Patient experiences with treatment in private practice compared with public mental health services

The study compared patient experiences with psychiatric treatment provided by private practitioners and public outpatient clinics. Questionnaires were completed by 642 outpatients in private practice and 6,677 outpatients in public clinics. The questionnaire included a measure of patient experiences comprising six items: treatment outcome, enough time for contact and dialogue with clinician, clinicians' understanding of patient's situation, suitability of therapy and treatment, clinician follow-up of planned actions, and influence on treatment. Patients in private practice had generally better experiences than patients in public outpatient treatment. The difference between private and public patients was largest for patients with poor self-evaluated mental health or those who had just one consultation in the previous three months. Private practitioners appear to have an important role in mental health services delivery, and patients have relatively good experiences with services. Further studies that assess the patient - clinician interaction in different mental health services may give further insights into potential service improvements.     

Ethical practice from the perspective of the forensic psychologist: Commentary on the uses and value of the Australian Psychological Society (2007) Code of Ethics

Forensic practice in Australia and around the world attracts a high level of public and judicial scrutiny. The way in which the forensic psychologist conducts him or herself in ethically challenging situations is important not only to the reputation of the individual practitioner, but to the profession more widely. This paper outlines some of the ethical issues that commonly arise in forensic psychology practice and discusses these in relation to the recently published Australian Psychological Society (2007) Code of Ethics. Four ethically challenging scenarios are described and discussed in terms of how the Code might be used to offer guidance to psychologists about how they might best respond.     

Memory and Narrative Healing Processes in HIV Counseling: A View from Africa

The AIDS pandemic in Africa has wreaked pain on millions of people, particularly the youth. Beyond physical symptoms, the disease destroys the emotional and psychological well-being of its victims and their families. Although psychotherapists are desperately needed, most of those in Africa have not been given sufficient training in HIV counseling. In addition, access to specific models of healing for those traumatized by the news of infection with HIV disease is hardly available. Memory healing processes, which are essential in grief work in Africa, can be combined with ritual theory within a narrative framework to provide a model for bringing healing to clients traumatized by the news of HIV infection. Augustine Nwoye, Ph.D., is presently Associate Professor, and formerly Chairman, Department of Psychology, Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya. A first version of the paper was presented as a Keynote Address at the International Conference in Durban, South Africa, organized by the South African Association of Marital and Family Therapy, May 2004. I thank Dr. Frida Rundell, the then President of the Association, for her invitation and hospitality.     

Analogous activities: Tools for thinking comparatively in religious studies courses

This article discusses an experiential teaching method that uses secular activities that are simple, accessible, and analogous to religious practice in order to facilitate comparative religious study. These “analogous activities” – for example, social rituals, stillness, yoga, a social media fast, singing, nonviolent communication, and mindfulness meditation – provide a third point of reference that allows students to pivot between their understanding of religion and those of practitioners and scholars of religion. Experiential learning can be quite successful if deliberately sequenced to allow students to encounter a series of interpretive frameworks and structured with prompts and parameters that encourage reflection and critical analysis of their experience. In my course engaging in analogous activities not only impacted students' understanding of Asian religions, but also led them to question two previous assumptions: first, that religious beliefs were more important than religious practices, which is particularly problematic in regards to Asian religious traditions that place more emphasis on orthopraxy than orthodoxy, and second, that religion was something separate from one's everyday or lived reality.     

Validation of a reflective practice rubric for evaluating the complexity of teacher candidate digital and written reflections

This study was conducted to validate the effectiveness of a previously published rubric for evaluating the reflective characteristics contained within reflective artifacts. The goal of the study was to test the validity of the rubric when evaluating written reflection and digital artifacts of teacher candidates. The theory of reflection is discussed, and the process of eliciting higher levels of reflection through various modalities from written prompts. Secondly, this study describes the process participants followed while learning to use the rubric, the methods of evaluating artifacts using the rubric, and the results the study produced. The rubric proved to be an effective tool when determining the level of reflection, a teacher candidate demonstrated. Lastly, this article discusses limitations of the rubric, as well as suggestions for further research regarding teaching reflective practices, and how to refine one’s own reflective skills to achieve a level of deep reflection on/for action.     

Who owns this data? using dialogic reflection to examine an ethically important moment

There has been growing use of reflective practice as a means for examining ethically important moments that occur during research. Reflective practice enables researchers to be alert to the unfolding of these ethically important moments and to consider how they will respond to them. In this paper, we use dialogic reflection to explore an ethically important moment that occurred during one of our research projects. We present our dialogic reflective conversation as a means of exploring the ethical issues associated with data ownership. We draw on this conversation to describe a framework for dialogic reflection that provides researchers with a process for engaging in reflection on their practice as ethical researchers.     

Imagining my ideal: a critical case study of digital storytelling as reflective practice

Teacher candidates (TCs) must navigate personal, experiential, and theoretical discourses of learning to teach to establish a teaching identity. This article describes a critical case example of digital storytelling to imagine a future classroom. The qualitative research design situates the TCs’ digital stories as a performance and analyzes the art form to consider how they might use these texts to imagine and make visible this negotiation. The critical case shows how the TCs used the digital story to make sense of personal experiences, their image of an ideal teacher, methods coursework, and the personal struggle inherent across these sometimes disparate voices of learning to teach. Findings indicate that digital storytelling expands TCs’ reflective practice in the supportive environment of a teacher education program.     

Reflective practice framework for TESOL teachers: one teacher’s reflective journey

Just as in the field of general education, scholars within the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) have also struggled to come to a consensus as to how reflective practice should be operationalized with many different approaches suggesting a retrospective approach to questioning about practice. As a result, many of these approaches have led to a type of routinization of reflection. Worried about such routinization of reflection, Farrell developed a more holistic approach to reflective practice that recognizes the spiritual, moral, and emotional aspects of reflection, as well as the usual retrospective questions about practice. This paper outlines a case study of the reflections of one experienced TESOL teacher teaching in South Korea using Farrell’s framework for reflecting on practice that included reflections on his philosophy, principles, theory, practice, and beyond practice. The results revealed three common themes of approachability, art-oriented conceptions, and curiosity that emerged in all aspects of his reflection as uniquely influential parts of a larger whole. Thus, Farrell’s holistic framework for teacher reflection employed in this study provided multiple filters through which these various parts could be viewed.