Concurrent reductions in psychotropic medication,assault, and physical restraint in two residential treatment programs for youth

Over the past decade, the level of clinical needs of youth in residential treatment has increased significantly. Youth in out-of-home settings typically experience higher levels of psychotropic medication use than their peers living at home, even when controlling for the severity of clinical issues. The purpose of the current study was to examine the effects of an approach to clinically reassess psychotropic medication utilization for youth residing in residential treatment settings while also observing the impact on the youth's need for physical containment. Medication changes were based on a data-informed process, using input from a multi-disciplinary treatment team. Data for 531 youth who were consecutively admitted to one of two non-affiliated intensive residential treatment programs, one in the Midwest and one in New England, was analyzed. Over half of these youth (n = 292, 55%) had their medications reduced during their stay and only 14% (n = 76) were prescribed more medication at discharge than they had been taking at admission. The remainder either saw no change during their stay (n = 104, 20%) or were never on medication at any time (n = 59, 11%). From admission to discharge there was a 62% decrease in the number of assaultive incidents as well as a 72% decrease in the use of physical restraints. These results support the view that residential treatment can provide a treatment milieu that allows for thoughtful reassessment of the clinical basis for behavioral disorders in children that can achieve the dual goals of medication reduction and behavioral stabilization.     

Measuring Pupil Activity

After the end of World War I, Congress enacted a bill that would reward military veterans for their service. The bill provided the veterans cash bonuses that would be paid starting in 1945. But as the nation settled into the Great Deression these veterans began to clamor for payment of their bonuses. In May of 1932, and estimated 15,000 veterans and their families made their way to Washington D. C. The events of the “Bonus Army” provide the basis of a lesson for students to examine the plight of these veterans and the eventual response of the federal government to later pass the GI Bill of Rights.     

Editorial

The first issue of a new journal is an ideal place to dis-cuss the purpose and scope of that journal. With as few words as possible I shall try to describe to prospective authors what may be accepted for publication and at the same time inform prospective readers what they may expect.     

Lesbian brides: post-queer popular culture

The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of lesbian representations in European and North American popular culture, particularly within television drama and broader celebrity culture. The abundance of “positive” and “ordinary” representations of lesbians is widely celebrated as signifying progress in queer struggles for social equality. Yet, as this article details, the terms of the visibility extended to lesbians within popular culture often affirm ideals of hetero-patriarchal, white femininity. Focusing on the visual and narrative registers within which lesbian romances are mediated within television drama, this article examines the emergence of what we describe as “the lesbian normal.” Tracking the ways in which the lesbian normal is anchored in a longer history of “the normal gay,” it argues that the lesbian normal is indicative of the emergence of a broader post-feminist and post-queer popular culture, in which feminist and queer struggles are imagined as completed and belonging to the past. Post-queer popular culture is depoliticising in its effects, diminishing the critical potential of feminist and queer politics, and silencing the actually existing conditions of inequality, prejudice, and stigma that continue to shape lesbian lives.     

Investigating call record data using sequence analysis to inform adaptive survey designs

Researchers have become increasingly interested in better understanding the survey data collection process in interviewer-administered surveys. However, tools for analysing paradata capturing information about field processes, also called call record data, are still not yet fully explored. This paper introduces sequence analysis as a simple tool for investigating such data with the aim of better understanding and improving survey processes. A novel approach is to use sequence analysis within interviewers, which allows the identification of unusual interviewer calling behaviours, and may provide guidance on interviewer performance. Combining the technique with clustering, optimal matching and multidimensional scaling, the method offers a way of visualising, displaying and summarising complex call record data. The method is introduced to inform survey management and survey monitoring. The method is hence informative for adaptive survey designs and will help to identify unusual behaviour and outliers and to improve survey processes. Sequence analysis is applied to call record data from the UK Understanding Society survey. The findings inform further modelling of call record data to increase efficiency in call scheduling.     

Identifiable state‐space models: A case study of the Bay of Fundy sea scallop fishery

State‐space models (SSMs) are now popular tools in fisheries science for providing management advice when faced with noisy survey and commercial fishery data. Such models are often fitted within a Bayesian framework requiring both the specification of prior distributions for model parameters and simulation‐based approaches for inference. Here we present a frequentist framework as a viable alternative and recommend using the Laplace approximation with automatic differentiation, as implemented in the R package Template Model Builder, for fast fitting and reliable inference. Additionally we highlight some identifiability issues associated with SSMs that fisheries scientists should be aware of and demonstrate how our modelling strategy surmounts these problems. Using the Bay of Fundy sea scallop fishery we show that our implementation yields more conservative advice than that of the reference model. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 47: 27–45; 2019 © 2018 Statistical Society of Canada     

Profile parallelism in repeated measures designs

Three statistics are developed to test tor treatment by time interaction after a certain point in repeated measures designs under several covariance matrix configurations, viz., unstructured, spherically symmetric and autoregressive. An example is fully developed.     

Passing through difference: C.L.R. James and Henry Lefebvre

ABSTRACT

This essay offers a comparative analysis of the work of Henri Lefebvre and C.L.R. James, both key contributors to the emergence of a humanist form of Marxism in the twentieth century. Independently of each other, both writers, I show, developed a mode of critique which emphasised capitalism’s dehumanizing social effects, and which rejected a merely instrumental or utilitarian political response. Consequently, both writers placed critical emphasis on those longings and demands made evident in the insurgent politics of everyday life and popular culture; in what both conceptualised as a search for ‘happiness‘. But at the same time, the comparison is important because it makes evident the extent of the divisive intellectual legacies of empire within European Marxism. Lefebvre’s work bears in itself the marks of a racialised understanding of human relations; the ’human’ of which he speaks is limited in ways that James challenged consistently.     

Recognising Strategy and Tactics in Constructing and Working with Involuntary Social Work Clients

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on the author’s academic work on working with involuntary clients, which began with a knowledge exchange project in Scotland. I reflect back on this work and use it as a way to explore subsequent reflections on the field. These move beyond consideration of the skills required to undertake such work through locating the category of involuntary clients within wider, yet contradictory, governmental discourses on client engagement. These are identified as the strategy that sets the context for such work. But the strategy is enacted through the day-to-day tactics of social workers on the ground; such tactics, enacted in everyday encounters, are constitutive of effective but also ineffective engagement with clients. The discussion goes on to problematise the distinction between voluntary and involuntary clients and to suggest that effective social work practice, whatever the nature of that involvement, requires that clients are recognised at an ethical and relational level.

IMPLICATIONS

• The term involuntary client(s) cannot be taken for granted but is constructed and needs to be understood in particular and often contradictory policy and professional contexts.

• Effective but also ineffective ways of working with involuntary clients go beyond the acquisition or demonstration of particular skills but are embodied in the everyday relational practices of social workers.

• Ethical engagement with involuntary clients proceeds from a sense of mutual recognition.