Understanding consumption within a care home: an interpretation of George's experiences of life and death

• We are witnessing perhaps the most important shift in the history of mankind – the rapid ageing of the earth's population. This trend raises such issues as elderly care giving and living arrangements in old age. By virtue, the author suggests that managing service provision for elderly consumers within care homes is going to become an increasingly important issue as more consumers live longer and require care. Moreover, given the paucity of literature related to elderly consumers' understandings of such institutions this research aims to illuminate and distil this issue. Based on interpretive methods the author reveals that elderly consumers such as George actively consume life and death related experiences in order to create a meaningful existence within the context of a care home.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Trumping the causal influence account of causation

Here is a simple counterexample to David Lewis’s causal influence account of causation, one that is especially illuminating due to its connection to what Lewis himself writes: it is a variant of his trumping example

Self-other orientation and legislative behavior1

Self-esteem and self-complexity of first-term Maine legislators were assessed at the beginning of a legislative session, using Ziller's (1973) topological method. Peer ratings of the freshman members' promise and likeability, and measures of their legislative activity were collected. Legislators rated as successful by their colleagues were of two distinct self-other types: low self-esteem, high complexity, or high self-esteem, low complexity. These two types were termed the Pragmatist and the Ideologue, respectively. The distinctions implied by these labels were supported by analyses of activity and voting records. High complexity of the self-concept, interpreted here as defensiveness, seems to moderate the effects of self-esteem on political activity.     

A Review of the Videotaped Proceedings of the Summit of the American Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development

The Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development (AMCD), a division of the American Counseling Association (ACA), held its first summit at the Baltimore Convention Center in Maryland in March 1992. Titled “Multicultural Summit: A Town Meeting,” the association meeting brought together counseling faculty, practitioners, and graduate students from different ethnic groups to discuss issues that have an impact on the multicultural counseling profession. The objective of summit participants was to identify specifically elements of common language and strategies for examining counseling issues. The summit was videotaped and edited. This is a review of the proceedings.     

Cognitive and attentional deficits in children vulnerable to psychopathology

Cognitive and attentional deficits were assessed in children with either a schizophrenic, an affectively disordered or a normal parent. The children were grouped both by their parents' DSM-II diagnoses (broadly defined group of schizophrenics and heterogeneous group of depressives)and by a new set of diagnoses (narrowly defined group of schizophrenics, unipolar depressive group and bipolar group). Children whose parents met the more stringent criteria for schizoprhenia performed somewhat more deviantly than children whose parents met only DSM-II criteria. In addition, the importance of splitting the heterogeneous depressive group into more homogeneous subgroups is indicated by the findings that children of unipolar parents generally could not be distinguished from children whose parents are schizophrenic. On the other hand, children of bipolar parents performed reliably better than children of schizophrenics. These findings are viewed within the context of current high-risk studies and psychological deficit literature and suggest that diagnostic issues require more attention by researchers in these areas.This research was supported by Grant MH 21145 from the National Institute of Mental Health. The authors are indebted to Lina Jandorf for assistance in testing the children and with the data analyses.     

The development and exploration of group experiential training models

This paper describes the development and changes in the cognitive and experiential portions of a group psychotherapy training program. The integration of these two components has shifted during the two decades of the program. Educational strengths and limitations of the different models are described. The two current models are of 16 weeks duration and begin with four didactic sessions. The succeeding 12 sessions consist of 1 hour of experiential group followed immediately by a 30-minute review. In one of these models the experiential group is leaderless. An illustration of the dynamics and educational potential of this leaderless experiential group is presented.     

Educational Reform through an Ethic of Performativity: Introducing the Special Issue

Serving as an introduction to the special issue of Studies in Philosophy and Education, Philosophical Transgressions: Performativity and Performance for Education, this paper situates the papers that follow in its own performative analysis, especially utilizing the insights of Jean-François Lyotard. From him two ideas are salient, one his conception of knowledge as performance and the other the aesthetic (through language and writing) that is a reformist response.