Making Career Theories More Culturally Sensitive: Implications for Counseling

The primary question addressed in this article is whether and how career theories can be more culturally sensitive without losing value as conceptual explanations or their usefulness for counselors. Contextual action theory is identified as a means to develop culturally sensitive explanations. Six steps are proposed and illustrated, including using the naive observations and subjective reports and recognizing ongoing processes. The use of these steps in counseling is also addressed.     

Making Rural and Remote Communities More Age-Friendly: Experts’ Perspectives on Issues,Challenges, and Priorities

With the growing interest worldwide in making communities more age-friendly, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the factors that help or hinder communities in attaining this goal. In this article, we focus on rural and remote communities and present perspectives of 42 experts in the areas of aging, rural and remote issues, and policy who participated in a consensus conference on age-friendly rural and remote communities. Discussions highlighted that strengths in rural and remote communities, such as easy access to local leaders and existing partnerships, can help to further age-friendly goals; however, addressing major challenges, such as lack of infrastructure and limited availability of social and health services, requires regional or national government buy-in and funding opportunities. Age-friendly work in rural and remote communities is, therefore, ideally embedded in larger age-friendly initiatives and supported by regional or national policies, programs, and funding sources.     

Community college web sites as tools for fostering dialogue

This research brief reports the results of an analysis of community college Web sites as places for fostering dialogic relationships with key publics. Our research suggests that community colleges have created easy to use, information sites that appeal to a variety of publics. With a more attention to the dialogic potential of the Internet, community colleges can better adapt to the needs of their various publics.     

Professional Identity for Clinical Social Workers: Impact of Changes in Health Care Delivery Systems

The recent rapid changes in funding and delivery of mental health services have impacted professional identity for social workers. A study of 127 clinical social workers in 3 different practice settings explored the sense of fit between personal and professional values: How much are they in concert and how much are they in conflict? Social workers described values in their own words. The sense of strain between values varied according to workplace setting. Implications for theory, research, practice, and training are discussed.     

When Numbers Began to Count for Health Policy: A Review Essay*

Books reviewed in this article: Jack M. Hollander , The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment's Number One Enemy Glenn Firebaugh , The New Geography of Global Income Inequality Nancy E. Riley and James Mccarthy , Demography in the Age of the Postmodern Catherine Campbell , ‘Letting Them Die’: Why HIV/AIDS Intervention Programmes Fail Konstantinos Kapparis , Abortion in the Ancient World