Role of workplace safety: a revisit of the relationship between job satisfaction and employment status

This study evaluated the relationship between employment status (i.e., part- and full-time) and job satisfaction, with the focus on the moderating roles of perceived injury risk and injury incidence. The results found that the level of job satisfaction for full-time workers was about the same regardless of the level of injury risk they perceived. In contrast, job satisfaction of part-time workers was significantly higher when they perceived low injury risk rather than high injury risk. The findings also supported the potential adverse impact of injury incidence and injury risk on job satisfaction for both part- and full-time workers. This study highlighted the importance of understanding both workplace safety and job satisfaction when attempting to understand the differences between part-time and full-time workers.     

Judicious order acceptance and order release in make-to-order manufacturing systems

This paper explores a two-stage input control system for fixed capacity make-to-order manufacturing systems (with heavy job tardiness penalties), that selectively accepts incoming orders and holds the accepted ones in a pre-shop queue prior to releasing them to the shop floor. Single-stage input control systems that only allow orders to be delayed in a pre-shop queue (i.e. they do not allow some orders to be rejected) have been previously investigated and found to negatively impact overall due-date performance. The hypothesis motivating this research is that judiciously rejecting a subset of incoming orders can prevent the order release queue from being overloaded when a surge of demand occurs. The input control system is evaluated via experiments using a discrete-event simulation model of a fixed capacity manufacturing system. The experiments reported here suggest that holding orders in the pre-shop queue does not improve due date performance, and that judiciously rejecting orders on its own is a viable alternative mechanism of input control that can deliver improved performance.     

Policing Mental Disorder: Controversies, Myths and Realities

In this article the premises on which Section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 have been evaluated traditionally will be outlined and assessed using data from a recent empirical study. In examining the nature of police action in implementing this provision it is shown that police discretion and ability to act autonomously is constrained by the social context within which officers become involved in incidents and the external influences impinging on police decision making. It is suggested that legalism is inadequate both in accounting for the social realities of policing and relevant social policy implications. Instead, a social constructivist approach capable of accounting for wider influences on police action and mental health policy more generally is advocated as the basis on which to evaluate the future use of the provision.     

Book review

Modeling Multigroup Populations. Robert Schoen. New York: Plenum Press, 1988. 308 pp. $29.50.     

Black-White Differentials in Adult Homicide Mortality in the United States

Objective . This article examines individual level black-white differences in adult homicide mortality. Homicide is a major social problem and a central cause of preventable death in the United States. A homicide not only claims one life prematurely but can also devastate a family, friends, and a neighboring community. Methods . We link eight consecutive years of the National Health Interview Survey (1987–94) to the Multiple Cause of Death file through the National Death Index (1987–97), and use Cox proportional hazard models to examine the role of social factors in black-white homicide mortality in the United States. Results . We find that individual level sociodemographic characteristics—age, sex, marital status, education, employment status, and geographic factors—explain almost 35 percent of the racial differences in homicide mortality. Conclusions . These results demonstrate the contributions that National Center for Health Statistics data can make to criminological literature and reveal the mechanisms through which blacks experience higher homicide mortality than whites. Such illumination may lead to a reduction in the fourth leading preventable cause of death in the United States.     

Using portfolios to stimulate critical thinking in social work education

Each generation of social work educators has grappled with the best way to teach students to become competent social workers. Critical thinking has become one goal in social work education. This paper is premised on the assumption that social work students can develop critical thinking abilities through portfolios. The theory behind the use of portfolios in social work education is a 'hand-in-glove fit' with critical thinking. In addition, portfolios are consonant with social work values of self-determination and individualisation. Portfolios are compendiums of purposefully selected student work to show that the objectives of a programme have been met. They are also useful as an alternative method of student evaluation. Portfolios and critical thinking are partners in educating students to become competent social workers.     

Internalized Other Interviewing in Relational Therapy: Three Discursive Approaches to Understanding its Use and Outcomes

For over 20 years, family therapist Karl Tomm has been engaging families and couples with a therapeutic intervention he calls Internalized Other Interviewing (IOI). The IOI (cf. Emmerson‐Whyte, 2010; Hurley, 2006) entails interviewing clients, from the personal experiences of partners and family members as an internalized other. The IOI is based on the idea that through dialogues over time, one can internalize a sense of one's conversational partner responsiveness in reliably anticipated ways. Anyone who has thought in a conversation with a family member or partner, “Oh there s/he goes again,” or anticipates next words before they leave the other's mouth, has a sense of what we are calling an internalized other. For Tomm, the internalized anticipations partners and family members may have offers entry points into new dialogues with therapeutic potential—particularly, when their actual dialogues get stuck in dispreferred patterns.     

Forecasting Mortality: A Parameterized Time Series Approach

This article links parameterized model mortality schedules with time series methods to develop forecasts of U.S. mortality to the year 2000. The use of model mortality schedules permits a relatively concise representation of the history of mortality by age and sex from 1900 to 1985, and the use of modern time series methods to extend this history forward to the end of this century allows for a flexible modeling of trend and the accommodation of changes in long-run mortality patterns. This pilot study demonstrates that the proposed procedure produces medium-range forecasts of mortality that meet the standard tests of accuracy in forecast evaluation and that are sensible when evaluated against the comparable forecasts produced by the Social Security Administration.     

Ethnicity as cognition

This article identifies an incipient and largely implicit cognitive turn in the study of ethnicity, and argues that it can be consolidated and extended by drawing on cognitive research in social psychology and anthropology. Cognitive perspectives provide resources for conceptualizing ethnicity, race, and nation as perspectives on the world rather than entities in the world, for treating ethnicity, race, and nationalism together rather than as separate subfields, and for re-specifying the old debate between primordialist and circumstantialist approaches.