“关怀伦理”视阈下和谐师生关系的构建

"教育亲情疏离"是目前高校普遍存在的现象."关怀伦理学"则有助于改善和提升师生关系的品质,促进二者的亲近和谐.文章从教师、学生、学校三个教育实践层面上提出构建亲近和谐师生关系的设想,以期促进高等教育事业健康发展.     

孝文化的文献综述与孝观念的调查

随着社会经济发展和人口老龄化,高龄老人的成年子女照顾者成为老年人照顾领域备受关注的群体。笔者通过对2006年深圳高龄老人成年子女照顾者的调查数据分析发现,尽管我国面临着经济和社会的转型,遵从孝道规范对成年子女照顾老年父母的日常生活有巨大的影响作用,而男性和女性在对待孝道观念存在一些差异。     

论高校学生干部创造性个性品质的培养

创新乃是知识经济的灵魂,创造性人才的培养是对学生创造性思维的培养。学生干部是高校学生中的骨干,是高校大学生中的高素质群体,最具创造性、能动性、号召力、凝聚力,他们的思想和行为可以带动一大批学生。积极研究和探讨如何加强对大学生干部创造性品质的培养,发挥高素质群体优势,是广大学生工作者面临的一项极其重要的教育任务。     

Early Childhood Developmental and Nutritional Training for Foster Parents

This exploratory study examined the effectiveness of a foster parent nutrition training program. Conducted in collaboration between Woman, Infants and Children (WIC) and a state foster care licensing agency, the study involved providing an intensive training to 11 self-selected foster parents. The participants completed pre-tests and post-tests related to their level of knowledge and comfort in the area of infant nutritional needs. Paired t-tests detected significant differences before and after the intervention, with participants reporting improved knowledge and understanding. While the sample was small and voluntary, the authors feel these pilot results merit further attention in the areas of practice and research.     

Foster parent perceptions of placement breakdown

The purpose of the study was to describe the perceived causes of placement breakdown by foster parents. Sixty-three foster parents from fifty families were asked to describe their challenges in response to the following question: “What would make you consider ending a foster placement”? The responses to this question were analyzed using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis, to yield nine themes. Foster parents indicated that they would consider ending a placement if there was a danger to their family, if the child could not adapt to the home or if they could not handle the child's behavior. Participants reported that the complex health needs of a foster child, problems dealing with the foster agency, and several unsuccessful attempts to make the placement work would cause a placement to breakdown. Foster parents also indicated that they would consider ending a placement if their personal circumstances changed, their own health deteriorated, or there was a lack of appropriate external support in place. The results of the study point to gaps in the research on violence in general foster care, foster parent perceptions of contributions to a foster child's transition back to his or her birth family, and the process of foster parent decision-making in cases of placement breakdown.     

Work and Care Strategies of European Families: Similarities or National Differences?

This paper examines the work and care strategies chosen by full‐time working families with children in Finland, Italy, Portugal and the UK. It asks whether European families in different countries, facing the same problems of balancing employment and childcare responsibilities, respond to their situations in similar ways. An increase in dual‐earner families where both parents work full‐time represents a general employment trend in today's Europe. Also, within families with children, such employment patterns are now more common than they were previously. National differences may therefore not any longer be as marked as often indicated by country‐based surveys. The qualitative data from the SOCCARE Project offer a way to examine this issue. The focal point of the paper is to make a comparative analysis of couples in similar work and care situations. Using their working hours as the common denominator, this paper analyses their daily childcare arrangements and how these are impacted by gender roles, working schedules, flexibility of workplace, income levels, parents’ educational background and availability of care facilities. The paper concludes that European families’ work and care strategies have many similarities whereby national differences may not be as marked as often indicated by contemporary research.     

A Group Approach to Fostering Self-Cohesion and Developmental Progression in Female Adolescent Group Home Residents

In this project, the applicability of David Wexler's (1991a,b) multi-model Program for Innovative Self Management (PRISM) to adolescent girls in group home placement was explored. The model is based on self-psychological and developmental theory. Originally developed for use in adolescent inpatient settings, PRISM utilizes cognitive-behavioral and relaxation techniques to equip the acting out adolescents with skills to better manage a wide array of emotions and behaviors. A modified version of PRISM was conducted in a group psychotherapeutic format with eighteen residents of two group homes, ages 14 to 18. The study reflected that the participants embraced the model and applied the skills with encouraging results. Recommendations for future research in this area are presented.     

Kinship care for children in the UK: messages from research,lessons for policy and practice1

This article presents a comprehensive overview of kinship care, or as it is also known, family and friends care, paying particular attention to the UK child welfare, legal, policy/practice contexts. The aim of the article is to raise awareness, and provide information, about a hitherto largely invisible, yet expanding placement option being widely used in child welfare systems in the UK, in Europe and elsewhere. The article places kinship care within a UK and European child welfare legal context, including the European Convention on Human Rights 1998 [Articles 8 and 14] and European kinship care developments are also highlighted. It contains the main findings of a kinship care research study conducted by the author, based on interviews with children and young people living with kinship carers, as well as with the kinship carers. Following an examination of theoretical and policy issues, the article examines ways forward for developing and supporting kinship care. In the final section, and based on the research findings and literature review, a new paradigm for child welfare is introduced. It is argued that this new paradigm is necessary in order for kinship care practice and policy to develop within a supported and sustainable family support framework.     

Strategies for Addressing the Nursing Shortage: Coordinated Decision Making and Workforce Flexibility

In this article, we present strategies to help combat the U.S. nursing shortage. Key considerations include providing an attractive work schedule and work environment—critical issues for retaining existing nurses and attracting new nurses to the profession—while at the same time using the set of available nurses as effectively as possible. Based on these ideas, we develop a model that takes advantage of coordinated decision making when managing a flexible workforce. The model coordinates scheduling, schedule adjustment, and agency nurse decisions across various nurse labor pools, each of differing flexibility levels, capabilities, and costs, allowing a much more desirable schedule to be constructed. Our primary findings regarding coordinated decision making and how it can be used to help address the nursing shortage include (i) labor costs can be reduced substantially because, without coordination, labor costs on average are 16.3% higher based on an actual hospital setting, leading to the availability of additional funds for retaining and attracting nurses, (ii) simultaneous to this reduction in costs, more attractive schedules can be provided to the nurses in terms of less overtime and fewer undesirable shifts, and (iii) the use of agency nurses can help avoid overtime for permanent staff with only a 0.7% increase in staffing costs. In addition, we estimate the cost of the shortage for a typical U.S. hospital from a labor cost perspective and show how that cost can be reduced when managers coordinate.     

Sequential and Simultaneous Decision Making for Optimizing Health Care Resource Flexibilities

Health care administrators commonly employ two types of resource flexibilities (demand upgrades and staffing flexibility) to efficiently coordinate two critical internal resources, nursing staff and beds, and an external resource (contract nurses) to satisfy stochastic patient demand. Under demand upgrades, when beds are unavailable for patients in a less acute unit, patients are upgraded to a more acute unit if space is available in that unit. Under staffing flexibility, nurses cross‐trained to work in more than one unit are used in addition to dedicated and contract nurses. Resource decisions (beds and staffing) can be made at a single point in time (simultaneous decision making) or at different points in time (sequential decision making). In this article, we address the following questions: for each flexibility configuration, under sequential and simultaneous decision making, what is the optimal resource level required to meet stochastic demand at minimum cost? Is one type of flexibility (e.g., demand upgrades) better than the other type of flexibility (e.g., staffing flexibility)? We use two‐stage stochastic programming to find optimal resource levels for two nonhomogeneous hospital units that face stochastic demand following a continuous, general distribution. We conduct a full‐factorial numerical experiment and find that the benefit of using staffing flexibility on average is greater than the benefit of using demand upgrades. However, the two types of flexibilities have a positive interaction effect and they complement each other. The type of flexibility and decision timing has an independent effect on system performance (capacity and staffing costs). The benefits of cross‐training can be largely realized even if beds and staffing levels have been determined prior to the establishment of a cross‐training initiative.