Post-traumatic stress disorder and health-related quality of life in female victims of intimate partner violence

The association between post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and health-related quality of life (QOL) in female victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) was examined. The Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36) was used to evaluate health-related QOL. IPV victims with PTSD (IPV/PTSD+; n = 18), IPV victims without PTSD (IPV/PTSD-; n = 22), and a non-abused control group (NA; n = 30) were compared. Multiple Analyses of Covariance (covarying for socioeconomic status and age) indicated that the three groups scored significantly differently on health-related QOL, and the IPV/PTSD- group was significantly more impaired than the NA group. IPV/PTSD+ subjects were significantly more impaired than IPV/PTSD- subjects on physical functioning, mental health, vitality, role limitations due to emotional health, and social functioning. Multiple regression analyses indicated that PTSD severity was a significant statistical predictor of SF-36 mental health composite scores (but not of physical health composite scores), after controlling for depressive symptomatology and extent of physical and psychological abuse.     

Adapting the jury trial for program evaluation: A report of an experience

A portion of the graduate program in clinical community psychology at SUNY Buffalo was subjected to a jury trial as a form of program evaluation. The theory of the trial as evaluation, the problems of implementation, and a posttrial evaluation are discussed. The trial, while time-consuming, especially in its pretrial phases, has the potential for presenting a dramatic picture of a program through the medium of human testimony. The jury was able to arrive at clear decisions on questions put to it, with a high degree of confidence. Decision makers accepted some of the jury's conclusions, and subjective evidence suggests that many of the controversial issues which generated the trial were resolved for the group by the procedure. The posttrial evaluation revealed limitations, such as evidence which was not presented at the trial. The experience proved useful for purposes of interdisciplinary education, providing another lens through which the evaluation problem could be viewed.     

An evaluation of analysis options for the one-group-per-condition design. Can any of the alternatives overcome the problems inherent in this design?

This article addresses the analytic problems associated with a design in which one identifiable group is allocated to each treatment condition and members of those groups are measured to assess the intervention. Such designs are often called quasi-experiments if the groups are not randomized to conditions and group-randomized trials if the groups are randomized. They present special problems, and previous reports have argued against their use in efficacy or effectiveness trials. Even so, this design still appears with surprising frequency. This article presents the results from a new simulation study that underscores the analytic problems associated with this design.     

Deniable Degradation: The Finger-Imaging of Welfare Recipients

Using finger-imaging of welfare recipients as an example, the concept of deniable degradation is delineated as a counterpoint to Garfinkel's notion of degradation ceremonies. Deniable degradation involves the use of procedures that can be legitimated in instrumental terms, but that also evoke cultural symbols of humiliation and degradation. Responses of welfare recipients to finger-imaging, drawn from interviews and other qualitative sources, reveal a mixture of themes, ranging from approval of finger-imaging because it enables them to distance themselves from welfare fraud to outrage at a procedure that is viewed as criminalizing welfare receipt.     

Using Auxiliary Time-Dependent Covariates to Recover Information in Nonparametric Testing with Censored Data

Murrayand Tsiatis (1996) described a weighted survival estimate thatincorporates prognostic time-dependent covariate informationto increase the efficiency of estimation. We propose a test statisticbased on the statistic of Pepe and Fleming (1989, 1991) thatincorporates these weighted survival estimates. As in Pepe andFleming, the test is an integrated weighted difference of twoestimated survival curves. This test has been shown to be effectiveat detecting survival differences in crossing hazards settingswhere the logrank test performs poorly. This method uses stratifiedlongitudinal covariate information to get more precise estimatesof the underlying survival curves when there is censored informationand this leads to more powerful tests. Another important featureof the test is that it remains valid when informative censoringis captured by the incorporated covariate. In this case, thePepe-Fleming statistic is known to be biased and should not beused. These methods could be useful in clinical trials with heavycensoring that include collection over time of covariates, suchas laboratory measurements, that are prognostic of subsequentsurvival or capture information related to censoring.     

The im/mobilities of ‘sometimes-migrating’ for abortion: Ireland to Great Britain

ABSTRACT

This paper furthers the concept of im/mobilities through an investigation of the reproductive mobilities of women migrating for abortion from Ireland (north and south) to Great Britain. Where more often the focus of reproductive mobilities concerns the movement of people and matter in order to reproduce, there is less (although some) attention to movement aligned with the prevention of reproduction. We consider the variegated im/mobilities of conception not brought to birth, in the frictional movement of people, things, ideologies and imaginations in staying with and moving beyond the dichotomy of mobility and immobility. We engage in transdisciplinary dialogue between mobilities and migration studies. Hence, underlying this exploration is the concept of the ‘sometimes-migrant’, used to challenge binary oppositions between mobility and immobility, broader conceptualisations of ‘migrants’ as ‘exceptional’, and more specifically the notion of travelling for abortion as ‘abortion-tourism’. We adopt the call to focus on different incarnations of the ‘sometimes-migrant’ in the form of women travelling temporarily across national borders of intermittent porosity in order to seek care that is not available in their own country. Intersections of migration and mobilities reveal the ways women are im/mobilised through geopolitical and cultural practices at local and global scales.