Measured Effects of Primary Prevention Strategies

A meta-analysis of 40 primary prevention studies provided an encouraging assessment of past efforts and clear challenges for the future.     

Defending the Common Life: National-Defence After Rodin

abstract   David Rodin has recently put forward a compelling but disturbing argument to the effect that the traditional justification in Just War Theory of a state's right to self-defence (what Rodin calls national-defence), which is derived from the legitimate case of personal self-defence, fails. He concludes that the only way to justify forceful responses to aggression against states by other states or non-state groups is by viewing the right to do so as falling under a form of law-enforcement, which in turn requires the existence of some overarching universal state. In this paper I argue that there exists a possible justification for national-defence that Rodin has overlooked due to an underlying commitment to what Charles Taylor calls 'the primacy of rights thesis'. My claim is that a particular family of views that see human identity as being crucially bound up with society offers the resources to avoid the pitfalls that Rodin points out befall other attempts to justify national-defence.     

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME IS STILL A ROSE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF RETICENCE,COMMUNICATION APPREHENSION,UNWILLINGNESS TO COMMUNICATE,AND SHYNESS

Theorists claim that reticence, communication apprehension, unwillingness to communicate, and shyness are different problems, but the interrelationships among those constructs has not been systematically explored. The purpose of this paper is to examine theoretical assumptions underlying these four constructs regarding the nature of the problem, how it is identified, its etiology, and proposed solutions. This analysis reveals that the four labels do not denote four discrete problems; rather, the constructs overlap to a great extent. A systematic interview in conjunction with self-report scales is recommended as the means of identification of the problem, since present methods do not provide a precise account of the specific nature of individual difficulties. The particular treatment used should depend on the exact nature of the problem as it is reported by the individual, rather than applying one specific mode of treatment in every case.