Perspectives on work (re)entry for persons with disabilities: implications for clinicians

Despite the prevalence of government funding to support employment opportunities for persons with disabilities, real jobs for this population still appear to be elusive. McMaster University researchers examined how six stakeholder groups defined workplace (re)entry success for persons with disabilities. Focus groups and individual interviews were conducted with representation from employers, unions, persons with disabilities, co-workers, supervisors and human resource departments. Participants numbered 86 and the average age was 42. Participant comments provided the researchers with rich data related to the study objectives. Success was perceived as not only a match between the employee and the job but also a win-win for employer and employer, a uniquely defined set of circumstances based on the specific individual and their environment as well as respect for the individual's dignity and quality of life. This article discusses the study and its outcomes and highlights implications for clinicians.     

Sticks,Stones and Semantics: The Ivory Tower Bully's Vocabulary of Motives

This ethnography focuses on the techniques of normalization used by university professors who are accused by their colleagues of bullying behavior. We examine how the organizational structure and institutional values of the university provide protective coloration for academic intimidation and discourage both the detection and effective labeling of such behavior. In noting that attempts to label bullying behavior frequently fail because the judgments are seen as mere matters of opinion in an environment whose principal currency of exchange is opinion itself, we modify and extend Sykes and Matza's discussion of neutralization techniques to academic settings. While we cannot speak to the presence or absence of guilt feelings on the part of alleged academic bullies, or to whether neutralization techniques successfully assuage such feelings, we can nevertheless discern the operation of these techniques to resist the imputation of unflattering social identities and/or to lay claim to public identities that are highly esteemed within the academy. Moreover, we identify three additional techniques of normalization that are employed by alleged ivory tower bullies: appropriation and inversion, in which accused bullies claim victim status for themselves; evidentiary solipsism, in which alleged bullies portray themselves as uniquely capable of divining and defining the true meaning-structure of events; and emotional obfuscation, which takes the form of employing symbols and imagery that are chosen for their perceived ability to elicit an emotional response on the part of an academic audience.     

Six‐Month‐Olds' Detection of Clauses Embedded in Continuous Speech: Effects of Prosodic Well‐Formedness

Three experiments investigated the role of prosodic structure for infants' recognition of embedded word sequences. Six‐month‐olds were familiarized with 2 versions of the same sequence, 1 corresponding to a well‐formed prosodic unit and the other to a prosodically ill‐formed sequence (although a successive word series). Next, infants heard 2 test passages. One included the well‐formed unit, and the other included the ill‐formed sequence. In Experiment 1, infants listened longer to the passage containing the well‐formed unit, suggesting that such units, even when they are embedded, are better recognized. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this better recognition does not depend on an acoustic match between the familiarized sequences and their later embeddings. This suggests that the advantage of the well‐formed unit is at least partially due to infants' use of prosody to parse continuous speech.     

VOTING AND IMITATIVE BEHAVIOR

Political behavior generates private benefits by helping people fit in with desired friends. A voter imitates other voters, but at the same time they imitate him. An equilibrium solution requires exogenous variables: the narrow self-interest of the participants. The reduced form makes one's vote a function of the narrow self-interest of others as well as one's own. In accord with the model, a person's party identification depends on his ethnic group's current income and its income in 1909 as well as his own income.     

A comprehensive program for pregnant adolescents: parenting and prevention

Beginning in 1981 as an effort to reduce mortality rates of at-risk infants, the Teen Pregnancy Project of this agency has grown steadily into a multiservice program with many approaches, yet all services for its help-resistant population depend upon an outreach, home-visiting initiative to establish useful relationships with its clients.     

Neural Correlates of Human and Monkey Face Processing in 9‐Month‐Old Infants

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggests a gradual, experience‐dependent specialization of cortical face processing systems that takes place largely in the 1st year of life. To further investigate these findings, event‐related potentials (ERPs) were collected from typically developing 9‐month‐old infants presented with pictures of familiar and unfamiliar monkey or human faces in 2 different orientations. Analyses revealed differential processing across changes in monkey and human faces. The N290 was greater for familiar compared to unfamiliar faces, regardless of species or orientation. In contrast, the P400 to unfamiliar faces was greater than to familiar faces, but only for the monkey condition. The P400 to human faces differentiated the orientation of both familiar and unfamiliar faces. These results suggest more specific processing of human compared to monkey faces in 9‐month‐olds.     

Smoking Prevalence and Antismoking Regulations in Transition Countries

As a number of new nations emerged in the early nineties, there has been a spurt in regulatory initiatives in transition countries toward nation building and socio-economic reforms. A key prerequisite to policy changes is an understanding of the related patterns and policies. This paper provides an overview of the smoking trends in transition nations, broken by gender and age, and the antismoking policies in place. In particular, four different types of non-price policies are studied. Comparisons with the rest of the world show that transition countries do not fare badly in terms of implementing antismoking policies and are, in fact, better in some cases than other countries. However, greater smoking prevalence for some population subgroups in transition nations suggests that either some other socio-economic factors influencing smoking prevalence might be at play or there might be some enforcement issues with the policies in place.     

RESOURCE MOBILIZATION: AN ANALYSIS OF CONFLICTING THEORETICAL VARIATIONS

Although resource mobilization theory has brought a number of advances to the field of social movements, it does not constitute a unified body of theory. The principal divisions exist between McCarthy and Zald's "professional organizer" model and McAdam's "political process" model. Their disagreements are centered mainly around their conceptualizations of the role that elites play in the formation and development of social movements. It is believed that these differences can be reconciled by returning to the original precepts of resource mobilization theory.