Exercising Research Skills: An Information Literacy Boot Camp for Religious Studies Graduate Assistants

Instructional librarians at the University of Dayton collaborated with a religious studies graduate program to offer a three-day information literacy workshop, or “boot camp,” to the program's graduate research assistants. The graduate program had found that the assistants' research skills did not meet the expectations of their faculty mentors, and the workshop sought to address these deficiencies. With input from the religious studies faculty, the workshop focused on catalog and database searching, Boolean logic, primary sources, and the Chicago citation style. The librarians incorporated active learning exercises into each workshop session. Assessment of the workshop suggested that the assistants gained confidence in these information literacy skills. Feedback from faculty also indicated that the assistants' research skills had improved.     

Collaboration of Churches and Service Providers: Meeting the Needs of Older African Americans

ABSTRACT

This article describes a community outreach volunteer project designed to reach frail community-based older adults. The project is an example of church and secular agency collaboration in which the church provides leadership in volunteer recruitment and the agency provides training and outreach activity monitoring. The church's role in this project illustrates that small and medium-size African American churches can play an important role in mobilizing volunteer resources and can perform a linking role in helping secular agencies to gain access to frail, hard-to-reach, low-income older adults.     

Victim Recantation in Child Sexual Abuse Cases

Summary

This article explores the reasons for victim recantation in child sexual abuse cases, problems that surface with a recantation, and practical steps multidisciplinary professionals can take to prevent the recantation of truthful allegations. Secondly, the article discusses the roles of investigative team members in the investigation and evaluation of a victim's recantation and in the trial which may follow. Finally, the article addresses possible final outcomes of criminal court intervention and the team's role in continued support for the child.     

Service users’ perceptions of shared agency in mental health services

Objective: The concept of shared agency is used in examining the collaboration between the service user and the professionals. The study aims to find out what kind of experiences on shared agency mental health service users have.

Method: The study was based on interviews of 19 service users. The data set was formed of those parts of the interviews that dealt with shared aims, being heard, collaboration and joint planning and decision-making. Typical methods of inductive content analysis were applied.

Results: Three domains of shared agency were found: emotional, communicative and supportive ones. The emotional domain included elements of becoming heard and building confidence. In the communicative one, the main features were mutual information sharing, finding words to describe the chaos and reconstructing harmony. The supportive domain included encouragement and giving support. Experiences on non-shared agency were also found.

Conclusion: Many experiences on shared agency were found. Joint planning and working with life goals were, however, seldom reported. This result, together with experiences of non-shared agency, sets a challenge for mental health services.     

Creating Comprehensive and Collaborative Systems

To improve outcomes for children and youth with serious emotional disturbance and their families, we need to create comprehensive and collaborative systems to promote systems change resulting in the development of coherent services built around their individual needs. These services should be family-centered, community-based, and appropriately funded. Unfortunately, barriers to understanding and operationalizing this level of collaboration persist, which challenges the aims of parents, practitioners, policy makers, and others to provide efficient and effective services to these students. I explore the seventh strategic target of the National Agenda for Achieving Better Results for Children and Youth with Serious Emotional Disturbance; provide examples of collaboration that relate to the National Agenda's other six strategic targets; and briefly discuss the present opportunities for and challenges to collaboration.     

Exploring the “New” Frontier of Spirituality in Health Care: Identifying the Dangers

Enthusiasm is growing in nursing and medicine for addressing spirituality and religious needs in patient care. We urge caution and stress the need for greater awareness of the dangers involved. The first danger is the lack of any attention given to how informed consent might be relevant to the topic of patient autonomy in spiritual health care decisions. The second danger is that the major health care providers, nursing and medicine, are not adequately educated to provide such care. The third danger is that we have not yet sufficiently clarified the roles of the various providers and as a consequence coordination of quality spiritual care is in jeopardy.     

Report of the Working Group on Research

Prepared by the Working Group on Research from the November 1995 Georgetown conference sponsored by the Association of Medical School Psychologists, this paper focuses upon the challenges for psychologists who wish to maintain active research programs in academic medical settings. Six specific strategies are offered that, if followed, would increase opportunities and visibility of psychological research programs both within academic medical settings and within society at large.     

Depth of Field: Using photographs and narratives to explore and reflect on ageing

The learning landscape of the higher education environment is changing, with an increased focus over the past decade on how educators might begin to cultivate reflective skills in health professions students. In addition, changing professional requirements demand that health professionals are adequately prepared to practise in today’s complex healthcare systems, including responding to changing demographics of population ageing. In this educational case study, we will share how we (a group of education, medical and nursing academics) developed ‘Depth of Field: Exploring Ageing’ a digital, consumer-driven, interprofessional reflective learning resource that uses photographs, narrative and small-group work to strengthen reflective capacity in current and/or future health professionals.     

Cultivating Community Psychology for Future Generations: Symbiosis,Synergy, and Separation

As we near the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of a community psychology division of the American Psychological Association, there are reasons to be concerned about the sustainability of the field. This commentary proposes a need for deliberate, systematic efforts to cultivate settings that can sustain the field. A framework for outreach to build symbiotic relationships and synergistic collaborations with persons who do not identify as community psychologists is proposed. Simultaneously, a strategy of separation from other disciplines may be needed in some circumstances to conserve settings that sustain the field. Finding a balance in these strategies is necessary to cultivate community psychology for future generations.