Sickness in the System: The Health Costs of the Harvest

Cherie Moraga's play, Heroes and Saints, and Helena Maria Viramontes' novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, offer readers perspectives on the lives of migrant farm workers in California that challenge the moral imagination and conscience. Both focus on health hazards of pesticides and on the often prohibitive difficulty of getting health care for those who fall ill as a result of exposure. This paper offers a reflection on the direct political and moral appeal these works present to readers who may not see or acknowledge the sacrifices sustained by those whose undercompensated labors are an integral part of our food systems.     

Examining adversarial growth in illness: The factor structure of the silver lining questionnaire (SLQ-38)

The Silver Lining Questionnaire (SLQ-38) is purported to measure 10 aspects of adversarial growth in illness. To date however, no empirical evidence exists to support this claim. Hence the aim of this study was to investigate the factor structure of the SLQ-38 in a sample of 560 individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS), cancer, cardiac, and renal disease. The results demonstrate that 24 SLQ-38 items can be factored into five subscales: improved personal relationships, greater appreciation for life, positive influence on others, personal inner strength and changes in life philosophy, all of which are in accordance with the literature on adversarial growth. Individuals with MS experienced lower adversarial growth compared to other illness groups. Gender, age and time since diagnosis were unrelated to adversarial growth in illness. The utility of the revised SLQ-38 is discussed along with suggestions for future research on the convergent and divergent validity of this revised instrument.     

Out of Season: Illness in Adolescent Fiction

The young adult novel is aimed at a carefully defined target market, often focused on a predictable range of issues. Where illness and death are the theme, the process of growing up is more dramatically defined. Young people who suffer or watch a family member suffer a serious illness find their stages of moral development disrupted, their values reorganized, and emerging sexual interests submerged under more insistent demands. The books discussed in this article are not formula novels, but complex tales with interesting subplots and characters. Notable features common to them are as follows: 1) strategies of normalization, 2) abandonment and alienation, 3) unexpected emotions, 4) extra-familial support, 5) other people's problems, and 6) God, meaning, and hope.     

Family Therapy With Irish-Americans

This paper presents a paradigm for understanding the cultural values and family patterns of Irish-American families and offers suggestions for clinical intervention. Families' correspondence to the model described will depend upon their level of acculturation, socioeconomic status, and other contextual factors. The paradigm suggests a number of issues that may create difficulties for the therapist and for the family in therapy. In general, behavioral techniques, Bowen systems therapy, and strategic interventions may be more useful than techniques emphasizing expression of emotions in therapy or direct attempts to alter communication or family behavior in therapy sessions, as used in structural therapy.     

MEASUREMENT ERROR IN RESEARCH ON HUMAN RESOURCES and FIRM PERFORMANCE: HOW MUCH ERROR IS THERE AND HOW DOES IT INFLUENCE EFFECT SIZE ESTIMATES?

Studies of the relationship between human resource (HR) practices and firm performance typically use a single respondent to assess firm level HR practices or HR effectiveness. However, previous research in other substantive areas suggests that rater differences are a potentially important source of measurement error. We demonstrate analytically the potential consequences of both random and systematic measurement error in research on HR and firm performance. However, our main focus is on random error and we show how generalizability theory can be applied to obtain better estimates of reliability by simultaneously recognizing multiple sources (e.g., items, raters) of random measurement error. These more inclusive reliability estimates, in turn, offer the possibility of more precisely quantifying substantive relationships in the HR and firm performance literature. In our sample, reliabilities (as estimated by generalizability coefficients) for single-rater assessments of HR variables were generally below .50. This degree of measurement error, if present in substantive studies on HR and firm performance, could lead to considerable bias, given that an unstandardized regression coefficient is corrected for measurement error in the independent variable by dividing by its reliability coefficient (not its square root). We also found only limited convergent validity between HR and line managers ratings of a second type of HR measure, HR effectiveness. In general, our findings suggest that future researchers need to devote greater attention to measurement error and construct validity issues. Our study provides an example of how generalizability theory can be useful in this pursuit.     

MCMI characteristics of DSM-III posttraumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans

Compared the MCMI profiles of 25 veterans with a diagnosis of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) with those of 25 veterans carrying psychiatric disorders which typically cause problems in the differential diagnosis of PTSD. The PTSD group had higher elevations on nine of the 20 MCMI scales (all ps less than .05). Profiles were also significantly different in shape and scatter. A discriminant analysis accounted for 100% of the variance and correctly classified 88% of the patients. Resulting MCMI profiles appear to be consistent with DSM-III criteria for PTSD.