The Counselor and Change: Counseling for Cultural Transition

Cultural analysts have indicated that American culture is going through a significant transition in values. The views of three of these analysts are reviewed and implications are drawn for counselors.     

Safety is more than the antonym of risk

abstract   Even though much research has been devoted to studies of safety, the concept of safety is in itself under-theorised, especially concerning its relation to epistemic uncertainty. In this paper we propose a conceptual analysis of safety. The paper explores the distinc-tion between absolute and relative safety, as well as that between objective and subjective safety. Four potential dimensions of safety are discussed, viz. harm, probability, epistemic uncertainty, and control. The first three of these are used in the proposed definition of safety, whereas it is argued that control should not be included in a reasonable definition of safety. It is shown that strictly speaking, an objective safety concept is not attainable. Instead, an intersubjective concept is proposed that brings us as close as possible to an objective concept.     

Psychiatric Epidemiology: Its Relevance for Counselors

Review of five articles from the epidemiological series appearing in the Archives of General Psychiatry, 1984, 41, 934–979.     

The Development and Sex-Related Use of Interruption Behavior

In this article the authors argue that claims of sex differences in interruption behavior should not be uncritically accepted as there are limitations in previous research that make such acceptance questionable. The frequency of interruption was examined over a portion of the early life span (Grades 4 and 9 and college). Twenty-minute structured conversations of 90 dyads (30 male, 30 female, and 30 mixed sex) were scored for four types of interruption, and both developmental and sex differences in interruption behavior were examined. Interruption frequency did not change over age or across dyads of different sex composition. Males did not interrupt any more than females did and females were interrupted by their partners as frequently as males were interrupted by theirs, with one exception: Grade 9females were interrupted more by their female partners. Interruptions were asymmetrically distributed in same-sex and opposite-sex dyads; however, the asymmetry in opposite-sex dyads was not predictablefrom sex of subject or sex of partner. That is, males did not interrupt females any more than females interrupted males. The authors conclude that wholesale acceptance of sex differences in interruption behavior is not warranted.