Assessing knowledge-intensive work environment: General versus situation-specific instruments

The aim of the present study is to examine to what extent general and situation-specific work environment instruments capture the salient work characteristics in a knowledge-intensive context. We conducted qualitative open-ended interviews with 30 employees (24 men and six women) from a Norwegian university department. The information from the interviews was content-analysed and coded on the scales of five work environment instruments; two general instruments (the General Nordic Questionnaire for Psychological and Social Factors at Work [QPSNordic] and the Job Diagnostic Survey [JDS]) and three situation-specific instruments (Assessing the climate for creativity [KEYS], Situational Outlook Questionnaire [SOQ], and the Organizational Climate Measure [OCM]). The results showed that situation-specific work environment instruments covered significantly more statements about the work environment than the general instruments. More statements could be categorized on the organization and individual levels, compared to group and leadership levels. The situation-specific instruments covered more statements than general instruments at the organization level. These statements were mainly related to the organizational context, social and relational characteristics, and encouragement of creativity and organizational impediments to creativity. The findings support the value of situation-specific instruments for assessing the work environment in knowledge-intensive organizations.     

The moral psychology of rationing among physicians: the role of harm and fairness intuitions in physician objections to cost-effectiveness and cost-containment

Introduction

Physicians vary in their moral judgments about health care costs. Social intuitionism posits that moral judgments arise from gut instincts, called “moral foundations.” The objective of this study was to determine if “harm” and “fairness” intuitions can explain physicians’ judgments about cost-containment in U.S. health care and using cost-effectiveness data in practice, as well as the relative importance of those intuitions compared to “purity”, “authority” and “ingroup” in cost-related judgments.

Methods

We mailed an 8-page survey to a random sample of 2000 practicing U.S. physicians. The survey included the MFQ30 and items assessing agreement/disagreement with cost-containment and degree of objection to using cost-effectiveness data to guide care. We used t-tests for pairwise subscale mean comparisons and logistic regression to assess associations with agreement with cost-containment and objection to using cost-effectiveness analysis to guide care.

Results

1032 of 1895 physicians (54%) responded. Most (67%) supported cost-containment, while 54% expressed a strong or moderate objection to the use of cost-effectiveness data in clinical decisions. Physicians who strongly objected to the use of cost-effectiveness data had similar scores in all five of the foundations (all p-values?>?0.05). Agreement with cost-containment was associated with higher mean “harm” (3.6) and “fairness” (3.5) intuitions compared to “in-group” (2.8), “authority” (3.0), and “purity” (2.4) (p?<?0.05). In multivariate models adjusted for age, sex, region, and specialty, both “harm” and “fairness” were significantly associated with judgments about cost-containment (OR?=?1.2 [1.0-1.5]; OR?=?1.7 [1.4-2.1], respectively) but were not associated with degree of objection to cost-effectiveness (OR?=?1.2 [1.0-1.4]; OR?=?0.9 [0.7-1.0]).

Conclusions

Moral intuitions shed light on variation in physician judgments about cost issues in health care.

     

The Effectiveness of a Spiritually-Based Intervention to Alleviate Subsyndromal Anxiety and Minor Depression Among Older Adults

The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of a spiritually-based intervention in the alleviation of subsyndromal anxiety and minor depression in an elderly population. Twenty-two residents of six continuing care communities diagnosed with minor depression participated in this study. There was a significant decrease in anxiety and a trend toward decreased depression. In addition, participants who continued to use the Prayer Wheel had a decrease in depression scores, while those who did not had an increase in depression scores. These findings suggest that use of the Prayer Wheel may promote psychological well-being among older adults.     

Healing Rituals for Couples Recovering from Adultery

Recovery from the trauma of adultery is a process that is full of points where the couple can get stuck. We describe an experiential model that utilizes healing rituals. We start with a general exploration of the use of rituals in marriage and family therapy. The key elements of effective rituals are described. We describe stuck points in these relationships including: 1) knowing the details, 2) releasing the anger, 3) showing commitment, 4) rebuilding trust, and 5) rebuilding the relationship. Ritualized interventions are described for each of these stuck points.     

Distinguishing the cognitive and behavioral consequences of attitude importance and certainty: A new approach to testing the common-factor hypothesis

Some published factor analyses have suggested that attitude importance and certainty are distinct psychological constructs, but other factor analytic investigations have suggested they are largely redundant reflections of a more general underlying construct. This latter sort of finding has led investigators to average measures of importance and certainty together into a composite index and then explore its cognitive and behavioral consequences. In this paper, we report three studies gauging the underlying structure of these strength-related attitude attributes by assessing whether they in fact relate in the same ways to information processing and action tendencies. We found that importance and certainty both independently predicted the likelihood that a person attempted to persuade others to adopt his or her attitude. Importance (but not certainty) was associated with the tendency to seek out information that would enable people to use their attitudes in a subsequent judgment and only importance predicted whether or not they turned out to vote in an election to express their attitudes. Certainty (but not importance) was related to the tendency to find more than one political candidate acceptable. And importance and certainty interacted to predict the frequency with which people performed attitude-expressive behaviors. All this suggests that importance and certainty have distinct effects on thinking and behavior and supports the maintenance of conceptual and empirical distinctions between them in social psychological theory building.     

The Effect of Later Life Parental Divorce on Adult‐Child/Older‐Parent Solidarity: A Test of the Buffering Hypothesis1

The present study examined the effect of later life parental divorce on solidarity in the relationship between the adult child and older parent. This examination was achieved by testing the buffering hypothesis. A cross‐sectional quasiexperimental pre‐post treatment design was used (Cook & Campbell, 1979), with retrospective pretests and data from 100 adult‐child/older‐parent dyads. The ANOVA results show that the mother/adult‐child relationship with a higher degree of predivorce solidarity responded to later life parental divorce with less disruption of affectional solidarity and associational solidarity than those with a lower degree of predivorce solidarity. Thus, the current research provides modest evidence (for the mother/adult‐child relationship) to support the buffering hypothesis. We found no evidence of a buffering effect for the father‐child relationship.     

Noise,Economy, and the Emergence of Information Structure in a Laboratory Language

The acceptability of sentences in natural language is constrained not only grammaticality, but also by the relationship between what is being conveyed and such factors as context and the beliefs of interlocutors. In many languages the critical element in a sentence (its focus) must be given grammatical prominence. There are different accounts of the nature of focus marking. Some researchers treat it as the grammatical realization of a potentially arbitrary feature of universal grammar and do not provide an explicit account of its origins; others have argued, however, that focus marking is a (grammaticalized) functional solution to the problem of efficiently transmitting information via a noisy channel. By adding redundancy to highlight critical elements in particular, focus protects key parts of the message from noise. If this information‐theoretic account is true, then we should expect focus‐like behavior to emerge even in non‐linguistic communication systems given sufficient noise and pressures for efficiency. We tested this in an experiment in which participants played a simple communication game in which they had to click cells on a grid to communicate one of two line figures drawn across the grid. We manipulated the noise, available time, and required effort, and measured patterns of redundancy. Because the lines in many cases overlapped, meaning that only some parts of each line could be used to distinguish it from the other, we were able to compare the extent to which effort was expended on adding redundancy to critical (non‐overlapping) and non‐critical (overlapping) parts of the message. The results supported the information‐theoretic account of focus and shed light on the emergence of information structure in language.