Economics of Disaster Risk,Social Vulnerability,and Mental Health Resilience

We investigate the relationship between exposure to Hurricanes Katrina and/or Rita and mental health resilience by vulnerability status, with particular focus on the mental health outcomes of single mothers versus the general public. We advance a measurable notion of mental health resilience to disaster events. We also calculate the economic costs of poor mental health days added by natural disaster exposure. Negative binomial analyses show that hurricane exposure increases the expected count of poor mental health days for all persons by 18.7% (95% confidence interval [CI], 7.44–31.14%), and by 71.88% (95% CI, 39.48–211.82%) for single females with children. Monthly time‐series show that single mothers have lower event resilience, experiencing higher added mental stress. Results also show that the count of poor mental health days is sensitive to hurricane intensity, increasing by a factor of 1.06 (95% CI, 1.02–1.10) for every billion (U.S.$) dollars of damage added for all exposed persons, and by a factor of 1.08 (95% CI, 1.03–1.14) for single mothers. We estimate that single mothers, as a group, suffered over $130 million in productivity loss from added postdisaster stress and disability. Results illustrate the measurability of mental health resilience as a two‐dimensional concept of resistance capacity and recovery time. Overall, we show that natural disasters regressively tax disadvantaged population strata.     

高校本科生特别培养学院组织文化研究

本科生特别培养学院是中国高等教育大众化背景下,以培养拔尖创新的卓越人才为目标的荣誉学院,而优秀的组织文化是其顺利实施英才教育的基础.本文在对英才教育、大学组织文化和培育组织文化的意义进行理论思考的基础上,从特别培养学院是学习型、责任型、混合型和宽容型组织四个角度提炼并阐述了其组织文化的特质,并提出了特别培养学院的组织文化理念和实践载体.     

(Mis)understanding Safety Culture and Its Relationship to Safety Management

Although the concept of safety culture was coined in relation to major accidents like Chernobyl and Piper Alpha, it has been embraced by the safety community at large as a cause for unsafe practice. In this article, three approaches to safety culture are discussed in terms of their underlying concepts of culture and organizational culture. Culture is an intangible, fuzzy concept encompassing acquired assumptions that is shared among the members of a group and that provides meaning to their perceptions and actions and those of others. The basic assumptions that form the essence of a culture are shared, yet tacit, convictions, which manifest themselves subtly in the visible world. As applied by safety researchers, the culture concept is deprived of much of its depth and subtlety, and is morphed into a grab bag of behavioral and other visible characteristics, without reference to the meaning these characteristics might actually have, and often infused with normative overtones. By combining the three approaches, we can resurrect the notion of safety culture and strengthen its analytical potential in understanding the development and implementation of safety management systems.     

Association of Personal Distress With Burnout,Compassion Fatigue,and Compassion Satisfaction Among Clinical Social Workers

ABSTRACT

Studies of empathy and empathy-related responding show that while some people respond to observing the suffering of another with a prosocial concern and urge to help the suffering person, others have an aversive, avoidant response that is primarily self-focused and aimed toward relieving their own distress rather than helping the other person. This self-focused response, labeled personal distress, is associated with various social and psychological problems. This article discusses the concept of personal distress and describes a study of licensed clinical social workers (n = 171) that examines the relationship of personal distress and three other aspects of the empathy construct with compassion fatigue, burnout, and compassion satisfaction. Results of ordinary least squares multiple regression analyses indicate that the model of empathy components and control variables explain 20% to 23% of the variance in the dependent variables. Personal distress is the only component of the empathy construct with significant associations with the dependent variables. Higher personal distress is associated with higher compassion fatigue and burnout and lower compassion satisfaction among clinical social workers. Implications for future research and for social work education are discussed.     

Voices of Resilience

Abstract

Terminally ill older adults have the capacity to live well in the context of dying. Having negotiated a lifetime of challenges, they have resources to demonstrate resilience and achieve wholeness in life's final phase, but research has not adequately investigated this process. This qualitative research study considered the paths to resilience used by 30 older adult hospice clients in Kansas and Illinois. Responses were coded using the grounded theory method of Strauss and Corbin (1990) where data drives interpretation and text is coded into categories. Results centered on four themes that included: (1) a redefinition of self; (2) use of religion/spirituality or openness to uncertainty; (3) maintenance of social investments; and (4) guarding independence even as the scope of life contracted. Results imply that attention should be paid to building environments of wellness. This may be accomplished paradoxically through facilitating continuity of client interests and yet opportunities for creativity and growth as well. Listening with a healing stance and cultivating a habit of being fully present in interactions with clients assist in this process.     

Selective Guide to Current Reference Sources on Marriage,Obesity, and Dieting

No abstract available for this article.     

Building Strength Through Challenging Homophobia: Liberation Workshops with Younger and Midlife Irish Lesbians

Drawing on the theoretical framework of liberation psychology, this article details workshops on liberation psychology conducted in Ireland with lesbian and transgendered persons aged from early 20's to late 50's. Both younger and older lesbians in the workshops benefited from the opportunity to focus on oppression and to explore options for transformation. The workshops illustrated many of the strengths and vulnerabilities associated with living with homophobia and demonstrated the value of action and engagement. Midlife lesbians were more aware of the systemic nature of homophobia and of the negative emotions related to that. They saw many of these as understandable and even necessary reactions to oppression rather than as negative patterns. These older lesbians tended to be more accepting of the course their lives had taken and of the ways in which choices had been influenced by homophobia and heterosexism. They tended to be more relativistic in their views on coming out, viewing coming out as a decision for each context rather than an overall principle. They valued the importance of community and of activism, and though they were aware of some of the challenges, they also had more positive experiences in this area. These strengths can facilitate managing both homophobia and aging more effectively.     

A Study of Battered Women’s Purpose of Life and Resilience in South Korea

The principal objective of this study is to determine whether battered women’s purpose of life (meaning/value) affects resilience (self‐efficacy/communication efficiency/optimism). This purpose is meaningful in that it may help provide battered women with a new perspective of a changeable life, away from the negative perspectives frequently associated with domestic violence sufferers. The subjects of this study were 110 battered women staying at shelters located in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province, Korea. The survey was conducted between August 15 and September 20, 2010. The data were collected using questionnaires measuring sociodemographic variables, a purpose‐of‐life scale, and a resilience scale. The collected data were evaluated with frequency, correlation, and multiple regression analysis. The results of this study can be summarized as follows. First, the meaning and value of life positively influenced self‐efficacy. Second, only the meaning had a beneficial effect on communication efficiency. Third, only the value variable positively affected optimism. Therefore, this study implied that resilience is an important area in the context of spousal abuse. Based on these results, a program for enhancing the meaning of life is suggested to help domestic violence survivors to build up resilience.     

Paradigm lost: Reinvigorating the study of organizational culture

In spite of the importance of organizational culture, scholarly advances in our understanding of the construct appear to have stagnated. We review the state of culture research and argue that the ongoing academic debates about what culture is and how to study it have resulted in a lack of unity and precision in defining and measuring culture. This ambiguity has constrained progress in both developing a coherent theory of organizational culture and accreting replicable and valid findings. To make progress we argue that future research should focus on conceptualizing and assessing organizational culture as the norms that characterize a group or organization that if widely shared and strongly held, act as a social control system to shape members’ attitudes and behaviors. We further argue that to accomplish this, researchers need to recognize that norms can be parsed into three distinct dimensions: (1) the content or what is deemed important (e.g., teamwork, accountability, innovation), (2) the consensus or how widely shared norms are held across people, and (3) the intensity of feelings about the importance of the norm (e.g., are people willing to sanction others). From this perspective we suggest how future research might be able to clarify some of the current conflicts and confusion that characterize the current state of the field.