The challenges of inclusive education in Lebanon

This article reports on a study conducted in Lebanon by four non-governmental organizations, primarily on the topic of inclusion of people with disabilities in education, with a secondary focus on inclusion in employment. This article reports on some of the findings of the assessment process that was four months in duration and aimed, through interviews and focus groups, to identify available information, current policies and legislation, main stakeholders and existing programmes. Findings of the assessment generated themes that are unique to each of the two groups: parents and children, and educators. However, there are some common themes, such as a perceived need for raising awareness on disability issues and a perceived lack of adequate teacher training. The article concludes by arguing for change efforts on various levels to support inclusion: awareness-raising; policy change; capacity-building; and community-building.     

Defining the health care product to ensure quality and manage costs

The frenzy of health care reform activity now led by the Clinton Administration's American Health Security Act of 1993 might end in the worst of all possible outcomes: a new government entitlement program financed by business and a global budget. Unbridled entitlement could drive utilization of benefits to the maximum and, with a budget cap, guarantee rationing. So far, the administration has talked about expanding access and controlling costs--not about the health care product. Given the threat that change poses for vested interests, time will undoubtedly lapse before final implementation of a new system. Unless physicians involved in health management seize the opportunity during this window of opportunity to help shape the future of health care delivery, the likelihood of preserving the U.S. health care delivery system as we know it will be dim indeed.     

A COMPUTER SIMULATION APPROACH TO THE TEACHING OF MAIL SURVEY STRATEGY ALTERNATIVES AND CHOICE

The author uses a computer simulation of mail questionnaire response rates to acquaint students with trade-offs in terms of survey cost, accuracy, and time. In the absence of a theoretical base in the literature, the approach familiarizes students with current issues and problems, and helps to develop a decision-making framework for this survey method. A step-by-step procedure emphasizing student involvement is described.     

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.     

Children in immediate danger: Emergency removals in Finnish and Irish child protection

This paper presents a qualitative analysis of front‐line practices regarding emergency removals in Finnish and Irish child protection. It examines how the responses to children's immediate danger are framed by legislation and how front‐line practitioners assess the child's situation and make emergency placement decisions. The data consist of interviews with 16 Irish and 33 Finnish social workers. These child welfare protection systems respond differently to a task that appears to be similar. The Irish team‐based practice rests on the social workers' shared assessment of the child's needs, and the formal decision is made by the courts (or police officers at night‐time); and the Finnish practice involves only one single social worker who makes both the assessment and the removal decision. The Irish system is tightly time regulated, whereas the Finnish system provides a more flexible time frame. Both approaches put a lot of stress on social workers' practice, which also includes creative workarounds (e.g., “planned emergency removals” in Finland). Future research will need to explore these features from the point of view of a child's right to protection.     

Latino Faces,Corporate Ties: Latino Advocacy Organizations and Their Board Membership

Although they have increased exponentially since the 1960s, social scientists know little about ethnic advocacy organizations. These nonprofits are important bridges between underresourced communities and mainstream funding organizations and their directors are established ethnic leaders. Sociologists study interlocking directorates—or shared board membership—to understand how organizations fit together within broader social networks. Network concepts, particularly the theory of institutional isomorphism, suggest that organizations are likely to be similar to the extent they are connected and operate within a common organizational field. We apply this logic to Latino advocacy organizations to examine the underlying source of cohesion across this ethnic field. We ask whether the organizations are tied by interlocking directorates of ethnic elites who sit on their boards of directors or if board members' common affiliation with other elite institutions creates the structural conditions that facilitate potential ideological or behavioral similarity. A social network analysis of five prominent Latino advocacy organizations reveals support for both hypotheses: Latino board members are both embedded in ethnic‐based networks and entrenched within elite organizational webs. This suggests that ethnic elites who sit on the boards of Latino advocacy organizations are also corporate elites, selected for the social capital they bring to these nonprofits.     

Evaluating the Use of Spatial Covariance Structures in the Analysis of Cardiovascular Imaging Data

This article investigates the choice of working covariance structures in the analysis of spatially correlated observations motivated by cardiac imaging data. Through Monte Carlo simulations, we found that the choice of covariance structure affects the efficiency of the estimator and power of the test. Choosing the popular unstructured working covariance structure results in an over-inflated Type I error possibly due to a sample size not large enough relative to the number of parameters being estimated. With regard to model fit indices, Bayesian Information Criterion outperforms Akaike Information Criterion in choosing the correct covariance structure used to generate data.