Relationship of social support and social burden to repeated breast cancer screening in the women's health initiative.

Direct and interactive effects of social support, social burden (caregiving, negative life events, and social strain), education, and income on repeated use of breast cancer screening among a large (N=55,278), national sample of postmenopausal women participating in the Women's Health Initiative observational study were examined. Repeated screening decreased as emotional/informational support and positive social interactions decreased (ps<.01). Repeated mammography decreased with frequent caregiving (p<.01). Less social strain reduced the frequency of repeated breast self-examinations (BSEs; ps<.01), but frequent caregiving and more negative life events increased repeated use of BSE (ps<.01). Interactive effects suggested that emotional/informational but not tangible support is associated with repeated mammography and clinical breast examinations (ps<.01) and may be particularly important among low-income older women, especially those burdened by caregiving.     

Alaskan Gay Males’ Couple Experiences of Societal Non-Support: Coping Through Families of Choice and Therapeutic Means

Trends in the marriage and family therapy (MFT) field show that gay men access therapy at a rate two to four times greater than their heterosexual counterparts. Thus, MFTs must be prepared to meet the needs of such clientele. Little research has been conducted on male–male couple experiences and less has been conducted in Alaska. In this qualitative study involving eleven participants we explored societal experiences and coping strategies of Alaskan male–male couples. Themes demonstrated more non-supportive than supportive experiences, the use of families of choice as the primary means of coping, and mixed therapeutic experiences.     

Friend or Foe? The Promise and Pitfalls of Using Social Networking Sites for HR Decisions

The Internet has changed many Human Resource (HR) practices, and techniques such as online job postings and testing have become quite common in HR. However, the use of social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter for recruiting, hiring, or terminating individuals is relatively new, but their use for these purposes is clearly growing while research on these practices is lacking. Many questions about using these sites for HR practice have yet to be addressed, including questions about the validity and usefulness of information obtained on these sites, applicant perceptions of employers’ use of these sites, and the legality of using these sites, among others. The current study describes issues associated with using social networking websites for recruiting, staffing/selection, and discipline/termination, and provides recommendations for future research studies in this area.     

Race and older mothers' differentiation: a sequential quantitative and qualitative analysis

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate a process by which qualitative and quantitative approaches are combined to reveal patterns in the data that are unlikely to be detected and confirmed by either method alone. Specifically, we take a sequential approach to combining qualitative and quantitative data to explore race differences in how mothers differentiate among their adult children. We began with a standard multivariate analysis examining race differences in mothers' differentiation among their adult children regarding emotional closeness and confiding. Finding no race differences in this analysis, we conducted an in-depth comparison of the Black and White mothers' narratives to determine whether there were underlying patterns that we had been unable to detect in our first analysis. Using this method, we found that Black mothers were substantially more likely than White mothers to emphasize interpersonal relationships within the family when describing differences among their children. In our final step, we developed a measure of familism based on the qualitative data and conducted a multivariate analysis to confirm the patterns revealed by the in-depth comparison of the mothers' narratives. We conclude that using such a sequential mixed methods approach to data analysis has the potential to shed new light on complex family relations.     

Substance use and violent behavior in women with antisocial personality disorder

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between substance abuse and dependence and violent behavior in a sample of incarcerated women with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). Among male populations, substance dependence is associated with aggression and criminal behavior. Individuals with ASPD have more severe substance dependence, including higher symptom counts, earlier age of onset, and more frequent co-morbidity. Incarcerated women have a high prevalence of ASPD and substance dependence, but there has been little detailed work regarding addiction severity. Similarly, work on association of substance abuse and dependence with specific violent behaviors has been limited. This study examined a group of 41 mid-sentence female felons with a diagnosis of ASPD to determine associations with substance abuse and dependence. Data were gathered through administration of the Semi-Structured Assessment of the Genetics of Alcoholism II (SSAGA II). Substance dependence was highly prevalent (i.e., alcohol dependence, 56.1%; opiate dependence, 48.8%; cocaine dependence, 61.0%). While specific diagnoses were not associated with violent behavior and offending, symptom severity (i.e., age of onset, symptom count, co-morbidity) was associated with violent behavior in women dependent on opiates, alcohol, and cocaine. Arrest for an assault 1 was associated with alcohol dependence and opiate dependence. These data suggest that measurement of symptom severity and co-morbidity is important in assessing violent behavior in incarcerated women with ASPD. These findings are potentially important in examining non-incarcerated, substance-dependent women.     

Using SenseCam with an amnesic patient: accessing inaccessible everyday memories

Forgetting is a normal and everyday occurrence that may sometimes reflect a complete loss of the mnemonic record or a failure to encode it in the first place. However, on many occasions with the help of cues we can eventually or suddenly recall a memory that seemed to be lost, thus highlighting the probability that many instances of "forgetting" may in fact reflect inaccessibility rather than true loss. We report here on our amnesic patient CR who presents an extreme example of this normal everyday forgetting. For 4 weeks, CR recorded regular personal autobiographical events both on a SenseCam (henceforth SC) and in a written diary form. Subjective and objective aspects of recall were measured each weekend both without any cues and then with either a SC or diary cue. We show that the SC enabled CR to recall significantly more detailed episodic memories than reading the diary and importantly we observed that the qualitative nature of these memories was different. We comment on the considerable potential of SC for therapeutic purposes.     

Assessing good qualitative research in the work psychology field: A response to the commentaries

This article is a response to three commentaries (Halbesleben, 2011; Hickson, 2011 & Locke, 2011) on ‘Assessing “good” qualitative research in the work psychology field: A narrative analysis’ (Cassell & Symon, 2011).