Expert witness evaluation of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and return to work

This author was hired by a defendant's attorney as an expert witness in the evaluation of a plaintiff who filed a lawsuit for the loss of her job and concomitant income due to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms acquired after sustaining a traumatic injury. This writer evaluated her symptoms, level of function, roles, and interests using a variety of assessments. This case study is a report of the evaluation. The results indicated that the plaintiff developed adequate coping mechanisms to manage her symptoms of PTSD in order to function in her diverse and chosen roles of worker, mother, care giver, wife, family member, volunteer, home maintainer, and religious participant even though she did not return to her prior place of employment. Because of these results, the case was settled out of court in the favor of the defendant.     

Shortcuts in complex engineering systems: a principal-agent approach to risk management

In this article, we examine the effects of shortcuts in the development of engineered systems through a principal-agent model. We find that occurrences of illicit shortcuts are closely related to the incentive structure and to the level of effort that the agent is willing to expend from the beginning of the project to remain on schedule. Using a probabilistic risk analysis to determine the risks of system failure from these shortcuts, we show how a principal can choose optimal settings (payments, penalties, and inspections) that can deter an agent from cutting corners and maximize the principal's value through increased agent effort. We analyze the problem for an agent with limited liability. We consider first the case where he is risk neutral; we then include the case where he is risk averse.     

Trends and transitions from secondary school: insights from a boarding school for disadvantaged New Zealand youth

Engagement in further education, employment or training following the completion of compulsory schooling is an important predictor of adult life adjustment. As a key microsystemic context, supportive school environments can facilitate positive transitions, especially for disadvantaged youth who are at higher risk of underachievement and not engaging in further education, employment or training (NEET) in emerging adulthood. The present research consists of quantitative and qualitative analyses of secondary data of three student cohorts from a New Zealand boarding secondary school for males from disadvantaged backgrounds to investigate positive transition outcomes and experiences. The quantitative study (N = 178) compared participants’ educational attainment and NEET status across cohorts and with national statistics. Results showed that participants’ achievement and transition outcomes were consistently superior to the national comparison. The qualitative study (N = 38) examined the subjective experiences of a subsample of participants who transitioned to tertiary study and apprenticeship courses. These findings highlight the importance of cultivating students’ holistic development during the secondary school years. Implications for secondary schools are discussed.     

Nursing home administrators' views of volunteers' work in an ombudsman program

This research investigated nursing home administrators' (NHAs) perceptions of visits of volunteers in an ombudsman program in relation to effectiveness and satisfaction. Unlike placements of other volunteers made at the behest of organizations, visits of volunteer advocates, which may be mandated and include evaluative assessments of care, usually do not occur at the invitation of NHAs. Yet, outcomes for administrators are not often studied. Despite research showing stress attributed to interaction with state agencies, questionnaire data from 196 NHAs indicated that more contact between volunteers and NHAs was associated with perceptions of greater effectiveness and satisfaction. Those who found visits infrequent and with little impact rated the work of volunteers as less effective and were less satisfied. Qualitative data describe unexpected benefits of visits that were internal and external to the facilities.     

Family support, social capital, resilience and adolescent coping

All too often young people are excluded in practice from the general policy and professional consensus that partnership and participation should underpin work with children, young people and their families. If working with troubled and troublesome young people is to be based on family support, it will require not only the clear statement of that policy but also demonstration that it can be applied in practice. Achieving that involves setting out a plausible theory of change that can be rigorously evaluated. This paper suggests a conceptual model that draws on social support theory to harness the ideas of social capital and resilience in a way that can link formal family support interventions to adolescent coping. Research with young people attending three community‐based projects for marginalized youth is used to illustrate how validated tools can be used to measure and document the detail of support, resilience, social capital and coping in young people's lives. It is also suggested that there is sufficient fit between the findings emerging from the study and the model to justify the model being more rigorously tested.     

Community Partnerships: Integrating Early Education with Childcare

This study reports on research into a Local Authority initiative in York, in North Yorkshire which aimed to establish early education and childcare partnerships between its 51 primary schools and local early‐years providers from the community‐voluntary and private sectors in close geographical proximity to the schools. The initiative was named Shared Foundation Community Partnerships.     

Preface

Being raised by a single mother is one factor that has been suggested as contributing to the plight of African American males. Yet few studies have focused specifically on African American single mothers' experiences with raising sons. This qualitative study explored the following questions: (1) What are the experiences of African American single mothers in the raising of their sons? (2) What coping strategies do African American single mothers use in the raising of their sons? Two rounds of unstructured open-ended interviews were conducted with 11 African American single mothers of at least one son. Implications for family therapy based on the interviews are presented.     

Female genital mutilation: Conditions of decline

Female genital mutilation (or femalecircumcision) has been experienced by over 100 millionwomen in sub-Saharan Africa and the Nile valley.Efforts to suppress the practice were made in theearlier decades of the present century, especially bymissionaries in Kenya in the 1920s and early 1930s.Successful indigenous opposition to this activity ledto a cultural relativist attitude toward FGM beingdominant among governments and international bodiesfor the next half century. This situation has changedover the last 20 years as the women's movement has ledan attack on the practice, so that by the mid-1990sall relevant major international bodies andgovernments without exception had committed themselvesto its suppression. Nevertheless, efforts to counterFGM have often been weak and there has been littleevidence of their success. This paper draws on acontinuing research program among the Yoruba peopleof southwest Nigeria to show not only that FGM hasbegun to decline but that this occurrence can beexplained wholly by programs organized by theMinistry of Health and women's organizations. Thefocus of this paper is on the determinants of thischange. These are shown to be: (1) a reduction inceremonies associated with the practice, (2) itsincreasing medicalization, (3) indigenous secularcampaigning based on the provision of information, and(4) a focus on individuals, especially women. There islittle belief that the campaign is an assault on theculture, but rather a growing feeling, especiallyamong those influenced by it, that it would be moreappropriate once such a campaign has begun for it tobe whole-hearted rather than lukewarm.     

Short Notices

Allen G. Debus (ed.), Medicine in Seventeenth Century England. A Symposium Held at UCLA in Honor of C. D. O'Malley (1974), xiii+485 (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, £8.50).

R. Quinault and J. Stevenson (eds.), Popular Protest and Public Order (1974), 242 (Allen and Unwin, £5.25).

Michael S. Cross (ed.), The Workingman in the Nineteenth Century (1975), xii+316 (Oxford University Press, Toronto, paperback £3.80).

Charles Rearick, Beyond the Enlightenment. Historians and Folklore in Nineteenth‐Century France (1974), xiv+206 (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, £3.65).

Malcolm I. Thomis, The Town Labourer and the Industrial Revolution (1974), vi + 247 (Batsford, £4.00, paperback £2.00).

John Woodward, To Do The Sick No Harm. A Study of the British Voluntary Hospital System to 1875 (1974), xii + 221 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, £5.50).

Alison Ravetz, Model Estate: Planned Housing at Quarry Hill, Leeds (1974), xvi + 251 (Croom Helm, £5.50).

Sergio Columbeanu, Granges exploitations domaniales en Valachie au XVIIIe siècle (Wallachian great estates in the eighteenth century) (1974), 199 (Editura Acadcmiei Republicii Socialiste Romania, Buearest, paperback Lei 8.75).     

Playful Seriousness: The Virtue of Eutrapelia in Dialogue

In Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle identified three moral spheres associated with human communication: speaking with decorum, conversation, and social conduct. Each sphere has a corresponding virtue. The virtue in speaking with decorum is truthfulness, the virtue in conversation is eutrapelia (refined, playful wit), and the virtue in social conduct is friendliness. Eutrapelia is gained in part by education and in part by personal experience. One learns to habituate oneself in conversation to avoid the excessive vice of bomolochos and the deficient vice of agroikos. A communicator enacts phronesis to deliberate good communicative choices, relying on one’s awareness of ethics, tact, and ingeniousness. Eutrapelia functions in dialogue to reveal unexpected connections in language, to open new interpretations in linguistic speculation, to negotiate meaning in the play of language, and to potentially shift one’s horizon of understanding about the content under consideration. Enacting eutrapelos as both refined humor and keen insight offers a place of respite that allows one to engage in the playful seriousness that is the hermeneutic work of dialogue.