Is Seasonal Stress a Career Choice of Professional Accountants?

Workload compression during the first quarter of each year (January-March) is hypothesized to involve additional job demands on auditors and tax professionals causing job strain (occupational stress). Using canonical correlation analysis to analyze the survey data, this study found that the strongest stressor-strain relationship was for the group surveyed in January, indicating that workload compression contributes to seasonal occupational stress. Seasonal stress will remain a very strong barrier to qualified individuals in making an accounting career their vocational choice and will put additional demands on Employee Assistance Program (EAP) counseling for accounting practitioners.     

The Paraprofessional and Family Therapy

The new career movement in the community mental health field will increasingly demand that training programs provide the paraprofessional with a clinical role that avoids the temporary and mostly erroneous advantages of being an “indigenous” worker. Clinical functions taught in training need to be related to the problems of the urban poor; it is this group that needs a concept of service that can combine management of reality with beneficial restructuring of psychological systems. The resulting role is that of the paraprofessional family therapist — a new career that offers service to the troubled family unit of the urban poor and vocational definition to the person who is so trained.     

A student-operated crisis center

In this article we describe an attempt to meet a university community's needs for emergency mental health services through the establishment of a student-operated telephone emergency service. The service provides an interesting model for use of nonprofessionals in mental health services, in which the professional functions primarily as a trainer and consultant rather than offering direct services. We describe the structure of the center and then discuss further innovations and projects.     

The Effects and Effectiveness of Marital Therapy A Review of Outcome Research

The literature on outcome research in marital therapy is reviewed. Issues considered include the nature of outcome criteria, the need to establish a base line against which to measure improvement, and therapeutic effectiveness as a function of treatment type and time-in-therapy. The overall improvement rate across a heterogeneous collection of patients, therapists, and treatment modalities was 66 per cent, suggesting, conservatively, at least a moderately positive therapeutic effect in light of the judgment that “spontaneous” rates appear to be much lower in marital than in individual therapy. Evidence of deterioration in marital therapy also was discovered. No support was found for the contention that co-therapy is more effective than treatment of the couple by a single therapist. The needs of future research in the outcome of marital therapy are discussed and possible fruitful directions for such investigations suggested.     

The Role of Social Contacts in the Successful Job Search

This study examined the impact of social contacts (“It's who you know, not what you know”) on job getting. Workers were interviewed to discover the source of information about their most recent job. Results show that social contacts were the most frequently used resources during the job-getting process and that these personal contacts were used more often in some occupational environments than in others.     

Cultural Values: A Review of Empirical Research and Implications for Counseling

In this review, empirical investigations that followed the Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck model of value-orientations are presented. The review finds between-group as well as within-group variations in cultural values. The author also discusses how an understanding of cultural values can enrich cross-cultural effectiveness. En este repaso se presenta las investigaciones que utilizaron el modelo Kluckhohn y Strodtbeck de evaluación orientativa. Se encuentran variaciones de valores culturales inter e intra grupo. Elautor también discute la manera en que el conocimiento de valores culturales puede mejorar la efectividad intercultural.     

Technolatry, Methodolatry, and the Results of Family Therapy

Wells and Dezen's revisited results of research on the outcomes of nonbehavioral family therapy are themselves revisited. While their conclusions are largely defensible in terms of conventional criteria for research design and for assessing change in psychotherapy, we question whether such standard criteria are sufficient for studying the outcomes of family therapy. Moreover, Wells and Dezen's preoccupation with therapeutic technology at the expense of relationship factors and of "objective" change measures at the expense of more inferential measures severely limits the clinical and conceptual meaningfulness of their review.     

Ideologies,Idols (and Graven Images?): Rejoinder to Gurman and Kniskern

Three major issues raised in Gurman and Kniskern's commentary are discussed. These are (a) the suitability of established research design criteria for studying the outcome of family therapy; (b) the impact of therapist relationship factors on therapy outcome; and (c) the place of concrete or objective change measures in psychotherapy outcome research. Areas of agreement and disagreement with Gurman and Kniskern's observations are identified.