Disability and participation: It's about us but still without us!

Participation is often espoused as a strategy to promote inclusion, social justice and equality. Exactly how to facilitate participation in practice is often not explicated, nor are the challenges or issues highlighted. By drawing on interview data, the first aim of this paper is to identify the key barriers to participation in an organizational planning activity as experienced by 12 disabled and non‐disabled staff and board members in a small community‐based disability advocacy organization. The second aim is to draw upon Jim Ife's principles of participation to further analyse the factors that hinder and enable participation in organizations. Reported barriers to participation were categorized at individual, interpersonal and organizational levels of analysis, and included a lack of skills and competence, interpersonal conflicts, poor resourcing and ad hoc processes. The importance of understanding the dynamic interplay of individual and structural factors, valuing different forms of participation and having participatory structures and processes embedded in organizational settings are all highlighted. This study illustrates that, even in an organization that is specifically attuned to meeting the needs of disabled people, there is still considerable exclusion and institutional discrimination. Strategies to promote participation within an organizational context may include providing sufficient time for reflection and support, and opportunities for board members to learn how to take part in constructive planning activities and to develop their strengths. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Aging,Spirituality, and Time: A Qualitative Study

We examined the concepts of aging, time, spirituality, and future care needs in four randomly selected informants from a group of 54 never-married childless older women. Using data from the Generativity and Lifestyles of Older Women (GLOW) study, we questioned how women’s perceptions of these concepts came together in current older age. We employed cultural theory, (our theoretical framework), ethnography, (our methodological framework), and phenomenology, (our philosophical foundation) to produce a portrait of each woman interviewed. Through a three-session interview process, we elicited the women’s life stories, reasons for childlessness, and topics that emerged as significant to the women, including aging, a sense of time remaining, and spirituality. A key finding was that the context of each woman’s life, both biographical and historical, transpired as a foundation for these concepts. That is, a woman’s “place in time” shaped their experiences of aging, as well as her reasons for childlessness and perceptions of finitude.     

Conflict of interest as seen from a researcher's perspective

The continuous growth of the pharmaceutical industry is expected to require a considerable output of new drugs, with speedy development and approval processes. This profit-driven expansion of the drug market may broaden the already established erosion of the role of academia in favor of commercial clinical research organizations. Less and less control on the clinical trial design, its conduct and the resulting publication[s] is the likely consequence. Academic medicine and governments should find means to sustain the development of independent clinical research. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an International Conference on “Conflict of Interest and its Significance in Science and Medicine” held in Warsaw, Poland on 5–6 April, 2002.     

Recent theoretical convergences in psychoanalysis and their epistemological importance

In this paper, the author starts by examining the recent occurrence of an increasing receptivity and critical exchange between different schools of psychoanalytical thought. Among its consequences have been convergences in the understanding of countertransference, especially through the hypotheses of projective identification and countertransferential enactment. The prevalence of these hypotheses points towards the fact that the community of analysts is bringing about an informal and convergent clinical research conducted by a wide and heterogeneous range of its members. The importance and epistemological relevance of this kind of 'informal clinical research' for the construction of psychoanalytical knowledge is emphasised. This process in psychoanalysis is compared with the evolution of knowledge in other scientific areas, highlighting their similarities and their differences. The author shows how Freud's 'mystic writing-pad'model can be expanded to represent the object of psychoanalytical investigation and to bring a better understanding of the reason why the hypotheses of projective identification and countertransferential enactment occupy such a central position in psychoanalysis. In addition, consideration is given to how this kind of research can help in the difficult task of finding criteria for the evaluation of different psychoanalytical concepts. Finally, the author demonstrates how, using this approach, some of the important divergences in contemporary psychoanalysis can be viewed from a new perspective.     

Students' Ethical Awareness and Conceptions of Research Ethics

The study focused on university students' understanding and conceptions of ethical issues in research. Domain-specific and domain-transcending measures were developed to gauge the students' awareness of ethical issues. Responses were obtained from 269 undergraduate and graduate students at a U.S. regional university. Participant withdrawal, the debriefing of research participants, the dissemination of findings, and giving credit to co-contributors were the most challenging ethical issues for the students. Ethical awareness was predicted by professional and organizational socialization, and perspective taking. Contextualization greatly improved the students' ability to recognize ethical issues. Simulations and role-taking are suggested as the means with which to teach students about the ethical issues perceived as challenging.     

Therapist orientation,supervisor match,and therapeutic interventions: Implications for session quality in a psychotherapy training PRN

Background: Theoretical orientation is a multifaceted construct that is integral to the process of psychotherapy and psychotherapy training. While some research has been conducted on personal identification with particular schools of psychotherapy, techniques used in psychotherapy sessions, and match between trainees and supervisors in training, there is insufficient information regarding how these may interact with one another. Aim: This study, conducted in a practice research network of trainee therapists, was designed to test whether these variables may be related to one another in predicting session quality. Method: The sample comprised 328 sessions from 26 clients and 11 therapists, with the clients completing session quality measures and therapists completing measures of technique immediately post‐session. Results: Using multilevel linear modelling, the data showed varied results. For behavioural therapy and person‐centred therapy, techniques and orientation were unrelated to session quality in the sample. However, process‐experiential, psychodynamic, and cognitive therapy techniques were all involved in interactions with therapist and/or supervisor orientations. Conclusions: These results suggest that the impact of specific psychotherapy techniques sometimes depends on the orientation of the therapist and/or supervisor. For instance, sessions high in cognitive therapy techniques were only associated with positive outcome when both the therapist and supervisor were highly cognitively oriented. Though preliminary, these results suggest that orientation may be an important variable to consider in training and supervision, especially in the context of other variables.     

Conducting Health Disparities Research with Criminal Justice Populations: Examining Research,Ethics, and Participation

This study explored the challenges of informed consent and understanding of the research process among Black and Latino men under community supervision (e.g., parole and/or probation). Between February and October 2012, we conducted cognitive face-to-face interviews using open-ended questions on the significant areas of research participation (i.e., the informed consent process, confidentiality, compensation, what is meant by human subject and clinical trials) among 259 men aged 35 to 67 under community supervision in Bronx, New York. Content analysis of the open-ended questions revealed limited knowledge concerning the understanding of research participation. The study participants appeared to generally understand concepts such as compensation after research participation and confidentiality. Participants demonstrated a lack of understanding of certain aspects of the research process—informed consent, human subject, Institutional Review Board, and clinical trials. These findings are informative to researchers conducting studies with criminal justice populations and Institutional Review Boards reviewing research studies.     

变革公平研究评述

个体导向取代系统导向逐步成为组织变革研究的新焦点, 变革公平为个体导向研究提供了新的视角。变革公平反映了人们对组织变革事件推进过程公平性的认知。变革公平受到变革事件属性、变革领导、个体人格和个体的社会支持方面因素的制约, 并影响了员工对变革、组织以及工作的反应。变革公平的未来研究应着重本土化研究、前因变量和调节变量的探索以及开展纵向研究。     

On the validity of culture‐level personality and stereotype scores

In response to comments by Perugini and Richetin and by Ashton, we discuss the reference‐group effect as a potential source of distortion in cross‐cultural comparisons and suggest some research designs to test its nature and importance. We argue that laboratory studies of personality are of limited utility in understanding personality questionnaire responses in real life. We summarise evidence in favour of the validity of aggregate personality traits and suggest that more scepticism is needed with regard to the accuracy of national character stereotypes. Published in 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A pluralistic framework for counselling and psychotherapy: Implications for research

Historically, training, research and practice in counselling and psychotherapy have been dominated by unitary theoretical models. Although integrative and eclectic positions have been developed as alternatives, these have not been successful in generating research and have resulted in a further proliferation of competing models. In this paper we introduce a ‘pluralistic’ framework for counselling and psychotherapy and discuss the implications of this framework for research. The basic principle of this pluralistic framework is that psychological difficulties may have multiple causes and that there is unlikely to be one, ‘right’ therapeutic method that will be appropriate in all situations—different people are helped by different processes at different times. This pluralistic framework operates as a meta‐theory within which it is possible to utilise concepts, strategies and specific interventions from a range of therapeutic orientations. The framework is structured around three domains—goals, task and methods—by which therapeutic processes can be conceptualised, critically examined and empirically investigated. These domains, and the relationships between them, are outlined and the collaborative relationship at the heart of the pluralistic framework is discussed. The pluralistic framework provides a means for empirical research directly to inform practice and potential lines of empirical inquiry are outlined, along with findings from a recent study of counselling in schools.