Internalized Other Interviewing in Relational Therapy: Three Discursive Approaches to Understanding its Use and Outcomes

For over 20 years, family therapist Karl Tomm has been engaging families and couples with a therapeutic intervention he calls Internalized Other Interviewing (IOI). The IOI (cf. Emmerson‐Whyte, 2010; Hurley, 2006) entails interviewing clients, from the personal experiences of partners and family members as an internalized other. The IOI is based on the idea that through dialogues over time, one can internalize a sense of one's conversational partner responsiveness in reliably anticipated ways. Anyone who has thought in a conversation with a family member or partner, “Oh there s/he goes again,” or anticipates next words before they leave the other's mouth, has a sense of what we are calling an internalized other. For Tomm, the internalized anticipations partners and family members may have offers entry points into new dialogues with therapeutic potential—particularly, when their actual dialogues get stuck in dispreferred patterns.     

Analysis of social innovation on social networking services

ABSTRACT

Social network services are allowing more social connectivity and making possible sharing information and knowledge of a different nature. This article analyses if social workers related to active social policies from Malaga province (Spain) are using social network services to share information and knowledge and if there is a mirror between online and offline relationships. Since it is an experimental model, through virtual ethnography and through social network analysis methodology, we observed the presence, connectivity and analysed the structure of relationships that keep 235 professionals from 52 organizations in Facebook®. Moreover, the model uses the statistical technique of modularity for detecting online communities, which are compared with distribution of professionals in their organizations. Results show how social network services applied to social intervention are massively and frequently used by professionals. On the other hand, the detected communities reflect existence of analogy between online and offline relationships. The online structure shows a high degree of cohesion and how certain professionals have higher capacity of influence and diffusion depending on position in the online structure. It argues about the opportunity to incorporate social network services towards social intervention as a manner of social innovation to improve cooperation and diffusion of information and knowledge.     

Racial/ethnic and socio‐economic biases in child maltreatment severity assessment in Spanish child protection services caseworkers

Evidence from several countries has shown the over‐representation of racial/ethnic minority groups in child protection services (CPS). The objective of the present study was to explore whether racial/ethnic and socio‐economic biases influence Spanish CPS caseworkers' judgements of the severity of child maltreatment. Moreover, the study attempted to explore the influence on these judgements of the use of structured instruments and professional experience. Two case vignettes of child maltreatment were presented to 405 CPS caseworkers and 169 students of social work and psychology. Family ethnic origin and income were manipulated in the vignettes. The findings showed no statistical evidence of biases related to family ethnic origin or socio‐economic status (SES) in Spanish CPS caseworkers' judgements of maltreatment severity. Biases related to family SES were found for students for the vignettes of physical abuse. CPS caseworkers and students who did not use a structured instrument to assess maltreatment severity tended to underestimate the severity for the vignettes of parental incapacity to control child/adolescent behaviour and to overestimate it for the vignettes of physical abuse. CPS caseworkers who used a structured instrument showed higher percentages of accuracy and inter‐rater agreement, supporting the relevance of structured tools in reducing potential caseworkers' biases.     

Fertility patterns in the Roma population of Spain

The Spanish Roma population have co-existed with the broader population of Spain, under the same laws and regulations for more than 500 years, but they exhibit very different fertility patterns. The aim of this paper is to determine whether there are factors other than income or education that can explain the larger number of children in Spanish Roma families. Our analysis reveals that the existence of a family business, which is highly labor-demanding, appears to be associated with parental decisions concerning the number of children. Since parental authority, in Roma families, holds sway over children even after their own marriage, the future labor contributions of children are particularly beneficial to the family business.     

Implementation of Jefferson-d’Hondt rule in the formation of a parliamentary committee

Same parliaments, to form a committee of size $q$ , use a voting process like the following: every parliamentary member votes for one out of a fixed set of candidates, and those $q$ candidates receiving more votes are elected for the committee. Assuming total discipline of vote, this is a game form in which players are the parliamentary groups. We investigate, according to some natural hypotheses about preferences, the likely distribution of the members of this committee. The main results are: (a) when fractional votes are allowed, there is a complete agreement between the distribution among the groups of the elected candidates that are outcomes of a Nash equilibrium and the distribution that, according to the size of the groups, would compute the Jefferson-d’Hondt allocation rule, and (b) when fractional votes are not allowed, there is a near agreement for a majority of situations.     

Managing skunkworks to achieve ambidexterity: The Robinson Crusoe effect

Literature on ambidexterity emphasizes the need for both exploration and exploitation. Large firms usually choose to implement structural ambidexterity to separate both activities. We here focus on an extreme case of such structural partitioning implemented as a secret skunkworks project in a large French automotive company. A qualitative survey using both primary and secondary data shows that the major basic and initial characteristics of a skunkworks (i.e. secrecy, urgency, and autonomy) created favorable conditions for the technological exploration. However, exploitation failed due to precisely those same characteristics coupled with the fact that the project did not respond to a specific market demand: The skunkworks suffered from what we call the "Robinson Crusoe effect." We therefore contribute to the literature on skunkworks, which have remained understudied in the academic literature, as well as on ambidexterity, by showing how the interrelation between different factors is crucial for structural ambidexterity to be successful     

A comparison of classification models to identify the Fragile X Syndrome

The main models of machine learning are briefly reviewed and considered for building a classifier to identify the Fragile X Syndrome (FXS). We have analyzed 172 patients potentially affected by FXS in Andalusia (Spain) and, by means of a DNA test, each member of the data set is known to belong to one of two classes: affected, not affected. The whole predictor set, formed by 40 variables, and a reduced set with only nine predictors significantly associated with the response are considered. Four alternative base classification models have been investigated: logistic regression, classification trees, multilayer perceptron and support vector machines. For both predictor sets, the best accuracy, considering both the mean and the standard deviation of the test error rate, is achieved by the support vector machines, confirming the increasing importance of this learning algorithm. Three ensemble methods - bagging, random forests and boosting - were also considered, amongst which the bagged versions of support vector machines stand out, especially when they are constructed with the reduced set of predictor variables. The analysis of the sensitivity, the specificity and the area under the ROC curve agrees with the main conclusions extracted from the accuracy results. All of these models can be fitted by free R programs.     

Convergence of non-linear functionals of smoothed empirical processes and kernel density estimates

We consider regularizations by convolution of the empirical process and study the asymptotic behaviour of non-linear functionals of this process. Using a result for the same type of non-linear functionals of the Brownian bridge, shown in a previous paper [4], and a strong approximation theorem, we prove several results for the p-deviation in estimation of the derivatives of the density. We also study the asymptotic behaviour of the number of crossings of the smoothed empirical process defined by Yukich [17] and of a modified version of the Kullback deviation.     

The Strong No Show Paradoxes are a common flaw in Condorcet voting correspondences

The No Show Paradox (there is a voter who would rather not vote) is known to affect every Condorcet voting function. This paper analyses two strong versions of this paradox in the context of Condorcet voting correspondences. The first says that there is a voter whose favorite candidate loses the election if she votes honestly, but gets elected if she abstains. The second says that there is a voter whose least preferred candidate gets elected if she votes honestly, but loses the election if she abstains. All Condorcet correspondences satisfying some weak domination properties are shown to be affected by these strong forms of the paradox. On the other hand, with the exception of the Simpson-Cramer Minmax and the Young rule, all the Condorcet correspondences that (to the best of our knowledge) are proposed in the literature suffer from these two paradoxes. Received: 30 November 1999/Accepted: 27 March 2000     

Adaptive and Generative Learning: Implications from Complexity Theories

One of the most important classical typologies within the organizational learning literature is the distinction between adaptive and generative learning. However, the processes of these types of learning, particularly the latter, have not been widely analyzed and incorporated into the organizational learning process. This paper puts forward a new understanding of adaptive and generative learning within organizations, grounded in some ideas from complexity theories: mainly self‐organization and implicate order. Adaptive learning involves any improvement or development of the explicate order through a process of self‐organization. Self‐organization is a self‐referential process characterized by logical deductive reasoning, concentration, discussion and improvement. Generative learning involves any approach to the implicate order through a process of self‐transcendence. Self‐transcendence is a holo‐organizational process characterized by intuition, attention, dialogue and inquiry. The main implications of the two types of learning for organizational learning are discussed.