Kultursensible Diagnostik in Forschung und Praxis

Nearly one fifth of the German population are migrants of the first and second generation. Evidence-based knowledge about mental health of migrants, their health care needs and the actual mental health care situation of this population is limited. Psychometric instruments are helpful for the assessment of mental disorders. Although a culture-sensitive approach in diagnostics is necessary it is often neglected in research as well as in clinical practice. This article describes culture-specific and linguistic challenges and specifies specific communication problems. In most cases psychometric instruments are not developed simultaneously in different languages but are translated later on. After translation psychometric instruments should be culturally validated and adapted with respect to linguistic, cultural and metric equivalence. The article gives an overview about the different aspects of equivalence and explains these aspects on the example of the PHQ-9.     

Regionale Psychiatrieberichterstattung

In diesem Beitrag werden zun?chst die Motivation, das Konzept und die Datenquellen der 2006 eingeführten Vorarlberger Psychiatrieberichterstattung dargestellt. Dann erfolgt, mit Hilfe definierter Kennzahlen, anhand der Ergebnisse für das Berichtsjahr 2008 ein überblick über die in die Berichterstattung einbezogenen Hilfsangebote und ihre Nutzer. Die Kennzahlen beschreiben den Umfang der Hilfen, das dafür eingesetzte Fachpersonal und die betreuten Patienten. Beispielhaft werden sodann M?glichkeiten der empirischen überprüfung des Zielgruppenbezugs und der regionalen Bedarfsgerechtigkeit der Hilfen erl?utert. Der Beitrag schlie?t mit einigen Bemerkungen zu den geplanten n?chsten Schritten auf dem Weg zu einer kontinuierlichen Qualit?tsentwicklung der regionalen psychiatrischen Versorgung, die das gesamte Netzwerk der Hilfen einbezieht und dabei auch die Notwendigkeit und Wirksamkeit der therapeutischen Ma?nahmen im Einzelfall in den Blick nimmt.     

Die Psychotherapeutenausbildung aus Sicht der Teilnehmer

Background

A survey was performed to assess the current situation in education and to identify critical issues 10 years after the inception of the German law regulating the education of psychological psychotherapists and child and adolescent psychotherapists. The study reports the results of a nationwide survey of German psychological psychotherapists and child and adolescent psychotherapists currently in training. The aim of the survey was to evaluate the individual sections of training, desired alterations and structural and financial conditions.

Methods

All trainees were contacted via the training institutes and the umbrella organizations. A total of 3,223 trainees participated and answered questions mainly using an online questionnaire.

Results

Most respondents practiced their training part-time and in most cases the trainees thought that the training would last longer than initially expected. The practical training was rated most poorly, whereas practical education and individual supervision were rated as most useful. The survey revealed deficits concerning the evaluation of the quality of several components of the training.

Conclusions

From the perspective of the trainees there is a necessity to modify the financial conditions of the training. This result has been considered in the recommendations of a research expertise on psychotherapy training and should stimulate further research.     

From segregation to intergroup contact and back: Using experiments and simulation to understand the bidirectional link

Research on intergroup contact has mostly viewed desegregation as a necessary condition for contact to unfold its power to reduce prejudice. Through residential and school choices, however, prejudice also contributes to segregation. To shed light on this bidirectional link, we conducted two survey‐based experiments with stratified quota samples of German adults. In Study 1, respondents with less contact and more prejudice indicated a lower likelihood of renting an apartment in a neighborhood with a larger proportion of minority members, although housing quality and crime rate were held constant. In Study 2, similar results were obtained for the likelihood of enrolling their child at a school with a larger proportion of minority students. Building on these results in a computer simulation, we find that because contact only reduces prejudice, but does not produce pro‐minority preferences, spontaneous desegregation is unlikely to occur even under the most favorable structural and economic conditions.     

“Care for the Common Home”: Responses to Pope Francis’s Encyclical Letter

Journal of Religion and Health - This article aims to build awareness of the growing global crisis in social, economic and environmental terms from different disciplinary approaches. The authors...     

Features of the Expert-System-Shell SPIRIT

The inference process in a probabilistic and conditional environmentunder minimum relative entropy, permits the acquisition of basicknowledge, the consideration of - even uncertain - ad hoc knowledge,and the response to queries. Even if these procedures are wellknown in the relevant literature their realisation for large-scaleapplications needs a sophisticated tool, allowing the communicationwith the user as well as all relevant logical transformationsand numerical calculations. SPIRIT is an Expert-System-Shellfor these purposes. Even for hundreds of – consistent– facts about the involved variables’ dependenciesthe shell automatically generates the corresponding epistemicstate, thus permitting the derivation of conclusions from theacquired knowledge. These conclusions’ reliability orprecision can be checked, inviting the user to enrich the knowledgeby further facts, if desired. Any inconsistencies among providedfacts are detected, and their elimination will be supportedby the shell. Knowledge acquisition can come from provided factsby a knowledge engineer as well as from real world data; inductivelearning supports the use of such data. An important capabilityof the shell is the calculation of impacts upon ideas or conceptsfrom a given stimulus. This paper is a brief survey of theoreticalconcepts and the corresponding features of the system, whichare accompanied by illustrative examples.     

Silencing without Convention

Silencing is usually explained in terms of conventionalism about the nature of speech acts. More recently, theorists have tried to develop intentionalist theories of the phenomenon. I argue, however, that if intentionalists are to accommodate the conventionalists' main insight, namely, that silencing can be so extreme as to render certain types of speech act completely unavailable to victims, they must take two assumptions on board. First, it must be possible that speakers' communicative intentions are opaque to the speakers themselves. Second, it needs to be assumed that structural oppression can have hidden psychological effects on its victims. Because both assumptions can be motivated independently, I argue that silencing can be fully understood without appealing to linguistic conventions.     

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