logit model is derived which clearly shows how much additional information is provided by each extra ranking step. A simulation study shows that, besides the Bayesian D-optimal ranking design, the Bayesian D-optimal choice design is also an appropriate design for this type of experiments. Finally, it is shown that considerable improvements in estimation and prediction accuracy are obtained by including extra ranking steps in an experiment.     

Welfare Program Implementation and Parents' Depression

This study examines how the frontline practices in welfare offices explain variation in program impacts on parents' depression. The study uses data from four large-scale experimental studies and conducts multilevel statistical modeling on 6,761 families in 22 local welfare offices. Analyses examine the ways that two program implementation practices (emphasis on quick job entry and personal client attention) are associated with program impacts on parents' depressive symptoms. Effects vary by the age composition of the parents' children, such that programmatic emphasis on quick job entry is associated with increases in depression among parents with preschool-age children but not among parents with school-age children. Findings have implications for research, policy, and practice.     

Vladimir Nabokov’s Poetry in Russian Émigré Criticism: A Partial Survey

Scholarship on Radishchev has so far neglected his fascinating letters from exile (1791–1801), using it primarily as source material on the writer’s biography or ideas, instead of analyzing it as a part of Radishchev’s text. The present paper examines how the writer uses his letters to build his new public image, after it has been destroyed by his arrest and trial. But Radishchev also uses them to stage his intimate body, in order to arouse his addressees’ interest and pity. Finally, he at times turns this real body into a rhetorical one, which fulfills different functions, from staging a fictitious intimacy in place of Radishchev’s real one when it is not satisfactory, to serving as a symbolic gift for his protector Count Alexander Vorontsov. The study of this specific issue sheds a new light on the writer.     

Career Counseling for Women Preparing to Leave Abusive Relationships: A Social Cognitive Career Theory Approach

Career counselors work with people from varied segments of society. For battered women, some of the challenges they face from intimate partner violence may significantly influence their career exploration and decision making. Social cognitive career theory (SCCT; R. W. Lent, S. D. Brown, & G. Hackett, 1994) is a framework that has important implications for working with these women. In this article, the authors present the unique career needs of battered women terminating abusive relationships, the relevance of SCCT to this population, strategies for using SCCT when working with these women, and a case study illustrating effective use of SCCT.     

Implementation of a Bayesian adaptive design in a proof of concept study

With increased costs of drug development the need for efficient studies has become critical. A key decision point on the development pathway has become the proof of concept study. These studies must provide clear information to the project teams to enable decision making about further developing a drug candidate but also to gain evidence that any effect size is sufficient to warrant this development given the current market environment. Our case study outlines one such proof of concept trial where a new candidate therapy for neuropathic pain was investigated to assess dose-response and to evaluate the magnitude of its effect compared to placebo. A Normal Dynamic Linear Model was used to estimate the dose-response--enforcing some smoothness in the dose-response, but allowing for the fact that the dose-response may be non-monotonic. A pragmatic, parallel group study design was used with interim analyses scheduled to allow the sponsor to drop ineffective doses or to stop the study. Simulations were performed to assess the operating characteristics of the study design. The study results are presented. Significant cost savings were made when it transpired that the new candidate drug did not show superior efficacy when compared placebo and the study was stopped.