The Social Psychology of Compassion

This article places social work clinicians’ compassion fatigue, burnout, and other negative consequences in a broader context of positive social work. We argue for a paradigm shift towards identifying the factors that lead clinical social workers toward human flourishing in their field. We introduce a model for creating “compassion satisfaction” or feelings of fulfillment with clients, rooted in positive psychology and expanded to incorporate the social work perspective. The model suggests that affect, work resources, and self-care influence clinicians’ positivity–negativity ratio, which in turn can result in compassion satisfaction. To maximize compassion satisfaction, research, education, and training should consider how classroom instruction and workplace policies can promote the most success among clinical social workers.     

Event Catalogs as Theories

All empirical social research rests, at least implicitly, on not one but two theories: a theory explaining the phenomenon under study, another theory explaining the generation of evidence concerning the phenomenon. The two theories necessarily interact, setting important constraints on each other. The second theory answers questions about how the phenomenon leaves traces, how analysts can observe those traces, and how analysts can reconstruct attributes, elements, causes, and effects of the phenomenon from those traces. As employed in studies of contentious politics, event catalogs raise all these questions. Competing conceptions of the phenomenon under study as protest, as collective violence, as collective action, as conflict, and as contentious claim-making imply different measurement strategies. The strategy of aggregation follows plausibly from identification of the phenomenon as protest or violence, the strategy of incidence from most of the competing conceptions, the strategy of internal regularities only from treatments of the crucial phenomenon as collective action, conflict, or contentious claim-making.     

Practice and Outcomes of Multidisciplinary Research for Environmental Sustainability

Since about 1990, when sustainability became a key concept for a wide range of scientific disciplines, the need for multidisciplinary collaboration has increased. We present five illustrative cases from the long-standing environmental research work at the University of Groningen. The projects described are about hazardous materials risk, odor annoyance, energy scenario evaluation, climate decision analysis, and household consumption, respectively. The various case discussions emphasize experiences in research conceptualization, project design and execution, main findings, policy advice and surplus value, and difficulties met. Conclusions and recommendations are presented about the practice of multidisciplinary research. Finally, some challenges for research and development about environmental sustainability are discussed.     

Wealth, Reservation Wealth, and the Decision to Retire

This paper introduces a model of retirement wealth choice. Reservation wealth is defined as the level of wealth at which an individual is indifferent between retiring and not retiring. Economic theory is used to generate hypotheses concerning how an individual's characteristics determine his or her reservation wealth. An econometric strategy is outlined for estimating these determinants, given that reservation wealth is not directly observed. This strategy is then employed using the 1992 Survey of Consumer Finances. The findings imply that individuals respond fairly conservatively, with respect to their retirement planning, to changes in their income. It is also found that married men and women choose their reservation wealth in very different ways.     

Shaping Clients' Answers: Departures from neutrality in care-staff interviews with people with a learning disability

What can happen when care staff interview clients with a learning disability? We examine tape-recordings of five questionnaire-based interviews designed to yield information on the clients' perceptions of the quality of the service provided to them. Of interest was the way in which the care staff, who were not formally trained in interview skills, delivered the 42-item questionnaire that formed the basis for the interview. It was discovered that interviewers replicated a number of non-neutral practices previously identified in a set of similar interviews administered by formally-trained professionals. They also introduced further deviations from neutral interviewing. The effect of these practices on the information recorded as the respondents' answers is discussed. We note that any interviewer is faced with a dilemma of choosing between literal (but potentially robotic and insensitive) and tailored (but potentially unstandardised and invalid) administration of a questionnaire. We argue that the deviations we see here show the interviewers falling on the side of 'liberal' administration. The net effect was arguably to prompt 'better' answers. When what is being recorded is an 'audit' of services provided to respondents, there is a real-life danger that their perceptions are being improved by what is ostensibly a neutral interview.     

Importance of Distributional Form in Characterizing Inputs to Monte Carlo Risk Assessments

The selection among distributional forms for inputs into uncertainty and variability (e.g., Monte Carlo) analyses is an important task. This paper considers the importance of distributional selection by examining the overall and tail behavior of the lognormal, Weibull, gamma, and inverse gaussian distributions. It is concluded that at low relative standard deviation (below 1), there is less of a difference between upper tail behavior among the distributions than at higher RSD values. Sample sizes in excess of 200 are required to reliably distinguish between distributional forms at the higher RSD values. The likelihood statistic appears to offer a reasonable approach to distributional discrimination, and it, or a similar approach, should be incorporated into distributional fitting procedures used in risk analysis.