Disability and Adult Education - the consumer view

Developments in recent years have shown an increasing interest in the educational needs and aspirations of disabled adults. There is still, however, limited research information representing the disabled person's voice. This paper describes the outcomes from a survey of the educational experiences of 44 physically disabled adults in the North West of England. The findings indicated that, usually, the earlier someone had acquired a disability, the less likely they were, as adults, to have achieved professional or higher qualifications, and that the level of qualifications reached among women being surveyed was particularly low. Barriers to course attendance reflect both attitudinal and practical access issues, with underachievement often the result of oppression from a variety of sources. Both positive and negative experiences from disabled adults form the basis of recommendations for an equal opportunities approach to adult education for disabled people around the themes of integration, self worth, empowerment and consultation.     

African American Gay Family Networks: An Entry Point for HIV Prevention

Gay families are constructed support networks that gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals of color form, often in response to societal marginalization and rejection from biological families. Research on these family structures has been scarce, with little focus on the experience of African American gay family networks in the South. The current grounded theory qualitative study focused on the experiences of 10 African American male and transgender individuals between the ages of 18 and 29 from gay families in the Mid-South, and explored the ways these families addressed safe-sex issues and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) risk prevention. Results revealed that families can play a role in either increasing HIV risk (e.g., ignoring HIV issues, encouraging such unsafe behaviors as exchanging sex for money or drugs, stigmatizing HIV-positive people) or decreasing it (e.g., intensive, family-level prevention efforts at safe-sex practices and family support for HIV treatment adherence). The potential of these family networks for HIV prevention and adherence efforts is considered.     

Self‐Help Career Services: A Case Report

Self‐help career services represent an important form of career intervention rarely described in the literature. Using a case‐report approach, the author describes this type of career intervention, which was guided by cognitive information processing theory and Holland's ( 1997 ) typological theory. The report offers an example of appropriately identifying client readiness to engage in career counseling using a 3‐tier model for service delivery composed of direct, brief, and self‐help interventions. It also demonstrates an effective method for translating theory to practice, a particularly critical need in the career development field. The outcome of the intervention supports a differentiated model of career services that increases client accessibility to those services.     

Sexual professionalism: for whom? The case of sexual facilitation in Swedish personal assistance services

Sexuality is a taboo subject in disability services, leading to insecurity for both service users and personnel about how to handle upcoming situations. In Sweden, there is also a lack of policy in this area, highlighting the need to study sexuality both as an individual and a political, and in this case also, depoliticized issue. A critical feminist policy analysis reveals that norms around disability, sexuality and professionalism in a particular legal, political and cultural context strongly influence the willingness to recognize disabled people’s sexual rights. The Swedish case indicates a need for increased transnational work to develop ethical, professional and non-discriminatory rights-based approaches to sexual facilitation.     

Joint coverage probability in a simulation study on continuous-time Markov chain parameter estimation

Parameter dependency within data sets in simulation studies is common, especially in models such as continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs). Additionally, the literature lacks a comprehensive examination of estimation performance for the likelihood-based general multi-state CTMC. Among studies attempting to assess the estimation, none have accounted for dependency among parameter estimates. The purpose of this research is twofold: (1) to develop a multivariate approach for assessing accuracy and precision for simulation studies (2) to add to the literature a comprehensive examination of the estimation of a general 3-state CTMC model. Simulation studies are conducted to analyze longitudinal data with a trinomial outcome using a CTMC with and without covariates. Measures of performance including bias, component-wise coverage probabilities, and joint coverage probabilities are calculated. An application is presented using Alzheimer's disease caregiver stress levels. Comparisons of joint and component-wise parameter estimates yield conflicting inferential results in simulations from models with and without covariates. In conclusion, caution should be taken when conducting simulation studies aiming to assess performance and choice of inference should properly reflect the purpose of the simulation.     

Differential associations and concordance across measures of parent emotion socialization: The role of parent and adolescent emotion dysregulation

Although parent ratings, adolescent ratings, and observations are all utilized to measure parent emotion socialization during adolescence, there is a lack of research examining measurement differences and concordance. Thus, the present study compared three measures of parent supportive and nonsupportive emotion socialization and examined whether parent and adolescent emotion dysregulation differentially related to these measures or moderated concordance across measures. Participants were a community sample of 92 adolescent-parent dyads. Adolescents were 13–17 years-old (M = 15.5, SD = 1.1), 41 were female and 51 were male; 87% of parents identified as mothers. Observed emotion socialization was coded during a parent-adolescent conflict discussion task. The adolescent and parent also rated the parent's supportive and nonsupportive reactions to the adolescent's negative emotions; they each also rated their own emotion dysregulation. Due to data collection timing, COVID-19 family stress was also assessed and explored as a covariate in analyses. Bivariate correlations indicated that there were weak and non-significant correlations across emotion socialization measures. Multilevel models indicated that measures of parent emotion socialization were differentially associated with adolescent emotion dysregulation, with adolescent emotion dysregulation relating significantly to adolescent ratings, but not observations or parent ratings, of parent emotion socialization. In addition, multiple regressions indicated that there was less concordance across measures when parents were higher in emotion dysregulation. Results suggest that measurement may influence researchers’ conclusions about how youth adjustment relates to parent emotion socialization. Additionally, there may be even lower agreement across measures of parent emotion socialization when parents have emotional challenges.