The Internet: An Essential Tool for College Health Networking

Abstract

With the advent of the Internet, college health professionals have available to them a new setting in which to network. The Internet provides opportunities for immediate communication with a large and diverse community of colleagues. Through both the Student Health Service (SHS) Discussion Group and numerous health-related databases, the Internet serves as a powerful research tool for program development and improvement. Answers to queries about practice options, solutions for local problems, and support of innovative policies can be received almost instantaneously from college health professionals from across the United States and Canada. In this article, the authors summarize the history and current use of the SHS Discussion Group, provide a brief overview of Internet basics, and identify more advanced uses of the Internet by college health professionals.     

Being central to decision making means I am still here!: The essence of decision making for people with dementia

The ability to make choices and decisions, and to have those decisions upheld, is central to self-determination. For people living with a diagnosis of dementia, however, it can be difficult to remain involved in decision making. While many studies show that people with mild or moderate dementia have the ability to participate in decision making, there are also indications that the attitudes of those around them, including health professionals and family carers, can sometimes be a barrier, and there is generally little understanding about the nature of decision making for this population. This small pilot study draws on van Manen's approach to phenomenology to explore the essence of decision making for people living with dementia. The findings highlight the importance of remaining central to decision making, and the key role that subtle support from carers plays in enabling this.     

Finding identity without discrimination: the plight of Arab American adolescents

This study investigated the relationship between self-reported discrimination and ethnic identity among 61 Arab American adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18 years. Participants completed the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM) to obtain an assessment of their ethnic identities. Additionally, the lead author developed a questionnaire asking participants to self-report if either they or another Arab student they knew had been ‘treated badly or differently because of their ethnicity’. Consistent with the rejection-identification model, respondents who had reported experiencing discrimination, knowing of others who had experienced discrimination, or both had higher ethnic identity scores than those who had not, although the only significant difference was found between the group that experienced both types of discrimination and the non-discrimination group. Implications of these results are discussed as well as directions for future research.     

Dis-integrated policy: welfare-to-work participants' experiences of integrating paid work and unpaid family work

Using a critical feminist theoretical lens, we followed 17 families for one year – as they attempted to make the transition from welfare to work – eliciting narrative accounts of their day-to-day lives. We used an institutional–ethnographic methodology to analyse the data. Our study shows that the juncture at which unpaid caring work and paid employment meet may be more difficult to negotiate for low-income lone-parent families than for coupled, middle-class employed families. Findings reveal that the unpaid work that happened on the edges of a paid work day, what we refer to as ‘the work outside the work’, took considerable time and energy for participants, making it difficult for them to procure and/or sustain employment. This was due to a number of factors including their limited access to economic and non-economic resources, and the complex nature of their lives, including struggles with day-to-day functioning and childcare arrangements. These challenges, combined with the realities of the low-income labour market made it difficult, if not impossible, for most participants to effectively integrate work and family. These findings suggest that the dis-integrated nature of welfare-to-work policies, which overlooks the actualities of low-income parents’ lives, limits families’ ability to become self-sufficient.     

Fixed-parameter tractability of anonymizing data by suppressing entries

A popular model for protecting privacy when person-specific data is released is k -anonymity. A dataset is k-anonymous if each record is identical to at least (k−1) other records in the dataset. The basic k-anonymization problem, which minimizes the number of dataset entries that must be suppressed to achieve k-anonymity, is NP-hard and hence not solvable both quickly and optimally in general. We apply parameterized complexity analysis to explore algorithmic options for restricted versions of this problem that occur in practice. We present the first fixed-parameter algorithms for this problem and identify key techniques that can be applied to this and other k-anonymization problems.     

The impact of therapist pregnancy on the treatment process

Therapist pregnancy is a powerful emotional stimulus and a real-life event that affects clients and the treatment process. In the present paper, previous literature is reviewed and clinical experiences of the author in a university counseling center are reported to address how therapist pregnancy influences clinical treatment. Although therapists often hesitate in emphasizing their pregnancy, evidence suggests that it is easy to underestimate the importance of the pregnancy for clients. Case examples are presented which demonstrate client responses and the significance of the pregnancy for four female clients. Gender differences in client reactions are not fully understood, and it may be particularly difficult to facilitate male clients in dealing with issues stimulated by the pregnancy. These clinical findings suggest that in a variety of settings, understanding and working with clients' reactions to the therapist's pregnancy can enhance treatment.     

Qualitative research in family therapy: publication trends from 1980 to 1999

In the early 1990s, scholars from a variety of disciplines encouraged greater inclusion of qualitative research methodology in the mental health field. Moon, Dillon, and Sprenkle (1990) hoped their paper “Family therapy and qualitative research” would serve as a stimulus for further development of qualitative research in the field of family therapy. Ten years later, entering the new millennium, has the field been influenced by recommendations for an increase in use of qualitative methodology in family therapy? A content analysis was conducted on articles published in the marriage and family therapy literature from 1980 to 1999. Of the numerous articles examined in four journals, 131 articles were published using qualitative research methodology. Findings support the contention that qualitative research is increasing, but still accounts for a small number of research articles published in marriage and family therapy journals.     

How will the British post office cope with technological change

This article considers the trends and the new technologies available to the Post Office which will have some bearing of the transfer of message carrying fromt the Post to Telecommunications. It also considers the practicalities of electronic mail and the future prospects for the traditional mail service. The objective is to provide some practical guidelines for the communications input to corporate planning.     

Motives for sharing illness experiences on Twitter: conversations of parents with children diagnosed with cancer

A patient- and family-centred approach in paediatric health care is important because parents are involved in making key decisions about their child’s health care and advocating for the best interest of the child. Parents and family members are increasingly turning to the internet to find and actively share information about their child’s health care. Twitter is one of many online platforms used by parents of children diagnosed with cancer to share information related to their child’s cancer experience. Existing research suggests that there is a need to better understand the motives for using Twitter for sharing content about a child’s cancer experience. Furthermore, there is a lack of theoretical frameworks for characterizing those motives. In this paper, we identify key themes of tweets posted by parents of children diagnosed with cancer and align those themes with motives inspired by the well-studied Everyday Life Information Seeking framework. We propose a new motive in addition to those associated with the framework and suggest that information can be shared for endogenous reasons as well as to meet the needs of others. This paper contributes an increased understanding of motives for sharing information about a child’s cancer journey and extends a theoretical framework for building further knowledge in this area.