Towards Developing a Family Therapy for Melanesia

Our principal objective is to call the attention, primarily of Australian‐New Zealand family therapists, to the relevance and the urgency of developing, promoting and providing family and/or couple therapy in the Melanesian context. We emphasise the need to take into consideration Melanesian worldviews, values and social systems. We discuss a traditional ‘mediation‐reconciliation ritual’ model of solving family or couple conflicts, and also point to some of the immediate situations in which a family therapist could intervene. A few recommendations are also made for how the academic context could be utilised to develop Melanesian family therapy.     

Gesundheitsf?rdernde Faktoren f��r Selbst?ndige in der Kreativwirtschaft

For political and economic decision makers, the Creative Industries are a major future market. The social situation many of the mostly self-employed creative workers find themselves in, however, is far from secure. Financial problems, precarious employment conditions, long working hours and high burn-out rates are typical of this ??class of the new?? (Barbrook 2009). This paper addresses the question of which variables that creative workers themselves have the power to influence have an impact on psychological health syndromes. It shows that compensation strategies such as ??brief periods of relaxation even during work intensive phases??, the quality of creative workers?? interpersonal relationships with peers and colleagues, ??being confident about one??s abilities??, enjoying work and ??taking holidays??have a positive impact on psychological health syndromes. Conversely, conflicts with colleagues or customers, turning a blind eye to problems and dependency on a single major customer impact negatively on psychological health syndromes. The paper is based on research carried out for the project ??Balancing creative workers dilemmas: value-based business and networking practices of self-employed working in the Creative Industries??, funded by the Translational Research Programme of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). It was developed as a thesis for the SOQUA postgraduate training programme (http://www.soqua. net), which provides further professional qualification for workers in the social sciences.     

Robust variable selection with application to quality of life research

A large database containing socioeconomic data from 60 communities in Austria and Germany has been built, stemming from 18,000 citizens’ responses to a survey, together with data from official statistical institutes about these communities. This paper describes a procedure for extracting a small set of explanatory variables to explain response variables such as the cognition of quality of life. For better interpretability, the set of explanatory variables needs to be very small and the dependencies among the selected variables need to be low. Due to possible inhomogeneities within the data set, it is further required that the solution is robust to outliers and deviating points. In order to achieve these goals, a robust model selection method, combined with a strategy to reduce the number of selected predictor variables to a necessary minimum, is developed. In addition, this context-sensitive method is applied to obtain responsible factors describing quality of life in communities.     

Knowledge and the regulation of innovation

Technology assessment (TA) is an important instrument for the regulation of innovation. From the perspective of sociology of knowledge, the regulatory process can be understood as a complex interplay between different forms of knowledge. The prevailing instruments of TA, expertise and participation, are both facing difficulties in dealing with the limits and impasses of regulatory knowledge in the realm of innovation. Nevertheless, as is argued in this article, reflexive forms of TA offer a good, if not the only, answer to the question of how we can deal with the contradictions and paradoxes involved in the regulation of innovation.     

Attachment Representations and Discipline in Mothers of Young School Children: An Observation Study

Previous research was extended by connecting maternal attachment representations not only to maternal emotional support and task structuring, but also to maternal discipline. A total number of 62 mothers of preschoolers (M_age = 54 months) completed the adult attachment interview and a self‐report measure of dysfunctional discipline. Two years later, a subsample of 38 mother–child dyads was observed during two laboratory interaction tasks in which the mother and child were induced to have divergent goals. In general, the hypothesized connections between maternal attachment representations and discipline were found, at least when discipline was independently observed. Specifically, as compared to autonomous mothers, non‐autonomous mothers showed more overreactivity, more psychological control and less flexibility in their discipline attempts. Also, their children were less compliant. These differences were more pronounced during a story‐eliciting task than during a block task. These findings suggest that parental behaviors in the discipline domain contribute to the explanation of the intergenerational transmission of attachment patterns.