Television,madness and community care

This paper describes the forms and contents of television representations of mental illness in the UK in 1992. The theoretical framework is provided by Moscovici's theory of social representations and some modifications are proposed for the case of madness. Quantitative and qualitative methods are used in the empirical analyses. It is shown that madness has multiple meanings on television, while at the same time violence is commonly included. It is also suggested that a partial reconfiguration of the representational field has taken place in recent years. Media stories about the responsibility of the policy of community care for scandals and tragedies are now commonplace. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Childhood maltreatment and college students' current suicidal ideation: a test of the hopelessness theory.

Few studies have examined the relation between childhood maltreatment and adult suicidality within the context of a coherent theoretical model. The current study evaluates the ability of the hopelessness theory of depression's (Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1989) etiological chain to account for this relation in a sample of 297 undergraduates. Supporting the model, emotional, but not physical or sexual, maltreatment was uniquely related to average levels of suicidal ideation across a 2.5-year follow-up. Further, students' cognitive styles and average levels of hopelessness partially mediated this relation. Although these results cannot speak to causality, they support the developmental model evaluated.     

Measuring Customer Service Orientation: An Examination of the Validity of the Customer Service Profile

The construct of customer service is taking on an ever increasing level of importance in today's global economy. Organizations need a way to identify those individuals who have the demeanor to effectively serve the public. The present study discusses the development and validation of a personality-based instrument which organizations can use to select high-quality service providers. Multiple converging sources of validity are discussed. Specifically, the authors collected validity evidence using customer related (vs. supervisor) ratings, an area relatively neglected in the service literature. Evidence suggests that customer ratings are viable and an important criterion for use in the validation of customer service instruments. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of both workplace intervention and future research.     

Alliance Ratings as a Part of Trainee Evaluations Within Family Therapy Training

Client-reported therapeutic alliance scores were examined as a measure of improvement in therapeutic skills across master's-level marriage and family therapy (MFT) training. The results indicate significant correlations between alliance ratings and training variables, with the number of cumulative clinical hours identified as a significant predictor of alliance ratings according to a regression analysis. Trainees lacking the expected number of clinical contact hours in each level of training were found to be more likely to receive consistently marginal alliance ratings. Additionally, alliance ratings were especially useful in identifying trainees who were functioning at minimal levels of competency.     

Sustained attention and unintentional injury among preschool-aged children.

This study examined vigilance in preschool-aged children and explored the relationship between vigilance and unintentional injury. There were 28 participating children, aged 4 and 5 years, who completed a computerized vigilance task for two 5-min sessions. The task generated measures of correct detections, false alarms, reaction time, and the signal detection indices of d' and c. Primary caregivers completed daily injury phone journals for a 4-week period. Results indicated that age and signal probability affected vigilance. Older children made more correct detections, had greater perceptual sensitivity, and performed in patterns similar to adults. Performance was enhanced in the high signal probability condition. In addition, vigilance indicators of perceptual sensitivity and response bias were predictive of injury, while age was not. Specifically, children with lower perceptual sensitivity scores, and who were less responsive to the vigilance task, experienced more unintentional injuries over the course of the study.     

Le logement des réfugiés à Montréal trois ans après leur arrivée: le cas des demandeurs d'asile ayant obtenu la résidence permanente

This article presents the results of a secondary analysis of the housing-related variables contained in a survey of the settlement experiences, of some 400 regularized refugee claimants living in Greater Montréal. It examines housing as a vector of settlement and integration, as well as the related neighbourhood context. The data indicate that the refugees are relatively well housed in terms of dwelling quality, but spend inordinately high percentages of their income on rent, essentially because of their low incomes. More optimistically, the refugees have access to social support from within their ethnolinguistic group, and in their neighbourhoods they are not isolated from the majority cultural groups of Québec society.     

Sexual behavior in young adulthood: a population-based twin study.

OBJECTIVE: With behavior genetic analyses of data from young adult twins, we evaluated theoretical perspectives that differentially emphasize biological dispositions, social/cultural factors, or universal pathways to explain individual differences in sexual behaviors. DESIGN: We fit biometric sex limitation models to three aspects of sexual behavior reported by 4,925 Finnish twins ages 23-27. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: From a postal questionnaire, we obtained self-report information on initiation/abstinence of sexual intercourse, onset age, and number of sexual partners. RESULTS: Genetic and non-shared environmental influences were significant for all three measures. There were trends for common environmental influences on initiation and, in females, age at first intercourse. Some differential effects in males and females were found. Results comparing onset age and number of partners among experienced twins from pairs concordant and discordant for initiation found genetic and environmental influences on initiation/abstinence overlapped those found for the other aspects of sexual behavior. CONCLUSIONS: These results document genetic variation in individual differences in sexual behavior of young adults. Incorporating genetic dispositions into integrated models of sexual behavior will facilitate more effective health promotion and risk taking intervention.