Teenagers,contraception, and pregnancy

The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania started a family planning counseling program for teenage nulliparae in a nearby public high school in 1973-1974. Educational, informal counseling, and discussion sessions were held in the school on a weekly basis by a social worker, family planning nurse, family planning counselor, and male outreach worker. Following the classes, almost half the girls attended the hospital's Teen Clinic for physical examination and contraceptive supplies. Parental permission was not necessary for attendance at the classes or at the hospital clinic. A second program was started at another school in the year 1974-1975. The goal of the program was to offer family planning information in the early teen years and prevent unwanted pregnancy.     

Organizational Image Assessment in the Health and Human Services Sector1

Five studies were conducted from 1976 to 1984 in southcentral Pennsylvania to evaluate the potential of bipolar ratings by adult user populations for assessing the general agency and/ or specific program image of service organizations in the not-for-profit sector. Statistically reliable differences in mean ratings on scales such as staff qualifications, physical accessibility, and so forth were found to distinguish image profiles and the clarity of image of three human service agencies within the same region of service, to detect change over a 6-year period in the image of individual agencies, and to be sensitive to the effects of management actions designed to modify the image of an in-patient psychiatric facility within a region. The demonstration that specific management interventions over a 2-year period were detectable by ratings along specifically relevant dimensions encourages the immediate application of this inexpensive feedback device by managers of human service agencies and the further investigation of user image ratings as a system output potentially amenable to control system analyses.     

Rethinking the Priority of Practical Reason in Kant

Throughout the critical period Kant enigmatically insists that reason is a ‘unity’, thereby suggesting that both our theoretical and practical endeavors are grounded in one and the same rational capacity. How Kant's unity thesis ought to be interpreted and whether it can be substantiated remain sources of controversy in the literature. According to the strong reading of this claim, reason is a ‘unity’ because all our reasoning, including our theoretical reasoning, functions practically. Although several prominent commentators endorse this view, it is widely thought to lack exegetical support. This paper seeks to strengthen the case for this reading by showing how theoretical reason's positive function, as Kant presents it in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, may be construed as fundamentally practical. I argue that reason's supreme regulative principle ought to be understood as a categorical practical imperative. This interpretation, I suggest, resolves the apparent inconsistencies that blight Kant's account of the principle in the Appendix, while bringing greater overall coherence to his account of theoretical reason's regulative function.