Counseling for the Family: The Neglected Aspect of Addiction Treatment in Canada

ABSTRACT

There has been a historic neglect of both research and practice in the area of counselling for the family members of alcohol or other drug abusers by the addiction field in Canada. As a result, treatment for individual family members affected by alcoholism and other drug addiction remains a neglected component of the majority of Canadian addiction programs. When family involvement is incorporated, the tendency has been to concentrate on orientation and education rather than on the provision of counseling for the family members. This dearth of programming exists despite the knowledge that an active alcohol or drug abuser's behaviour disrupts the entire family system, including the functioning and development of children. Each family member is uniquely affected with negative outcomes ranging from economic hardship to violence being perpetrated against them to an increased risk among children of becoming alcohol or drug abusers themselves. Thus, treating only the active alcohol or other drug abuser is limiting and an overly narrow orientation for the enhancement of both family and community health.     

外商投资国民待遇制度与反垄断立法

文章分析了当前中国外商投资法律制度的建立、现状以及未来的发展方向 ,同时分析了反垄断法在外商投资法律制度中的意义 ,指出尽快制定反垄断法的现实意义 ,并结合中国当前实际情况 ,提出加强中国企业竞争力是防止外资垄断的重要途径     

Drug addiction as a lifestyle

Drug addict rehabilitation programs receive a small proportion of the funds made available through the social welfare system. Emphasis has traditionally been placed on the pathological rather than the salutogenic elements of an addicted lifestyle. A new test of a person's sense of coherence in life (Antonovsky's 9-item Sense of Coherence scale) may be of interest in rehabilitation work with drug addicts, and in focusing more attention on this aspect of addiction treatment. Thirty drug addicts in treatment and rehabilitation and 10 former drug addicts were interviewed using the 9-item Sense of Coherence scale. The results obtained were compared to a well known test of distress, the 24-item Symptom Checklist. Drug addicts in treatment facilities had significantly lower mean scores on the 9-item Sense of Coherence scale (2.3) and higher scores on the 24-item Symptom Checklist (2.3) than both drug addicts in rehabilitatively oriented institutions (3.3 and 1.6) and the long-term rehabilitated non-using former drug addicts (4.2 and 1.5 respectively). The differences between the group in rehabilitation and the former drug addicts were also statistically significant. The levels of the two psychometric tests suggested a gradual movement towards normal values and an increased sense of meaning in life among the former drug addicts, contrary to findings by other researchers. The length of time before these tests return to normal values may exceed the observation period often used in follow-up at treatment facilities. Increased social welfare may follow if a disclosure of salutogenic possibilities in drug addicts is obtained. Further prospective research is, however, necessary to confirm our findings.     

Partitioning with Respect to a Control: Unequal Sample Sizes Case

This article describes a method for partitioning with respect to a control for the situation in which the treatment sample sizes are unequal and also for the situation where the treatment sample sizes are equal except for a few missing values. Calculation of the critical values required for finding confidence limits is discussed and tables are presented for the “almost equal” sample size case. An application of this method to length of stay data for congestive heart failure patients is also provided.     

Indoor Climate and Thermal Comfort from a Long-Term Perspective

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how a Swedish wooden burgher house, the mid-1660s Burmeister House, was adapted over the course of 250 years to satisfy ever-changing expectations of thermal comfort. The investigation is based on the climatic conditions of the Nordic Region, where the issue of thermal comfort is crucial when attempting to understand the development of indoor environments. The article explores how spatiality, heating, and interior decor and furnishing operated and affected the inhabitants' experiences of indoor climate and thermal comfort. The results show that Burmeister House followed a general pattern of improvement, especially with regard to innovations in heating. Burmeister House ceased to be a private residence when it was restored and turned into a historic house museum. Rather than revealing its history, restorations carried out in the twentieth century worked to conceal or remove most of the building's more recent history. As a consequence, the house has become more difficult to use since it can no longer be efficiently heated.     

Nonshared Environment Research

SUMMARY

This review focuses on conceptualizations of nonshared environment and on four areas of research that should be targeted for future growth. It is argued that there are at least two different approaches to the study of nonshared environment. “Experience-oriented” researchers center on sibling differential experiences in the family and their role in children's development. “Outcome-oriented” investigators focus on the search for environmental origins of individual differences in outcomes. Turkheimer and Waldron's (2000) concept of objective versus effective nonshared environment and Reiss and colleagues' (2000) notion of single-system versus multi-system nonshared environment processes are also discussed. Four topics for future research are outlined: (1) age-related changes and development; (2) the role of the self; (3) the role of context; and (4) the importance of extrafamilial experiences. More work in these areas will lead to useful theories of how nonshared environment processes are linked to sibling and individual differences in behavioral development and adjustment.     

自我表露及其作用

有关自我表露的研究是心理学关于自我研究的一个重要领域,心理学家发现,展示个人信息的行为有重要的心理学意义.自我表露是个人成长和自我实现的必要环节,是个体印象管理和应对压力的有效方式,也是心理治疗的重要途径.     

跨国公司对华投资国民待遇问题研究

跨国投资企业对东道国发挥的经济效应 ,与东道国对跨国投资企业给予的待遇密切相关。介绍外国对其外资企业所采取的待遇标准 ,论述我国对来华投资企业的待遇安排及其产生的效果 ,认为我国当前对来华投资企业实行国民待遇不切实际 ,只能逐步向有限制的国民待遇方向发展。     

Program Evaluation and Causal Inference With High‐Dimensional Data

In this paper, we provide efficient estimators and honest confidence bands for a variety of treatment effects including local average (LATE) and local quantile treatment effects (LQTE) in data‐rich environments. We can handle very many control variables, endogenous receipt of treatment, heterogeneous treatment effects, and function‐valued outcomes. Our framework covers the special case of exogenous receipt of treatment, either conditional on controls or unconditionally as in randomized control trials. In the latter case, our approach produces efficient estimators and honest bands for (functional) average treatment effects (ATE) and quantile treatment effects (QTE). To make informative inference possible, we assume that key reduced‐form predictive relationships are approximately sparse. This assumption allows the use of regularization and selection methods to estimate those relations, and we provide methods for post‐regularization and post‐selection inference that are uniformly valid (honest) across a wide range of models. We show that a key ingredient enabling honest inference is the use of orthogonal or doubly robust moment conditions in estimating certain reduced‐form functional parameters. We illustrate the use of the proposed methods with an application to estimating the effect of 401(k) eligibility and participation on accumulated assets. The results on program evaluation are obtained as a consequence of more general results on honest inference in a general moment‐condition framework, which arises from structural equation models in econometrics. Here, too, the crucial ingredient is the use of orthogonal moment conditions, which can be constructed from the initial moment conditions. We provide results on honest inference for (function‐valued) parameters within this general framework where any high‐quality, machine learning methods (e.g., boosted trees, deep neural networks, random forest, and their aggregated and hybrid versions) can be used to learn the nonparametric/high‐dimensional components of the model. These include a number of supporting auxiliary results that are of major independent interest: namely, we (1) prove uniform validity of a multiplier bootstrap, (2) offer a uniformly valid functional delta method, and (3) provide results for sparsity‐based estimation of regression functions for function‐valued outcomes.