Strategies of Intervention with Families of Pediatric Leukemia Patients

As part of a longitudinal research study, families of children with leukemia were provided with a psychosocial intervention program over a two-year period. This paper describes the approaches used at specific times during the illness: diagnosis and initial treatment, early outpatient treatment, later outpatient treatment, remission, relapse, and death. the goals of the intervention strategies were to facilitate: an understanding of the realities of the illness; management of emotional distress; and utilization of resources to care for the child, attend to other responsibilities, and support and communicate with one another.     

Identity and stammering: negotiating hesitation,side‐stepping repetition,and sometimes avoiding deviation

Individuals who experience speech dysfluency are often stigmatised because their speech acts differ from the communicative norm. This article is located in and seeks to further the identity debates in exploring how individuals who are subject to the intermittent emergence of a stigmatised characteristic manage this randomised personal discrediting in their identity work. Through a series of focus groups and semi‐structured interviews participants grudgingly report their management approaches which include concealing, drafting in unwitting others, role‐playing and segregating self from their stammer. In describing how they manage their stammer they detail their use of the social space in a number of ways, including as a hiding place; a site for ‘it’ (the stammer); a gap in which to switch words; and a different area in which to perform. This study offers important insights, increasing our understanding of the often hidden negotiations of identity work and the sometime ingenious use of space in the management of a social stigma.     

Being out of Work and Health among Younger Japanese Men: A Panel Data Analysis

This paper examines the effect of being out of work, which is in a broader category ofunemployment, on the physical and mental health of younger Japanese men using panel data.A fixed effects model, widely used to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity inpanel data analysis, was used for this analysis. Using the first through the fifth wavesof the Japanese Life Course Panel Survey, the first wave of which was conducted withpeople aged 20–40 yrs in 2007, it is found that being out of work has no observable effecton self-assessed physical health. However, being out of work has a negative effect onmental health as measured by the five-item version of the Mental Health Inventory. It isdifficult to clearly distinguish the direction of causality even after controlling forindividual heterogeneity that is constant over time. An analysis was done with asub-sample to mitigate a possible reverse causality. The results consistently show thatbeing out of work has a negative effect on mental health.     

Individual variations in work output per unit energy intake in East Java

In studying East Javanese peasant farmers it was found that workers with low energy intakes were as productive as workers with high energy intakes. Measurements indicated that work output produced by a given energy intake varied considerably in relation to the individual consumer and that the work efficiency of the consumer varied inversely in relation to the degree of undernutrition or energy stress. It appeared that there may have been compensatory mechanisms such as higher levels of metabolic efficiency, lower basal metabolic rates, greater physical fitness, or stronger incentives to work enabling those on a low energy diet to produce more work per unit energy intake than individuals with relatively high energy intakes.     

CYCLICAL ABSENTEEISM AMONG PRIVATE SECTOR,PUBLIC SECTOR AND SELF‐EMPLOYED WORKERS

This research note analyzes differences in the number of absent working days and doctor visits and in their cyclicality between private sector, public sector and self‐employed workers. For this purpose, I used large‐scale German survey data for the years 1995 to 2007 to estimate random effects negative binomial (count data) models. The main findings are as follows. (i) Public sector workers have on average more absent working days than private sector and self‐employed workers. Self‐employed workers have fewer absent working days and doctor visits than dependent employed workers. (ii) The regional unemployment rate is on average negatively correlated with the number of absent working days among private and public sector workers as well as among self‐employed men. The correlations between regional unemployment rate and doctor visits are only significantly negative among private sector workers. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What makes a structural intervention? Reducing vulnerability to HIV in community settings,with particular reference to sex work

Abstract

Increasing emphasis is being placed on the need for ‘structural interventions’ (SIs) in HIV prevention internationally. There is great variation in how the concept of SI is defined and operationalised, however, and this has potentially problematic implications for their likely success. In this paper, we clarify and elucidate what constitutes a SI with particular reference to the structured distribution of power and to the role of communities. We summarise the background to the growing emphasis being placed on the concept of SIs in HIV prevention policy, and present ethnographic case-study material from a sex worker's HIV project in Kolkata, India, to illustrate the nature of HIV vulnerability and its implications for the design and targeting of successful SIs. The paper draws attention to the dual importance of (1) attending to local complexities in the micro and macro-level structures that produce vulnerability; and (2) clarifying the meaning and role of communities within SIs.     

The Effect of Maternal Dose on Lead Retention in Suckling Rats

Lead (Pb) transfer from mother to litter was investigated at the late stage of lactation after a single intraperitoneal injection of 2.0 μg Pb/ml marked with ²⁰³Pb . After 48 hr almost 20% of the maternal dose of ²⁰³Pb was found in the litter, and about 0.6 and 0.2% of the injected dose was found in the liver and kidneys of suckling rats, respectively. Similar whole-body retention was observed earlier in suckling rats after a 20 times lower dose of stable lead was injected intravenously into their mothers.     

Work experiences among nurses and physicians in the beginning of their professional careers – analyses using the effort–reward imbalance model

Scand J Caring Sci; 2013; 27; 36–43 Work experiences among nurses and physicians in the beginning of their professional careers – analyses using the effort–reward imbalance model The aim of the study was to scrutinise how nurses and physicians, employed by the county councils in Sweden, assess their work environment in terms of effort and reward at the start of their career. The aim was also to estimate associations between work satisfaction and the potential outcomes from the effort–reward imbalance (ERI) questionnaire. The study group, 198 nurses and 242 physicians who graduated in 1999, is a subsample drawn from a national cross‐sectional survey. Data were collected in the third year after graduation among the nurses and in the fourth year after graduation among registered physicians. The effort–reward imbalance questionnaire, together with a question on work satisfaction, was used to evaluate psychosocial factors at work. The results reveal that nurses scored higher on effort, lower on reward and experienced higher effort–reward imbalance, compared with physicians. Women scored higher on work‐related overcommitment (WOC) compared with men. Among the physicians, logistic regression analysis revealed a statistically significant association between WOC and ERI, sex, effort and reward. Logistic regression analysis also revealed a statistically significant association between WOC and ERI and between WOC and effort among the nurses. Dissatisfaction with work was significantly higher among those who scored worst on all three ERI subscales (effort, reward and WOC) and also among those with the highest ERI ratios compared with the other respondents. In conclusion, to prevent future work‐related health problems and work dissatisfaction among nurses and physicians in the beginning of their professional careers, signs of poor psychosocial working conditions have to been taken seriously. In future work‐related stress research among healthcare personnel, gender‐specific aspects of working conditions must be further highlighted to develop more gender‐sensitive analyses.