Transforming the debate about child care and maternal employment.

Over the past two decades, the large-scale entrance of women into the work force has fundamentally changed the fabric of work and family life. Unlike 75 other nations, the United States has no comprehensive family policy that helps families cope with the competing demands of work and family. Research within psychology has not been helpful in pointing out the need for a major shift in public policy. This article argues that both governmental policy and psychological research reflect the popular culture's idealized myth of motherhood. It suggests an interruption of the research agenda that searches for negative consequences of maternal employment and alternative child care. A new agenda is proposed that would document the negative consequences of not providing high-quality, affordable day care. This new agenda would also acknowledge the centrality of fathers and family process to developmental outcomes in children.     

Developing practice and evidence for counselling in primary care: the agenda

Counselling in primary care has developed rapidly over the last few years and now appears to be a widespread provision. Yet ad hoc , unregulated development, coupled with radical changes within the National Health Service environment, presents an array of challenges to continued development. This paper reviews and summarises the contributions of all the authors to this special symposium, and in so doing attempts to set out a development agenda for both evidence and practice as a practical yield from the rich insights and experiences offered.     

Engaging the Faith Community for Public Health Advocacy: An Agenda for the Surgeon General

This article proposes an agenda for the Surgeon General of the United States that is consonant with the traditional public health approach of “upstream” and “midstream” intervention addressing social and institutional determinants of health. Accordingly, this features a prominent role for expanded partnerships between the faith-based and public health sectors. Such an agenda would revise the current status quo for the Surgeon General, whose celebrated bully pulpit is currently focused more on encouraging “downstream” compliance with federal guidelines related to lifestyle behavior modification. A new faith-based agenda, by contrast, could more effectively advocate for core features of the traditional public health ethic, including primary prevention, the multiple determinants of population health, communitarianism and social justice, and a global perspective, supported by the historic prophetic role of the faith traditions.     

Changing Issue Agendas of Women Clergy

Using data from separate studies conducted in 1988–89 and 1998, we explore changes in the issue agendas of women clergy. Rosenstone and Hansen (1993) argue persuasively that mobilization often occurs due to a commitment to a particular political issue. Our data allow us to test three separate hypotheses about the evolution of women clergy's issue agendas over the course of a decade that saw an unprecedented number of women enter the ministry. Shifts in the issue agendas of women clergy suggest a model of issue agenda evolution including four possible explanations for change: public agenda shifts, changes resulting from the growing number of women clergy, or ideological stability.     

Behavioral economics of drug self-administration and drug abuse policy.

The concepts of behavioral economics have proven useful for understanding the environmental control of overall levels of responding for a variety of commodities, including reinforcement by drug self-administration. These general concepts are summarized for application to the analysis of drug-reinforced behavior and proposed as the basis for future applications. This behavioral agenda includes the assessment of abuse liability, the assay of drug-reinforcer interactions, the design of drug abuse interventions, and the formulation of drug abuse public policy. These separate domains of investigation are described as part of an overall strategy for designing model projects to control drug use and testing public policy initiatives.     

Overview: forging research priorities for women's mental health

After a decade of reports underscoring the inadequacy of existing scientific knowledge for understanding gender differences in mental disorder and its treatment, the National Institute of Mental Health has developed a women's mental health research agenda with five priority areas for research: diagnosis and treatment of mental disorder, mental health issues for older women, violence against women, multiple roles, and poverty. This overview highlights some of the major findings in each of these five areas and introduces the more in-depth treatment given in this Psychology in the Public Form section to the areas of violence, poverty, and multiple roles. It also underscores the importance of identifying sources of gender bias in all mental health research. Women's mental health issues have become officially recognized as part of the NIMH research agenda. Only time and continued monitoring will determine how these official policy priorities will become translated into actual funding and research initiatives.     

Contesting the “territorial aggression thesis” in environmental psychology,ca. 1965–1980

In the latter part of the 1960s, the ethologically derived idea of territoriality as an explanation for human aggression became widely debated among social scientists. The instinctual basis of human territorial aggression was promoted by so‐called popular ethologists and consequently embraced by lay audiences. The article examines how the emerging field of environmental psychology adopted the notion of human territoriality from ethology and made it into a part of their own research agenda. It shows how environmental psychologists were inspired by the fashion around the claimed relevance of human territoriality for the large‐scale social problems, such as aggression, war and population growth. Despite of the obvious influences and comparisons between animal and human behavior, many environmental psychologists wanted to contest not only the ‘territorial aggression thesis’ but also the relevance of animal studies for the analysis of human behavior.     

Public policymaking and research information

The public policymaking process presents behavior analysts with opportunities to shape public policy and influence decisions that affect the evolution of communities. Although the scientist-advocate's role in public policymaking has received increased attention, little attention has been given to behavioral analyses of the policymaking context. This paper describes the stages of policymaking, including agenda formation, policy adoption, policy implementation, and policy review. It also analyzes seven types of research information important in agenda formation and policy adoption-information about the dimensions of an issue, number of people affected, relative standing of an issue, interests of those involved, controlling variables, program alternatives, and program acceptability. Methods for communicating research information to policymakers are discussed.     

The Unmet Educational Agenda in Integrated Care

One of the reasons integrated care has not become a dominant service delivery model is the unmet training agenda. This article argues that the typical mental health professional is not trained to adequately address the challenges of integrated care. To insure competency both a macro and clinical training agenda are needed. At the macro-level, mental health professionals need to understand healthcare economics and basic business principles as any integrated care service delivery system is embedded and driven by economic forces. Integrated care practitioners also need some basic business skills to understand these forces and to create and manage a financially viable system, given the future flux of the system. Traditional mental health professionals also do not have the clinical skills to implement integrated care. Integrated care is not simply placing a traditionally trained mental health professional and letting them practice specialty mental health in a medical setting. Thus, the special skills needed in integrated care are enumerated and discussed. Finally, a new degree program is described as it is time given the huge need and advantages of integrated care to develop specialty training in integrated care.     

Emotions of austerity: Care and commitment in public service delivery in the North East of England

In the context of an austerity agenda, constructed through the deployment of aversive emotions, we offer a more-than-rational understanding of uneven austerity politics for organisations providing public services with marginalised groups. The article highlights how emotions are at the heart of the experiences of those delivering services in the North East of England. It considers the emotional toll of changes under austerity on the professional lives of participants, but also those impacts which relate to wider interpretations of loyalty and care beyond individual participants. Due to the nature of occupational roles which involve an ethos and practice of commitment, and through relations with decision makers, colleagues, service users and community over time, participants are engaged in a range of emotional work. We explore how recent experiences have highlighted a continued and in some cases accelerated undermining of their work and communities of which they are, in different ways, a part. However, they are also seen as generative of a set of significant emotionally charged responses to such challenges, which variously challenge and conform to the dominant discourse of austerity.     

Day care: Promoting collaboration between research and policymaking

An agenda for day care research that is tailored to current policy concerns is presented. Familiar developmental issues related to the quality of day care are recast within a policy perspective. Largely unexamined issues pertaining to the costs and supply of day care, the preventative role of day care services, economic and employment-related effects, links between day care and other settings that comprise children's environments, and alternative approaches to day care such as employer-sponsored care, are also identified. It is argued that these issues extend current conceptualizations of interdisciplinary and ecological research. By way of introduction, an overview of recent sociodemographic trends and changes in federal day care policy is provided. A discussion of emerging policy issues that could profit from input by child development research then serves as background to detailed suggestions for research that can advance the dual goals of informing day care policy-makers and contributing to developmental theory.     

Seek first to understand

A recent study suggests that doctors often diminish effective time with patients by talking about themselves in a manner that does not improve the patient visit and is sometimes disruptive to it. Good care requires hearing what the patient has to say, as the doctor cannot set proper goals for a visit without knowing the patient's agenda. Listening to the patient is the key both to good patient care and to caring for the patient.     

Psychology and homelessness. A public policy and advocacy agenda.

This article describes a public policy agenda developed for the American Psychological Association (APA) by the APA Ad Hoc Advisory Panel on Homelessness, which met May 31-June 1, 1991. The agenda is intended to inform APA staff in their legislative and policy work with Congress and Executive Branch agencies on issues relevant to homelessness.     

Ego depletion in consumer behavior: A review,synthesis, and research agenda

This research aims to identify, analyze, and map the intellectual structure of the topic of ego depletion in consumer behavior through the bibliometric strategies of namely co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling. We performed the co-citation analysis covering 20 years of research, divided into two 10-year analyses. The bibliographic coupling analysis focused on recent research covering the last decade, divided into two five-year analyses. The results presented the most important research, authors, research centers, and journals on the topic, as well as the factors derived from the co-citation and bibliographic coupling analysis, the evolution of the theme between the analysis and subsequent periods, and the agenda for future research. The main contribution of this article is the proposition of an agenda for future research on ego depletion and its effects on consumer behavior.     

Research into the organisation,training and effectiveness of counsellors who work for free

The activities of voluntary or ‘paraprofessional’ counsellors, who work for free, represent a highly significant component of the delivery of psychological therapy in Britain and other countries. However, in recent years there has been relatively little published research into issues associated with the provision of service by counsellors who work on a voluntary part‐time basis, and who typically receive limited training and supervision. This paper introduces a special theme section on counselling in the voluntary sector, which highlights some recent examples of research into the context, organisation, training and effectiveness of such counsellors. Some suggestions are made concerning the research agenda for counselling in the voluntary sector.     

Finding a Locus for Dialogue between Genetics and Theology

Christoph Schönborn, Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, has dismissed Pope John Paul II's position on theology and science as “rather vague and unimportant.” I believe that the Cardinal's analysis of John Paul II's views on evolution and Christian faith deserves a careful and detailed response from all those concerned with the constructive dialogue between science and theology that John Paul II so strongly supported for decades. My ‘bottom line’ is twofold. First, Cardinal Schönborn's concern over evolution is unnecessary: What scientists view as chance in nature Christians can see as God's ongoing and purposeful action in the creation of life and humanity. Second, the Cardinal's concern is also misplaced. When evolutionary theory is co-opted by atheists to serve their agenda the Cardinal should challenge the atheists, not the science they falsely claim proves their views.     

The doctor as double agent

American doctors in the 1990s are being asked to serve as "double agents," weighing competing allegiances to patients' medical needs against the monetary costs to society. This situation is a reaction to rapid cost increases for medical services, themselves the result of the haphazard development since the 1920s of an inherently inflationary, open-ended system for funding and delivering health care. The answer to an inefficient system, however, is not to stint on care, but rather to restructure the system to remove the inflationary pressures. As long as we are spending enormous resources on an inherently inefficient and inflationary system we cannot justify asking doctors to withhold beneficial care to save money for third-party payers. Doing so serves a largely political agenda and endangers the patient-centered ethic that is central to medicine.