Re-Imagining Family Therapy: Choosing the Metaphors We Live By

This paper examines the influence of dominant metaphors in everyday and professional language, and relates this theme to emerging concerns with the historically dominant metaphor in family therapy: the family viewed as a system. Increasing interest is being shown in the development of alternative metaphors, especially those based on aspects of language and literary practice e.g. conversation, discourse, rhetoric, narrative and text. However, the fundamental question remains: how do we choose the metaphors we wish to live by? To address this question, a journey into postmodernist cultural studies is made and the concept of the ethical-poetical imagination is borrowed as a criterion for comparison and choice. From this vantage point, preferences for the metaphorical future of ‘postmodernist’ family therapy are expressed and explained.     

Eye-Tracking Data: New Insights on Response Order Effects and Other Cognitive Shortcuts in Survey Responding

Survey researchers since Cannell have worried that respondents may take various shortcuts to reduce the effort needed to complete a survey. The evidence for such shortcuts is often indirect. For instance, preferences for earlier versus later response options have been interpreted as evidence that respondents do not read beyond the first few options. This is really only a hypothesis, however, that is not supported by direct evidence regarding the allocation of respondent attention. In the current study, we used a new method to more directly observe what respondents do and do not look at by recording their eye movements while they answered questions in a Web survey. The eye-tracking data indicate that respondents do in fact spend more time looking at the first few options in a list of response options than those at the end of the list; this helps explain their tendency to select the options presented first regardless of their content. In addition, the eye-tracking data reveal that respondents are reluctant to invest effort in reading definitions of survey concepts that are only a mouse click away or paying attention to initially hidden response options. It is clear from the eye-tracking data that some respondents are more prone to these and other cognitive shortcuts than others, providing relatively direct evidence for what had been suspected based on more conventional measures.     

超越帝国主义和恐怖主义的新文明:生态纪研究和过程思想的作用

在长达 5 0年的“冷战”期间 ,由于西方资本主义和东方共产主义两大力量在世界戏剧舞台上扮演着主导的角色 ,世界保持着一种“不稳定”的稳定状态。今天 ,很多力量在竞争全球或地区霸权 ,而美国是世界的超级大国 ,它通过军事力量、经济影响和文化 ,对世界事务实施一种帝国统治。但这种统治决不意味着全部。在很多地方 ,宗教的、地区的和民族的运动大胆并热情 ,然而也带着莽撞 ,它们毫不理睬创造一个全球的、现代化社会的努力。在帝国主义和恐怖主义所造成的混乱的世界秩序里 ,远古的甚至是原始的理解正与现代性信条相竞争。文章提出生态纪研究和过程思想 ,它为建设性的后现代的未来文明提供充满希望的、奠基性的哲学要素     

A cross-national study of a method for researching non-profit organisational effectiveness

Are there criteria that define non-profit organisation effectiveness? If the criteria can be identified, is it possible to use them in a comparative study to assess whether and in what way the use of the criteria may vary between nations? This study addresses both questions. The study uses the factorial survey method and is based on the social constructionist conception that effectiveness is created as an ongoing and sometimes contested outcome of a social judgement process. We illustrate the method with samples from the US and UK and compare the results. The results establish the value of the factorial survey method. Analyses show that both US and UK respondents use percentage expenditures on fund-raising, advocacy emphasis, change in financial surplus and unit cost of services as effectiveness criteria. There is evidence that voluntarism is a more important criterion in the US and that advocacy is more important in the UK.     

The Experience and Practice of Approved Social Workers in Northern Ireland

Correspondence to Dr Roger Manktelow, School of Social and Community Sciences, University of Ulster Magee College, Derry, BT48 7JL, Northern Ireland. Summary This article reports on the first extensive survey of ApprovedSocial Worker (ASW) activity under the Mental Health (NorthernIreland) Order 1986. The integrated health and social servicesorganizational structure, the adverse effects on individualmental health of the legacy of thirty years of civil conflictand the move from hospital to community care are significantfeatures which have influenced the delivery of mental healthsocial work services locally. The practice and experience ofASWs was surveyed by postal questionnaire and user and carerexperience of compulsory hospital admission was investigatedby a series of focus groups. The study revealed that two-thirdsof ASWs had experience of acting as an applicant in compulsoryhospital admission during the past two years. Nearly half (42per cent) of these ASWs had reported experience of between oneand five admissions and one-tenth had completed over twentyadmissions in the two-year period. In only a small minorityof cases did joint face-to-face assessment with the GeneralPractitioner (doctor) take place; nearly half of ASWs reporteddifficulties in obtaining transport; and only one-fifth of ASWshad experience of acting as a second approved social worker.Half of ASWs reported experience of guardianship, either asapplicant or in making the recommendation. Both service usersand carers reported a lack of understanding about the role ofthe ASW and complained about the lack of alternative resourcesthat ASWs could use to prevent hospital admissions. These findingsare discussed and a number of recommendations are proposed forimprovements to approved social worker practice.     

Ethics and Choosing Appropriate Means to an End: Problems with Coal Mine and Nuclear Workplace Safety

A common problem in ethics is that people often desire an end but fail to take the means necessary to achieve it. Employers and employees may desire the safety end mandated by performance standards for pollution control, but they may fail to employ the means, specification standards, necessary to achieve this end. This article argues that current (de jure) performance standards, for lowering employee exposures to ionizing radiation, fail to promote de facto worker welfare, in part because employers and employees do not follow the necessary means (practices known as specification standards) to achieve the end (performance standards) of workplace safety. To support this conclusion, the article argues that (1) safety requires attention to specification, as well as performance, standards; (2) coal-mine specification standards may fail to promote performance standards; (3) nuclear workplace standards may do the same; (4) choosing appropriate means to the end of safety requires attention to the ways uncertainties and variations in exposure may mask violations of standards; and (5) correcting regulatory inattention to differences between de jure and de facto is necessary for achievement of ethical goals for safety.     

Analysing partial ranks by using smoothed paired comparison methods: an investigation of value orientation in Europe

Summary. This paper introduces the paired comparison model as a suitable approach for the analysis of partially ranked data. For example, the Inglehart index, collected in international social surveys to examine shifts in post-materialistic values, generates such data on a set of attitude items. However, current analysis methods have failed to account for the complex shifts in individual item values, or to incorporate subject covariates. The paired comparison model is thus developed to allow for covariate subject effects at the individual level, and a reparameterization allows the inclusion of smooth non-linear effects of continuous covariates. The Inglehart index collected in the 1993 International Social Science Programme survey is analysed, and complex non-linear changes of item values with age, level of education and religion are identified. The model proposed provides a powerful tool for social scientists.