Church: An Overlooked Mental-Health Resource

In a multi-perspective survey of mental-health consumer needs, 50% of the stakeholders in the Alaska mental-health system identified participation in church or religious activities as important. However, the publicly supported mental-health service system has a tradition of rarely using church-based resources for its clients. In today's climate of diminishing government, this may be the time for publicly supported mental-health and other social-service providers to rethink their traditional avoidance of church and religious activities. For many consumers, church and religious activities may be a considerable potential resource within the continuum of resources needed for psychiatric rehabilitation.     

Women's Spiritualities: Resource for Mission

What are the distinguishing features of women's spiritualities, what informs women's spiritualities and practice? This paper attends to the transformative elements that women's spiritualities potentially offer to the task of mission. Mary and her song in Luke 1 are explored in order to plumb something of the depth of the spirituality of Mary and her song and Mary in her role as woman, as co‐worker with God to redeem and transform the world.     

The Counsellor Resource Centre: An On-Line Resource for Career Development Specialists in Canada

The Counsellor Resource Centre is an Internet site devoted to counselor self-care. This article describes the factors creating the need for such a site, the process used to develop the site, and the structure of the site.     

Religion as Dialogical Resource: A Socio-cultural Approach

William James proposed a psychological study of religion examining people’s religious experiences, and to see in what sense these were good for them. The recent developments of psychology of religion moved far from that initial proposition. In this paper, we propose a sociocultural perspective to religion that renews with that initial stance. After recalling Vygtotsky’s core ideas, we suggest that religion, as cultural and symbolic system, participates to the orchestration of human activities and sense-making. Such orchestration works both from within the person, through internalized values and ideas, and from without, through the person’s interactions with others, discourses, cultural objects etc. This leads us to consider religions as supporting various forms of dialogical dynamics—intra-psychological dialogues, interpersonal with present, absent or imaginary others, as well as inter-group dialogues—which we illustrate with empirical vignettes. The example of religious tensions in the Balkans in the 90’s highlights how much the historical-cultural embeddedness of these dynamics can also lead to the end of dialogicality, and therefore, sense-making     

The Sibling Resource Dilution Theory: An Analysis

In this study, I examined relationships between sibling variables and children's family educational resources at different levels of family social status and children's intellectual ability. Data were collected from 900 eleven-year-old Australian children (450 boys, 450 girls) and their parents. Relationships among the variables were examined by plotting regression surfaces generated from models that included terms to test for possible linear, interaction, and curvilinear associations. Although results from some of the regression models provided tentative support for the sibling resource dilution theory, overall results suggest that acceptance of the theory must be treated with some caution. In general, the analysis indicated the possible complexity of relationships between sibling variables and family educational resources.     

Evaluating Resource Gain: Understanding and Misunderstanding Posttraumatic Growth

In a response to an article by Hobfoll and colleagues, theoretical and empirical considerations regarding the concept of posttraumatic growth are reviewed. It is noted that posttraumatic growth should be assessed as such, with measures developed specifically to address this construct; that it follows a challenge to and re-examination of core beliefs, not every bad experience; it can be influenced by many factors; it can coexist with distress during stages of the process without indicating that growth is unimportant or negative; and it can follow various trajectories, including ones where it may at first serve one function, but later involve personally transformative changes.
En réponse à un article de Hobfoll et al., des réflexions théoriques et empiriques concernant le concept de croissance post-traumatique sont menées. On note que la croissance post-traumatique doit être estimée à partir de mesures qui lui sont propres. Il est aussi souligné que la croissance post-traumatique survient après un défi et un réexamen des croyances fondamentales et non après chaque expérience négative. La croissance post-traumatique peut être influencée par de nombreux facteurs, elle peut coexister avec la détresse durant les étapes du processus sans que, pour autant, cela soit un indicateur d'une croissance négative ou peu importante. Enfin, elle peut suivre des trajectoires variées, y compris celles où elle remplit au départ une fonction et ultérieurement est impliquée directement dans des changements.     

Resource Cost Analysis: We Really Need to Know

Analysis of costs in delivering special services is seen within the context of increasing demands by various consituencies for cost accountability and containment. The problem of analyzing such cost is considered and approaches to cost analysis are delineated. The Resource Cost Model is suggested as a useful cost analysis method and discussed in terms of potential advantages and limitations at local school levels.     

Elegiac Poetry: A Pastoral Resource with Complicated Grief

This essay argues that elegiac poetry, the poetry of mourning, may be a resource for pastoral care with complicated grief. It builds on Freuds distinction between mourning (normal grief) and melancholia (complicated grief), particularly as appropriated by French literary critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. It makes the case for elegy as a locus for externalizing a lost object which, in complicated grief, has been internalized as part of the bereaved persons self and which is not only grieved but also treated ambivalently if it is not hated. Drawing on the suffering God motif in Christian theologies of the cross, theological reflections supplement psychological arguments.     

Assessment Centers: An Untapped Resource For Global Salesforce Management

The decisions surrounding salesforce hiring, career development and promotion choices have traditionally been left to the creativity and subjective judgement of marketing managers with very few decision aids from which to draw. As salesforce management became a task requiring an increasingly international focus, the complexity of the decisions and the cultural sensitivity required have left the management of the global salesforce as a very challenging function within the multinational firm. The assessment center, a structured means of evaluating potential new sales recruits and candidates for promotion and transfer, is offered as a tool to begin to address the above problem.     

Women in Professional Selling: A Human Resource Management Perspective

The authors present a set of human resource management tactics that can assist women who are pursuing sales careers and organizations that need effective salesforces. Topics discussed include recruiting selection, training, mentoring, managing and supporting.     

Resource theory and power in families: life cycle considerations

We begin our discussion by outlining the usefulness of "resource theory" as a theoretical framework for the study of family power. This framework is then used to analyze changes in the balance of power between elderly parents and their middle-age children. With respect to intergenerational power relationships, we argue that the autonomy of elderly parents has increased, but their power and influence over adult children has decreased. This trend is likely to continue in coming decades. Resource theory is then utilized to analyze changes in marital power relationships as couples age. Most studies of power relationships between elderly spouses have an important limitation--they tend to reflect yesterday's definitions of male and female roles. Recent changes in these roles may significantly alter the social meanings of aging for both men and women in coming years.