Clinical relatedness with persons having schizophrenia: A symbolic interactionist perspective

The practive of psychotherapy with persons having schizophrenia has been increasingly abandoned by clinical social workers, even as an adjunct to broad psychosocial interventions, due to the rise in prominence of case management and biological interventions. The author opposes this trend and presents a rationale for including long-term relationship-based clinical treatment with the client population as a major portion of a comprehensive treatment milieu. This article focuses on the difficult process of developing the treatment relationship and is based on a conceptual framework of symbolic interactionism. The process, including seven practive guidelines, is illustrated with a case example.     

Soa's Version: Ironic Form and Content in The Self‐Account of A Transnational métisse Narrator

In this article I explore the links between the form and content of narratives collected from a young Malagasy/French woman, named Soa, who has recently moved from Madagascar to France. Soa's self‐account is riddled with stories that point out the ambiguities inherent in her experience of life as a woman with feet, and obligations, in two worlds at once. Rather than indicating her confusion or uncertainty, it is argued here that these stories, and the form in which they are presented, indicate the sort of ironic stance that may well be the prerogative of transnational, millionétisse narrators like Soa.     

Cost models for evaluating virtual design strategies in multicycle product families

Rapid technological change and increased competition are forcing firms to compress the time it takes to develop product families and rapidly realize innovations among successive family members (models). Competition in rapidly changing high-variety markets requires effective management of design information across successive generations of products as well as in the same product generation. This paper considers two complementary approaches to design information management: virtual design and modular design. Virtual design describes the abstraction hierarchy used to represent product function. Modular design describes the hierarchy of physical realizations of the product and leads to a group technology approach to manufacturing. An analytical model is used to describe the impact of design management strategy characterized by investment in tools and infrastructure for virtual design and group technology on product development costs. This model provides insight into the impacts on costs of the mix of standard and revised parts in a product family. Virtual design has greatest impact on cost when there is a large proportion of parts revision, while group technology has most impact on cost when large numbers of standard parts are re-used. Effective management strategy for high variety rapidly changing products should combine both of these approaches and emphasize compatible organizational methods and technology integration.     

Screening for elder abuse in hospitalized older adults with dementia

When older adults with dementia are hospitalized for psychiatric treatment, which elder abuse screen to use is questionable. This article reviews screens to identify desirable characteristics. For clinician completion, the Elder Assessment Instrument and the Brief Abuse Screens for the Elderly are recommended. For the older adult, the brief Hwalek-Sengstock Elder Abuse Screening Test is suitable. The Modified Conflict Tactics Scale, which can be used by both the older adult and the nonprofessional caregiver, has many of the recommended characteristics. Research is necessary in the application of these screens within hospitals to detect elder abuse within this specialized population.     

Negotiating user preferences, discrimination, and demand for migrant labour in long-term care

The restructuring of long-term care for older people has been marked both by the role of the market and by the role of migrant labor. This article develops the analysis of these processes at the microlevel of the provision of care. It draws on data collected as part of a cross-national comparative study on the employment of migrant care workers in residential care homes and home care services for older people in England and Ireland. The article examines, first, the ways in which divisions of race, ethnicity, and citizenship shape the preferences of service providers/employers and some service users as regards who provides care. Second, it examines how the institutional context of quasi-markets in long-term care shapes the negotiation of demand for migrant labor, the racialized preferences of individual users, alongside the rights of care workers to non-discrimination. It is argued that market-oriented policies for personalization, as well as for cost containment, raise implications for divisions of race, ethnicity, and citizenship in the provision of long-term care. At the same time, those divisions point to the limits of framing care in terms of the preferences of the individual as opposed to the social relations in which care is embedded.     

Power models and the farm workers' struggle: A case study of the agribusiness vs. UFW conflict

Power elite and pluralist frameworks are used to examine the conflict between farm workers and their employers, in California, from 1850 to 1977. Analysis focuses on four time periods which provide varying support for the contending frameworks. Assumptions and assertions of theorists in each camp are shown to be contradicted by some of the data in this case. We conclude by suggesting that a more accurate theoretical model of our national structure of power would emerge from a series of similar case studies of important national issues. This is a revision of a paper presented at the Eastern Sociological Society Meeting in New York, 1977. The research was supported by a generous grant from the Ford Foundation to the first author.     

The Role of Parentification and Family Climate in Adaptation Among Immigrant Adolescents in Israel

Parentification has been defined as the familial interactional pattern in which children and adolescents are assigned or assume roles and responsibilities normally the province of adults. Two studies were conducted to examine the role that parentification takes in the context of immigration with regard to its impact on adolescent adaptation. In study 1, a comparison between 70 adolescent immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) in Israel with 70 nonimmigrant Israeli adolescents showed higher levels of spousal role taking among the immigrant adolescents. In the case of the immigrants, spousal role taking was seen to involve positive relationships with both parents (as opposed to with only one for the nonimmigrants) and to be associated with better coping with stressful events. In study 2, the association between the incidence of parentification and family climates was explored among 123 adolescent immigrants from the FSU in Israel. Of the three climates found, the optimal cohesive independence‐oriented family climate showed a higher incidence of parentification (parental role taking, spousal role taking, parental role for siblings, and nonspecific adult role taking) as opposed to within the unstructured‐conflict‐oriented and control‐oriented family climates. These results seem to strengthen the position that optimal adolescent development following immigration involves a combination of enhanced familial relatedness and assumption of responsibility within a climate that allows age‐appropriate autonomy.     

Exact intervals and tests for mean of symmetrical population when one "sample" value possibly an outlier

The (continuous) data are n observations that are believed to be a random sample from a symmetrical population. Confidence intervals and significance tests for the population mean are desired. There is, however, the possibility that either the smallest observation or the largest observation is an outlier. That is, the population providing this observation differs from the symmetrical population providing the other n - 1 observations. If this occurs, intervals and tests are desired for the mean of the population providing the other n - 1 observations. Some investigation difficulties can be overcome if intervals and tests can be developed that are simultaneously usable for all of these three situations (a confidence coefficient, or significance level, has the same value for all three situations). Two kinds of intervals and tests with this property are developed. These results always involve both the next to smallest observations and should have at least moderately high efficiencies. Also, some extensions are considered, such as allowing each observation to be from a different population.     

Concepts of Risk in Relation to Organizational Structure and Functioning within the Personal Social Services and Probation

The main argument of this paper is that personal social services, including probation, at both a policy and practice level are increasingly focused on issues of risk. We postulate that risk assessment, risk management, the monitoring of risk and risk-taking itself are rapidly becoming the dominant raison d'être of such agencies, thus supplanting ideologies of meeting need or welfare provision. In turn they have become key to priority setting and rationing, the basis for organizational rationales and structures, the central focus for professional activity and accountability, and measuring quality. Thus an analysis of risk as an organizing principle offers fundamental insights into the rapidly changing nature and organization of statutory social work and probation. There is very little literature that focuses on risk across the spectrum of services. Risk analysis, as such, is most developed in the criminal justice and child protection fields. However, the mental health literature, being centrally preoccupied with notions of dangerousness, is quickly adopting risk terminology. Apart from work on elder abuse, literature on child welfare and community care has been framed in terms of need, issues of risk only coming to the fore around potential admission to residential care. We contend that as issues of rationing and accountability become more dominant, so do concerns with risk. Thus we predict the extension of notions of risk as central organizing principles throughout the social services and probation.