The Group Home Workplace and the Work of Know-How

This paper is concerned with the everyday practice of authority and knowledge in a group home for adults with intellectual disability. Based on fieldwork, the group home is understood as a workplace, which provides a model of organizational participation as a dilemma of freedom rather than a problem of power. Three kinds of work are observed in the everyday know-how of counselors and residents. First, Michael Lipskys concept of street-level bureaucracy is used to understand the inherently indeterminate and conflictual nature of counselor work. Second, the competent participation of residents is also organized as work, often explicitly, as the work they must do to become more independent. The group home is therefore understood as a setting of governmentality because it reflects the indirect practice of authority characteristic of contemporary liberal societies. Finally, the ethnomethodological insight about the accomplished character of local order is the basis for the observation of everyday life itself as a third kind of work.     

Developmental changes in the linguistic performance correlates of reading achievement

The present study evaluated the hypothesis that measures of linguistic skills differentially contribute to the variability in reading achievement at different ages. Linguistic skills that develop earlier and are more important for earlier phases of reading were predicted to contribute more to the variability of reading achievement at earlier ages (5–7) than at older ages (10–12). Conversely, linguistic skills that develop later and are more important for later phases of reading were predicted to contribute more to the variability in reading achievement at older ages (10–12) than at younger ages (5–7). To test these developmental hypotheses, measures of language skills with different developmental rates were administered to cross-sectional samples of disabled and nondisabled readers at three mean ages: 5.5, 8.5, and 11 years. Reading group differences were apparent at each age on measures assumed to develop earlier, thus failing to confirm the first prediction. However, these measures may not have been sensitive to linguistic skills important for beginning reading. Reading group differences on measures of later developing language skills were apparent only for older readers, thus confirming the second prediction. The latter age-dependent relationships provided additional evidence for developmental changes in the linguistic correlates of reading achievement.     

Integrated,Family‐based,Partial Hospital Treatment for Complex Pediatric Illness

This paper describes a unique treatment program for complex pediatric illness. The Hasbro Children's Partial Hospital Program uses a family systems orientation, integrated care, and a partial hospital setting to treat children with a wide range of pediatric illnesses that have failed outpatient and inpatient treatments. We have treated more than 2000 children with at least 80 different ICD‐9 diagnoses. The multidisciplinary treatment team functions as a meta‐family for children and their families who present with illness and family beliefs that impede successful outcomes with standard care. The three features: family systems orientation, integrated care, and partial hospital setting, hopefully interact to create an environment that helps families expand and modify their explanatory models regarding participating in effective medical care. The goal of treatment is for both children and their parents to feel empowered to take control of the illness. Parents completing standardized measures at intake describe their children and families as experiencing significant emotional distress, low levels of general family functioning, and poor quality of life. Although the children are described as having distinct behavioral differences, the families are described as responding to the experience of a seriously ill child in similar ways. A treatment program that addresses the noncategorical aspects of how families respond to illness while addressing the specific diseases of the children can allow children and their families to respond favorably to treatment.     

Epistemic Injustice and Open‐Mindedness

In this paper, I argue that recent discussions of culprit‐based epistemic injustices can be framed around the intellectual character virtue of open‐mindedness. In particular, these injustices occur because the people who commit them are closed‐minded in some respect; the injustices can therefore be remedied through the cultivation of the virtue of open‐mindedness. Describing epistemic injustices this way has two explanatory benefits: it yields a more parsimonious account of the phenomenon of epistemic injustice and it provides the underpinning of a virtue‐theoretical structure by which to explain what it is that perpetrators are culpable for and how virtues can have normative explanatory power.