EFFECTS OF A FAMILY-ORIENTED TRAINING EXPERIENCE ON THE ROLE OF THE PHYSICAL THERAPIST

This article describes ways in which a family-oriented psychologist contributed to a reconceptualization of the appropriate role for the physical therapist in patient care. The article identifies aspects of the changing role of the physical therapist, specifically its expansion to include skilled psychosocial interaction with patient and family for the purposes of reassurance, support and instruction. A primary shift involved changing from focus on the individual and his or her disability to focus on the patient in the context of his or her family. The article briefly describes elements of appropriate psychological training which can be incorporated successfully in a physical therapy educational experience, and concludes with a case example illustrating the basic points relevant to this type of interdisciplinary collaboration.     

The role of interagency collaboration for substance-abusing families involved with child welfare

Meeting the needs of families involved with the child welfare system because of a substance abuse issue remains a challenge for child welfare practitioners. In order to improve services to these families, there has been an increasing focus on improving collaboration between child welfare, treatment providers, and the court systems. This paper presents the results from qualitative interviews with 104 representatives of these three systems that explore how the collaborative process works to benefit families, as well as the barriers and supports for building successful collaborations. Results indicate that collaboration has at least three major functions: building shared value systems, improving communication, and providing a "team" of support. Each of these leads to different kinds of benefits for families as well as providers and has different implications for building successful collaborative interventions. Despite these putative benefits, providers within each system, however, continue to struggle to build effective collaborations, and they face such issues as deeply ingrained mistrust and continued lack of understanding of other systems' values, goals, and perspectives. Challenges that remain for successful collaborations are discussed.     

Authorship and publication practices: evaluation of the effect of responsible conduct of research instruction to postdoctoral trainees

We have studied postdoctoral trainees funded by NIH F32 fellowship awards in order to test the effectiveness of responsible conduct of research (RCR) education in the areas of authorship and publication practices. We used a 3-wave telephone and on-line survey design, conducted over a period of two years, in order to test for individual change before and after completing RCR education. Overall the responses of the subjects suggested a clear awareness of standards and practices in publication. However, our results failed to suggest that RCR education in this group significantly increased the level of ethically appropriate behavioral responses measured in the study. Similarly we saw no significant effect on increasing awareness of or attention to ethical guidelines about authorship and publication practices. Our interpretation of these null findings was influenced by the significant publication experience of our cohort of subjects. We forward possible explanations for these null findings in this context. Most importantly, we do not suggest that our results argue against continued instruction in RCR education. Instead, we believe our data reinforce the importance of careful articulation of course goals and objectives with attention to the background and experience of the student audience when developing RCR curricula.     

Towards an Organisational Model of Marital Instability

This paper parts company from psychological and much of systems based theorising on the nature of marital instability, and asks whether there might not be fresh insights available from a model of organisational recuperation and decay derived from economic and political analysis. It focuses on situations of incipient marital breakdown as ones in which the participants are confronted by a choice between exit, voice and loyalty, and draws out some of the analytical and therapeutic implications of such an approach.     

Policy-making for immigration and integration in Québec: degenerative politics or business as usual?

Policy Design Theory (PDT) predicts that the distribution of the costs and benefits of governmental intervention depends on the social construction and level of power of target groups. The case of Québec, Canada, which recently went through acrimonious policy debates on immigration and integration issues, does not correspond to this pattern. Degenerative politics – that is, the stigmatization of powerless groups and an unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of governmental intervention to the detriment of the most vulnerable – did not occur even if the conditions were seemingly in place to produce it. Using Québec as a ‘most likely’ case, I show that the policy-making sphere remained immune to the degenerative dynamics that took hold in the media and the legislature. More precisely, I argue that three interrelated factors explain the results: past policies and their unintended consequences, an implementation structure committed to the needs of immigrants, and the specific incentive structure facing political actors. The results question the transferability of PDT outside of the institutional setting of the USA, where it was first developed and applied.     

Gender-based violence and the Arms Trade Treaty: reflections from a campaigning and legal perspective

The Arms Trade Treaty, the first treaty to regulate the international transfer of conventional arms and ammunition, was adopted in 2013 at the United Nations. It aims to regulate the flow of weapons around the world by requiring governments to assess all arms transfers against a set of criteria, before the transfer is authorised or denied. The agreed criteria include language on the risks of gender-based violence. This is a landmark provision, and shows that the issues of women, peace and security have successfully moved into the realm of mainstream security. This article explores how this happened, and the lessons campaigners can learn from this campaign success. The article also explores what the implications are for progress on reducing gender-based violence in conflict, and the areas of uncertainty as attention turns to the treaty's implementation.     

Discussion of Hughes’ “There’s No Such Thing as a Whole Story”

The discussion of Elizabeth Hughes’ essay “There’s No Such Thing as the Whole Story” seeks to argue that a biopsychosocial perspective can flesh out understanding of what occurs at the level of discourse by adoptees. Underpinning such discourses, it is argued, is an experience-dependent view of the embodied mind. From this perspective understanding of the unconscious is situated biopsychosocially and includes aspects of how an autobiographical sense of self (Damasio, 2011) is embedded in memory.