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.     

PERCEPTION AND THE REACH OF PHENOMENAL CONTENT

The phenomenal character of perceptual experience involves the representation of colour, shape and motion. Does it also involve the representation of high-level categories? Is the recognition of a tomato as a tomato contained within perceptual phenomenality? Proponents of a conservative view of the reach of phenomenal content say 'No', whereas those who take a liberal view of perceptual phenomenality say 'Yes'. I clarify the debate between conservatives and liberals, and argue in favour of the liberal view that high-level content can directly inform the phenomenal character of perception.     

IS PERCEPTION A PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDE?

It is widely agreed that perceptual experience is a form of intentionality, i.e., that it has representational content. Many philosophers take this to mean that like belief, experience has propositional content, that it can be true or false. I accept that perceptual experience has intentionality; but I dispute the claim that it has propositional content. This claim does not follow from the fact that experience is intentional, nor does it follow from the fact that experiences are accurate or inaccurate. I end by considering the relationship between this question and the question of whether experience has non-conceptual content.     

Some Benefits of Being an Activist: Measuring Activism and Its Role in Psychological Well-Being

Do activists lead happier and more fulfilled lives than the average person? Two online surveys using a sample of college students (N = 341) and a national sample of activists matched with a control group (N = 718) demonstrated that several indicators of activism were positively associated with measures of hedonic, eudaimonic, and social well‐being. Furthermore, in both studies, activists were more likely to be “flourishing” ( Keyes, 2002 ) than were nonactivists. A third study of college students (N = 296) explored the possible causal role of activism by measuring well‐being after subjects either engaged in a brief activist behavior, a brief nonactivist behavior, or no behavior. Although well‐being did not differ substantially between these three groups, the subjects who did the brief activist behavior reported significantly higher levels of subjective vitality than did the subjects who engaged in the nonactivist behavior. Potential mediators of the relationship between activism and well‐being and the usefulness of these findings are discussed.     

Height, Gender, and Authority Status at Work: Analyses for a National Sample of Canadian Workers

A small number of previous studies using convenience samples from outside Canada, and mostly for males, show positive relationships between physical height and holding a position of authority as a manager or supervisor. The present study employs Multiple Classification Analysis to assess the generality of these patterns to a representative sample of full-time Canadian workers (2,210 males and 1,815 females) using seven alternative measures of authority status. The results for male workers, after controls, generally show significant positive relationships between height and authority status. The controlled analyses for female workers, however, do not. Additional analyses for males show height to be a comparatively strong predictor relative to other social background predictors of authority status. Alternative interpretations of the patterns of findings are discussed.     

Opportunity recognition and the tendency to be an entrepreneur: A bivariate genetics perspective

We applied quantitative genetics techniques to a sample of 851 pairs of monozygotic and 855 pairs of dizygotic female twins to examine the influence of genetic factors on the variation across people in opportunity recognition. We also examined the extent to which the same genetic factors contribute to both opportunity recognition and the tendency to be an entrepreneur. We found substantial heritability for opportunity recognition (0.45), with no influence of the shared environment. Moreover, we found that 53% of the phenotypic correlation between opportunity recognition and the tendency to be an entrepreneur had a common genetic aetiology.     

Which Societies Provide a Strong Religious Socialization Context? Explanations Beyond the Effects of National Religiosity

Religious socialization occurs within the immediate family as well as in the broader social context. Previous research has shown that parents’ religiosity matters less for the transmission of religious beliefs in devout than in secular nations, implying smaller costs of religious socialization. In this article we test which other societal factors affect the transmission of religious beliefs: anti‐religious policies in formerly socialist countries, economic development, and income inequality. Our results indicate that societies with high levels of income inequality seem to provide the most favorable context for religious socialization. Individuals develop strong religious beliefs even if they only received little religious socialization within the family. Formerly socialist nations increased socialization costs through the overall suppression of religious practice. Economic development has no impact on socialization effects, suggesting that inequality is a more important driver of religious change than previously thought.     

Intention, Rule Following and the Strategic Role of Wright's Order of Determination Test

I argue that Wright's constructivist action of intention is fundamentally flawed and that the source of its error can be diagnosed by locating it within its strategic context; Wright's response to Wittgenstein on rules. Wright deploys intentions as an analogy to disarm Kripkean scepticism. Since we can have direct knowledge of the content of our intentions, Kripke's claim that knowledge of the content of rules cannot be direct and must be inferential is question begging. But Wright goes on to concede that a substantial explanation should be given of how first person grasp of content is possible for which he deploys constructivism. I raise a number of criticisms to show that constructivism fails to explain our knowledge of intentions. Finally I show that Wright's failure fits into a pattern anticipated by Wittgenstein. The ongoing judgments that are supposed to determine the content of intentions are like the interpretations of rules which fail because they stand in need of further interpretation. Contra Wright I claim that the moral of the rule following considerations is precisely that no substantial answer can be given to the question of how the content of mental states can be grasped. The phenomenon of mental content must simply be presupposed and not reductively explained.     

Ethical Issues in Counselling in Education

It is suggested that there are two quite distinct Systems of ethics and practice in use by counsellors in education: the integrated model, which emphasises viewing the counsellor-institution relationship as theprimary ethical perspective; and the differentiated model, which emphasises the counsellor-client relationship as the starting point for an ethical understanding of the counsellor's role. The implications of these two perspectives for ethical issues relating to sources of referrai, issues of confidentiality, accountability for resources, the implications of role diffusion, and the outcomes of counselling, are examined. The ethical consequences of viewing the two Systems as reconcilable or incompatible are explored.