Review of Feminist Bioethics At the Center, On the Margins, edited by Jackie Leach Scully, Laurel E. Baldwin-Ragaven, Petya Fitzpatrick

Book details

Leach ScullyJackie, Baldwin-RagavenLaurel, Fitzpatrick Petya:Feminist Bioethics At the Center, On the Margins Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press 2010 Xiv307     

Spiritual Tools for Enhancing the Pastoral Visit to Hospitalized Patients

The tradition of visiting the sick is a practice that brings comfort to patients who are suffering, offers prayers for healing, and keeps the connection with family and community alive. It is a practice recognized from ancient times through today, one which underscores the mission of the field of Pastoral Care. This paper describes the creative use of multi-sensory spiritual tools, such as music, singing, personal prayer, psalms, and traditional texts, to enhance the sick visit to the hospitalized patient. This brief structured model is replicable and teachable to lay and professional caregivers. Both patient, family members, and caregivers can benefit from sharing in these moments of inner spiritual attunement and connection with others. Israela Meyerstein, LCSW-C, LMFT, is a social worker and family therapist in private practice in Baltimore, Maryland. An Approved Supervisor for the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, Ms. Meyerstein has trained therapists of all disciplines and has published over two dozen articles relating to Family therapy, medical issues, and spirituality. She is co-founder of the Baltimore Jewish Healing Network. Correspondence to Israela Meyerstein, Imeyerstein@hotmail.com. Gila Ruskin has served as a congregational rabbi, psychiatric hospital chaplain, adult and day school educator, and pastoral counselor. Rabbi Ruskin currently teaches Bible, Holocaust Studies, and Creative Writing at the St. Francis Academy in Baltimore, Maryland. She is co-founder of the Baltimore Jewish Healing Network.     

Mapping Juvenile Justice: Identifying Existing Structural Barriers to Accessing Probation Services

The majority of justice‐involved youth are placed on probation; however, many of those same youth struggle to comply with probation requirements and are subsequently confined. In Baltimore, 20% of newly committed youth were detained for violations of probation. While there are various reasons youth fail to comply with probation requirements, there have been recent calls to consider the impact of structural and spatial barriers to accessing probation programs and services. Centering the goals of community psychology, we aim to identify how existing structural barriers in Baltimore City may be contributing to social injustice through inequitable access to probation services for youth and their families. In this study, we take a novel, interdisciplinary approach to identify structural or spatial barriers facing justice‐involved youth in Baltimore, MD. Specifically, we explore transportation barriers (i.e., vehicle access) and spatial disparities between youth residences and probation office locations. Our findings suggest that there are several barriers facing Baltimore’s justice‐involved youth that may impact access to and engagement with juvenile probation. Specifically, we found that 1 in 3 youths reside in areas with extremely low levels of vehicle access and where the median household income is 25% below the city median. We also find that the majority of youth live beyond walking distances; many would require lengthy transit commutes. These findings highlight the structural and spatial barriers facing justice‐involved youth that may impact access to and engagement with probation services.     

Infant attachment in the Czech Republic: Categorical and dimensional findings from a post-communist country

Infant attachment remains virtually unexplored in former Eastern Bloc countries. The dimensional approach to infant attachment, which could ease common obstacles in cross-cultural attachment research, necessitates more empirical support. This study explores infant attachment in the Czech Republic, a post-communist country with a unique family policy, using both the categorical and the dimensional models. It also compares the Czech infant attachment distribution to infant attachment distributions in other countries and compares infant attachment distributions in European countries to the Baltimore study sample. In the Strange Situation Procedure, forty-nine (74 %) out of sixty-six mother-infant dyads (35 boys, M = 13.8, SD = 0.9) received the B classification. Despite the generous family policy and cultural emphasis on close mother-infant relationships, the Czech distribution of insecure categories did not differ from the Baltimore study sample. Out of other post-communist countries, only the infant attachment distribution in former East Germany differed from the Czech and the Baltimore study samples due to a lower proportion of type B and a higher proportion of type A infants. There were also more type A infants in the Italian sample. Interactive behavior scales accurately predicted attachment categories in 91 % of cases. Contact-maintenance and proximity-seeking scales substantially improve the assessment of insecure resistant behavior. Our findings support the universality and normativity of attachment and the utility of the dimensional approach.     

Book Review

H. R. Beech. Changing Man's Behavior. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969, 282 pages, $1.95. Reviewed by Leonard Ullmann     

The Baltimore Mural Project: An approach to threshold concepts in religious studies

The Baltimore Mural Project (BMP) seeks to connect religious studies education to the growing literature on threshold concepts in order to address bottleneck areas in student learning. The project is designed for undergraduate service courses comprised of mostly non‐majors: for example, world religions. Students in these courses often struggle to understand and apply the discipline's unique approaches to the study of religion (i.e. its threshold concepts). Rather than merely memorize certain facts about a religious tradition's myths [or world forming stories], rituals [or embodied disclosures], materials, and so on... students are asked to apply threshold concepts related to religion, art, and the social good to the study of murals in Baltimore. Through a series of project elements (including: field work, photography, digital geomapping, and quantitative, qualitative, and archival research) the BMP helps students who struggle with threshold concepts in religious studies by creatively connecting the more conventional aspects of world religions courses to social justice issues related to mural art in Baltimore. By experientially helping students to make these connections, they are able to find creative routes through otherwise hindering barriers to their learning in religious studies.     

Partial assessment of technologies

Trade‐Offs: Imperatives of Choice in a High‐Tech World, by Ed Wenk, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, 238 pages, hb $20     

Public Relations Design for College Career Counseling Services

This article describes the step-by-step design of a long-range public relations program, initiated at Essex Community College, Baltimore, which noticeably increased student use of career counseling offerings. Effective public relations principles are shown to bear a close relationship to successful career program development.     

Building Opportunity: Developing City Systems to Expand and Improve After School Programs

A growing body of research is examining the strengths and weaknesses of specific after school programs and their effect on youth outcomes. Few reviews, however, have sought to examine the components of citywide system-building—to understand intentional efforts to develop, support and sustain high quality after school programming across a community. Beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing through the present, private funders, public officials and program practitioners in cities across America have joined together to build systems to support the expansion and improvement of after school programs at the city-level. This paper presents the community context and underlying principles that drove the development of Baltimore’s After-School Strategy; articulates a set of system components derived from this experience and the available literature; and lays out future work to expand high quality after-school opportunities for youth in Baltimore and in other distressed urban environments.     

Neighborhood social disorder as a determinant of drug injection behaviors: a structural equation modeling approach.

Neighborhood environments are increasingly recognized as a contextual determinant of health, behaviors, and disease; however, the pathways through which neighborhood characteristics impact health behaviors are poorly understood. This article examines pathways to elucidate how neighborhood social disorder may lead to HIV transmission. Data are from a baseline survey of 701 injection drug users from the Self-Help in Eliminating Lethal Diseases Study, an HIV prevention intervention in Baltimore. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the pathways among social disorder, psychological distress, and drug injection behaviors. The relationship between disorder and injection behaviors in the models tested suggests that psychological distress is higher in more socially disordered neighborhoods, that distress leads to greater injection frequency and equipment sharing, and that injection frequency predicts equipment sharing.     

A Social-Psychological Version of the Aesthetic Attitude

Abstract

Robert Latou Dickinson and Lura Beam. The Single Woman. Baltimore: Williams &; Wilkins, 1934. Pp. xix+469. $5. Reviewed by Raymond Royce Willoughby.     

Cross-sectional studies of personality in a national sample: 1. Development and validation of survey measures

Short scales were developed to measure three broad dimensions of personality in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES I) Epidemiologic Followup Study. Items to measure neuroticism were selected rationally from the General Well-Being Schedule, and items to measure extraversion and openness to experience were selected by multiple regression from the NEO Personality Inventory. In a sample of 654 men and women from the Augmented Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, all three short scales showed clear evidence of convergent and discriminant validity against full scales in self-reports, and against peer and spouse ratings. Because they were developed and validated on a sample with a comparable age range, the NHANES scales should be useful in examining age trends in these three personality dimensions in a national sample.     

Witch‐hunt as enlightenment

Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrel With Science by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt. Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, 314 pages, $25.95 hardback only     

Wrapping services in an urban setting

Efforts to reform services for children and their families in Baltimore City have included providing Wraparound services to youth returned or diverted from out-of-state residential treatment. We briefly present the history and evolution of the system reform efforts in Baltimore City that were necessary to support the implementation of a Wraparound model of service delivery. The characteristics of the Wraparound service model is presented along with the referral pathway of the youth into the service system, the components of the service delivery system and an overview of step-down services and linkages utilized to transition the youth. Data are presented that demonstrate the level of community adjustment of a subset of the 121 youth served through the Wraparound model in contrast to the level of community adjustment achieved by nonequivalent comparison groups. We discuss the use of report card type of outcome measures, its user-friendly features, limitations, and the developmental steps needed to refine it further.     

Critical Reviews of Recent Books

Abstract

(Ellis, H. My Life: Autobiography. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1939.) Reviewed by Goodwin Watson

(Wechsler, David. The Measurement of Adult Intelligence. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1939. Pp. 229.) Reviewed by     

Socrates and psychotherapy

This article examines the basic philosophical ideas of Socrates and how these ideas form a basic part of the philosophical foundation of psychotherapy. His influence is analyzed by observing how Kierkegaard and Nietzsche view his contribution. The controversial thesis of I.F. Stone's recent book,The Trial of Socrates, is used to re-examine the man and his philosophy.He teaches moral philosophy at Notre Dame College in Baltimore, Maryland.     

Cross-sectional studies of personality in a national sample: 2. Stability in neuroticism, extraversion, and openness

Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES I) Epidemiologic Followup Study were used to examine age differences in neuroticism, extraversion, and openness to experience. Cross-sectional analyses of data from 10,063 respondents showed that older subjects were slightly lower in neuroticism, extraversion, and openness; that age trends were not curvilinear; and that there were no differences in personality scores that might be attributable to a mild-life crisis or transition. Comparison with data from 654 participants in the Augmented Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (ABLSA) showed that the ABLSA sample was lower in extraversion and higher in openness than the national sample, although the differences were small in magnitude. Results were interpreted to mean that sampling and attrition in this longitudinal sample did not seriously bias results on these personality variables, and that cross-sectional findings from a large probability sample support the conclusion that personality is predominantly stable in adulthood.     

Individuation and adult children of alcoholics

42 adult male and 99 female volunteers from the Washington and Baltimore areas were administered the Psychological Separation Inventory, the Personal Authority in the Family System Questionnaire, the Adult Child of Alcoholics Screening Test, the Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test, and the Symptom-Checklist-90--R in a study of variables associated with the development of psychopathology of adult children of alcoholics. Individuation evolving from family dynamics rather than from intrapsychic individuation was more crucial to the development of psychopathology.     

Book reviews

Effect of Small Doses of Alcohol on a Skill Resembling Driving. By G. C. Drew, W. P. Colquhoun and Hazel A Long. Medical Research Council Memorandum No. 38. London. H.M.S.O. 1959. Pp. 108. 7s. 6d. net.

The Anatomy of Judgment. By M. L. Johnson Abercrombie. London. Hutchinson. 1960. Pp. 156. 25s. net.

Handbook of Physiology. Section I: Neurophysiology. Volume I. Editor-in-Chief: John Field. Section Editor: H. W. Magoun. Executive Editor: Victor E. Hall. American Physiological Society (Sole Agents: The Williams & Wilkins Co., Baltimore). Pp. xiii + 779. 1959. $22.00.

Research Techniques in Human Engineering. By Alphonse Chapanis. Baltimore. Johns Hopkins Press. 1959. Pp. vii + 316. $6.

What is Cybernetics? By G. T. Gilbaud. (Translated by Valerie Mackay from La Cybernetique. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1954.) London. Heine-maim: Contemporary Science Series. 1959. Pp. viii + 126. 10s. 6d.     

Household family structure and children's aggressive behavior: A longitudinal study of urban elementary school children

The relationship between contemporary household family structures at fourth-grade and sixth-grade parent- and teacher-rated aggression was examined in an epidemiologically defined population of urban school children. The relationship between family structure and aggression varied by child gender and by parent and teacher ratings in the home and school, respectively. After taking into account family income, urban area, and fourth-grade aggressive behavior, boys in both mother—father and mother—male partner families were significantly less likely than boys in mother-alone families to be rated as aggressive by teachers. No significant relations between family structure and teacher- or parent-rated aggression were found for girls.This work was supported by the following National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grants: Epidemiologic Prevention Center for Early Risk Behavior P50 MH38725; Periodic Outcome of Two Preventive Trials RO1 MH42968; and a Postdoctoral Training Program 2T32MH18834-06A1. The authors would like to thank the Baltimore Public City School System and the children and parents who participated. The views expressed here are those of the authors; no official endorsement by NIMH is intended or should be inferred.Address all correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Ialongo, Department of Mental Hygiene, School of Hygiene and Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, 624 North Broadway, Baltimore, Maryland 21205.