A qualitative inquiry into women’s experiences of severe maternal morbidity

Severe acute maternal morbidity (SMM) is a near-death experience during pregnancy, childbirth or termination of a pregnancy. Nine women recruited from hospital intensive care or high dependency units following the birth of their baby participated in two qualitative interviews about their SMM experience. The interpretative phenomenological analysis led to the identification of three superordinate themes related to participants: moving from a state of normal pregnancy to being severely unwell, being in critical care and returning to normal. Participants’ transition to a SMM event occurred quickly and was frightening, with participants expressing concerns about their husbands/partners’ trauma. Participants’ time in hospital was particularly hard for those separated from their baby, with this eased by staff kindness and family support. After discharge participants continued to seek explanations for their SMM. Implications include more formal support for mothering when women are in maternal critical care, and support for husbands/partners following a SMM event.     

Secondary Trauma: A Team Approach

Bearing witness to trauma stories can evoke in clinicians the confusion and emotional turmoil their clients experience, known as secondary trauma. Given the complexities of trauma work, practitioners need help to clarify issues and feel more effective. The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 further compound the task, as therapists may themselves be feeling the impact of those events. Presented here is a team model for structured case discussion which can help workers identify and deal with their reactions to both client trauma stories and their own experiences. The model is explained and illustrated with examples, and the process by which it was piloted and evaluated is discussed.     

Attempts to promote residential water conservation with educational,behavioral and engineering strategies

The water meters of 129 residences were read for 70 consecutive days. After five weeks of baseline, state-of-the-art education, feedback, and engineering interventions were applied according to the factorial design: 2(Education versus No Education) × 2(Daily Consumption Feedback versus No Feedback) × 2(Low Cost Conservation Devices versus No Devices). Significant water savings occurred following only the installation of low cost water conservation devices, although the amount of water saved with these devices (a daily average of 17 gallons) was much less than expected. The findings are discussed with reference to the development of cost-effective water conservation programs.This research was supported by Grant No. SPI-8003981 from the National Science Foundation. The authors are sincerely grateful for professional advice from Drs. Richard A. Winett and Jerard F. Kehoe, and for the special data collection efforts of Lisa Barnett, Steven Churchill, Edward Fleder, Lisa Paterson, Susan Pelton, Stephen Rodock, Jeffrey Shilling, Kenneth Spitz, and Elizabeth Talbott. Reprint requests should be addressed to Scott Geller, Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061. All booklet, questionnaire and information materials used in the study are available upon request from the first author.     

A Goal-Setting and Feedback Intervention to Increase ID-Checking Behavior: An Assessment of Social Validity and Behavioral Impact

A participative goal-setting and feedback intervention increased cashiers' identification-checking behavior at a large grocery store. The cashiers' identification-checking percentages increased from 0.2% at baseline to 9.7% during the intervention phase and then declined to 2.3% during withdrawal. At the control store, the percentages of identification-checked purchases were 0.3%, 0.4%, and 0.7%, respectively, during the A-B-A phases at the intervention store. A comprehensive social-validity assessment showed ID-checking to be accepted by both cashiers and customers.     

Paternal Incarceration and Support for Children in Fragile Families

High U.S. incarceration rates have motivated recent research on the negative effects of imprisonment on later employment, earnings, and family relationships. Because most men in jail and prison are fathers, a large number of children may be placed at considerable risk by policies of incarceration. This article examines one dimension of the economic risk faced by children of incarcerated fathers: the reduction in the financial support that they receive. We use a population-based sample of urban children to examine the effects of incarceration on this support. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal regressions indicate that formerly incarcerated men are less likely to contribute to their families, and those who do contribute provide significantly less. The negative effects of incarceration on fathers’ financial support are due not only to the low earnings of formerly incarcerated men but also to their increased likelihood to live apart from their children. Men contribute far less through child support (formal or informal) than they do when they share their earnings within their household, suggesting that the destabilizing effects of incarceration on family relationships place children at significant economic disadvantage.     

Improved local polynomial estimation in time series regression

We propose a modification of local polynomial estimation which improves the efficiency of the conventional method when the observation errors are correlated. The procedure is based on a pre-transformation of the data as a generalization of the pre-whitening procedure introduced by Xiao et al. [(2003), ‘More Efficient Local Polynomial Estimation in Nonparametric Regression with Autocorrelated Errors’, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 98, 980–992]. While these authors assumed a linear process representation for the error process, we avoid any structural assumption. We further allow the regressors and the errors to be dependent. More importantly, we show that the inclusion of both leading and lagged variables in the approximation of the error terms outperforms the best approximation based on lagged variables only. Establishing its asymptotic distribution, we show that the proposed estimator is more efficient than the standard local polynomial estimator. As a by-product we prove a suitable version of a central limit theorem which allows us to improve the asymptotic normality result for local polynomial estimators by Masry and Fan [(1997), ‘Local Polynomial Estimation of Regression Functions for Mixing Processes’, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 24, 165–179]. A simulation study confirms the efficiency of our estimator on finite samples. An application to climate data also shows that our new method leads to an estimator with decreased variability.     

Assessing Urban Vulnerability in the Context of Flood and Heat Hazard: Pathways and Challenges for Indicator-Based Analysis

Applying indicators in the context of vulnerability assessments is widespread but remains challenging for various reasons. This article focuses on quantitative estimates of urban vulnerability to climate change related hazards. It presents a methodology to assess three components of residential vulnerability in areas of different socio-environmental conditions: exposure, susceptibility and coping capacity, including the selection of indicators, combination of variables and building of indices. The overall purpose is the assessment of urban vulnerability in order to allow for a more precise consideration of who is vulnerable and why, and to demonstrate the potential coping capacities of people living in flood and heat prone areas. This acknowledges that in Santiago de Chile, the case study used to underpin this article empirically, only hazard exposure assessments have been undertaken so far. The case study findings of the vulnerability assessment confirm that the indicator-based approach is appropriate for analysis of exposure and susceptibility, but that coping capacity appraisal remains a challenge.     

A Sort of Homecoming: Incarceration and the housing security of urban men

While individuals returning from prison face many barriers to successful re-entry, among the most serious are the challenges they face in securing housing. Housing has long been recognized as a prerequisite for stable employment, access to social services, and other aspects of individual and family functioning. The formerly incarcerated face several administrative and de facto restrictions on their housing options; however, little is known about the unique instabilities that they face. We use a longitudinal survey of urban families to examine housing insecurity among nearly 3000 urban men, including over 1000 with incarceration histories. We find that men recently incarcerated face greater housing insecurity, including both serious hardships such as homelessness, and precursors to homelessness such as residential turnover and relying on others for housing expenses. Their increased risk is tied both to diminished annual earnings and other factors, including, potentially, evictions from public housing supported by Federal “one-strike” policies.     

Increased variability in tacting under a lag 3 schedule of reinforcement

Research has shown that variability may be an operant dimension of behavior. One method of reinforcing response variability is to use a lag schedule of reinforcement (Page & Neuringer, 1985). Several studies have shown that a Lag 1 schedule is effective in increasing variable responding with human participants (e.g., Esch, Esch, & Love, 2009; Lee, McComas, & Jawor, 2002). In these arrangements, however, the return to baseline responding during reversal phases suggests that the resulting behavior change may not be maintained following intervention. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of a Lag 3 schedule on increasing and maintaining variability of tacts in 2 children diagnosed with developmental disabilities. Results demonstrated increased variability in tacting for both participants and maintenance in variable responding after a 3-week follow-up.