Deweyan Democracy,Neoliberalism, and Action Research

Studies in Philosophy and Education - This article aims to establish a line of continuity between John Dewey’s democratic and educational ideals and the practice of action research, to...     

Enabling Action: Reflections upon Inclusive Participatory Research on Health with Women with Disabilities in the Philippines

People with disabilities experience health disparities arising from social, environmental, and system-level factors. Evidence from a range of settings suggests women with disabilities have reduced access to health information and experience barriers to screening, prevention, and care services. This results in greater unmet health needs, particularly in relation to sexual and reproductive health. Women with disabilities are also more likely to experience physical and sexual violence than women without disabilities, further undermining their health. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) can generate knowledge and underpin action to address such health disparities and promote health equity. However, the potential and challenges of disability inclusion in CBPR, particularly in contexts of poverty and structural inequality such as those found in low- and middle-income countries, are not well documented. In this paper, we reflect on our experience of implementing and evaluating W-DARE, a three-year program of disability-inclusive CBPR aiming to increase access to sexual and reproductive health and violence-response services for women with disabilities in the Philippines. We discuss strategies for increasing disability inclusion in research and use a framework of reflexive solidarity to consider the uneven distribution of the benefits, costs, and responsibilities for action arising from the W-DARE program.     

Cleaning versus replacement in power plant air preheaters: a comparison between deterministic and stochastic goal programming models

Power plants lose efficiency when the air preheater elements are not replaced or cleaned as they deteriorate. Replacing is more expensive than cleaning but more secure to preserve power and lifetime. How many baskets should be then replaced and how many cleaned to achieve ‘satisficing’ goals of cost, power and lifetime? We design deterministic/stochastic goal programming approaches to this problem and develop a decision case for usual preheaters. Some discrepancies in results between both approaches appear, the deterministic model advising to replace less baskets than the stochastic, which is plausible due to the risk variable. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

COCAINE ADDICTS AND THEIR FAMILIES: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF THE PROCESSES OF IDENTIFICATION

The processes of identification between adolescent cocaine addicts and their parents were studied in 402 subjects, in total 134 familial triads (father"mother"son), subdivided into two groups of 67 triads, one of these groups having as the child an adolescent of masculine sex dependent on cocaine and the other, equal in number, being a control group, duly matched for age and socio-economic status. The instrument employed was the Rorschach test (1922), limited to the application of the Lerner Defense Scale (LDS; Lerner & Lerner, 1980). The findings in the affected triads showed up as consistent statistically for the presence of intense processes of pathological identification, especially between father and son, a sign of the importance of the presence of disturbances of paternal function in the development of this addiction. The utilisation of very regressive defence mechanisms, above all of projective identification, was the predominant mode of procedure in triads with a dependent child. In comparisons between the fathers the odds ratio (OR) for projective identification was 8.66 to 1, which points to the association between cocaine addiction and the primitive mental functioning of the fathers. With empirical methodology these findings serve to corroborate the psychoanalytical conclusions based on studies of single case studies, testifying that the dysfunctions of identificatory phenomena in familial functioning are predominant in the mental organisation of cocaine addicts.     

Semantic priming in the prime task effect: Evidence of automatic semantic processing of distractors

The automaticity of the semantic processing of words has been questioned because of the reduction of semantic priming when the prime word is processed nonsemantically--for example, in letter search (the prime task effect). In two experiments, prime distractor words produced semantic priming in a subsequent lexical decision task, but with the direction of priming (positive or negative) depending on the prime task. Lexico-semantic tasks produced negative semantic priming, whereas letter search produced positive semantic priming. These results are discussed in terms of task-based inhibition. We argue that, given the results from the distractors, the absence of semantic priming does not indicate an absence of semantic activation but reflects the action of control processes on prepotent responses when less practiced responses are needed.     

THE CONSTANCY OF STRUCTURE OF PERCEIVED PARENTAL REARING STYLE IN GREEK AND SPANISH SUBJECTS AS COMPARED WITH THE DUTCH

To be able to contribute to the cross-cultural study of child-rearing practices and psychopathology, this study sought to examine the cross-national generalizability of parental rearing constructs by analyzing self-report data on the EMBU, an instrument designed to assess memories of one's parents' rearing behavior. Of the four primary factors identified originally with Dutch individuals, namely Rejection, Emotional Warmth, Overprotection and Favoring Subject, the first three were replicated in a similar form in a Greek and a Spanish sample of normal research volunteers. Other properties of the factors, their corresponding scales, and the items constituting the scales were such that it would be warranted to carry out mean scale level or pattern comparisons between subjects from the respective countries on the three constructs evidencing cross-national constancy. Scale-level factor analysis of these constructs produced identical two- factor compositions (CARE and PROTECTION) across the Greek, the Spanish and the Dutch samples which further supported this conclusion.     

The role of stress on the language-independence and code-switching phenomena

this investigation studies the extent to which stress affects the assumed functional separation of coordinate bilingual's linguistic organization. Spanish/English bilinguals were subjects in a GSR linguistic conditioning experiment using two intensities of buzzer sounds (stressful conditions) and two lists of words. One word for each list functioned as the conditioned stimulus. Generalization to semantically, phonemically, and unrelated words occurred in both languages and buzzer conditions. We found a differential impact of the buzzer on the functional separation of the languages, although not in the direction predicted. We concluded that stress produced code-switching, and hence, a primitivization of the subject's cognitive and linguistic functioning is assumed to have occurred. These findings are important in understanding the way stress affects the bilingual's languages at the linguistic and cognitive levels. They are also important in understanding the role of stress in language development and in the transfer of linguistic information.Different portions of this paper were presented at several scientific meetings, including the conference on Treating Hispanic Clients: Cultural, Ethnic and Linguistic Considerations, Long Island University, May 1986, and the Annual Convention of the New York State Psychological Association, April 1987