Caring for the carer: home design and modification for carers of young people with disability

This HMinfo Occasional Research Paper focuses on carers, that is those who deliver informal (unpaid) care to young people with disability, and particularly those carers who share their home with the person they are caring for, as well as the housing design considerations that may support carers in their caring role. In this report, paid carers are referred to as support workers, and their role is clearly differentiated from that of carers, who are unpaid. It should also be noted that many people with disability are themselves the carer for a partner or family member. Both carers, who are usually family members or partners, and support workers, who are paid to provide care to a person with disability, need supportive and safe environments in which to care for people with disability. The definition of a carer is: “A person of any age who provides any informal assistance, in terms of help or supervision, to persons with disabilities or long-term conditions, or older persons (i.e. aged 60 years and over). This assistance has to be ongoing, or likely to be ongoing, for at least six months.”. This research adopts a definition of disability that understands it as the product of interaction between an individual and their environment. Whether or not a particular physical condition is experienced as disabling depends on the natural and built environment, social, political and cultural structures, and interpersonal processes of the individual concerned. In addition, Eley et al highlight that both people with intellectual disability and their carers are ageing, and the concurrent ageing of these groups poses specific challenges in providing suitable housing. For the purpose of this research, the concept of ‘care’ is defined as the provision of assistance to a person with disability or chronic health condition or frail older person, to ensure their health, safety and wellbeing. Care is generally triaged into: • formal care delivered by waged staff or trained volunteers • informal care delivered by unpaid carers, usually family members; or • self-care, a newly evolving conceptual category that will be referenced in this report insofar as it impacts on the degree of care provided by carers. The ABS describes self-care as the capacity to undertake tasks associated with: showering or bathing; dressing; eating; toileting; and bladder or bowel control. This HMinfo Occasional Research Paper will focus on the unpaid (informal) carers of young people with disability (<65 years) only, and from the following perspectives: 1. What tensions, if any, may exist between a carer’s needs and the needs of the person with disability in home design? 2. What design features of the physical home environment would enable carers t

Siege and Response: Families’ Everyday Lives and Experiences with Children’s Residential Mental Health Services (FULL REPORT)

Purpose Our purpose in interviewing parents with a child placed in residential mental health treatment was threefold: (1) to understand the functioning of children requiring residential mental health treatment before, during, and after treatment; (2) to characterize parents’ perceptions of their families’ involvement with residential treatment; and, (3) to address the popular notion that children requiring residential treatment come from highly dysfunctional and potentially harmful families by describing prevalent family functioning patterns. Methodology|This report is based on information obtained by interviewing 29 primary caregivers who had a child placed in residential care at one of two Ontario children’s mental health agencies. Parents were visited in their homes by an interviewer to engage in one-on-one dialogue to explore dimensions of their everyday lives and reflect on their service experiences. Interviews consisted of a series of open ended questions and were approximately 1 ½ to 2 hours in length. Because of the labour intensive nature of qualitative investigations, there are limitations to the number of cases that can practically be included in a study; however, what is lost in generalizability is compensated for by a richer sense of the struggles facing these families. Parents’ Perceptions of Residential Services Parents were generally pleased with their child’s placement in a residential treatment center. Parents feel respected, valued, and understood by service providers. They experience staff as competent, compassionate, and helpful. Residential services offered respite for families and containment for focal children. Many parents reported gains made for themselves and their children. Yet only 17% of parents felt that sufficient gains had been made to warrant the discharge of their child from the center. Parents tended not to blame the residential center for the lack of progress. The also seemed unable to articulate what the residential center could have done differently. Yet these parents, extremely hopeful when they first had their child placed in residence, had to come to terms with the realization that service outcomes had not matched their hopes. These stories highlight both the complexity and the tenacious nature of these children’s mental health difficulties. They also provide a challenge to service providers. What do we do when good is not good enough? Changes in Child Functioning Before, During and After Residential CareThese stories provide dramatic testimony that most of the older cohort children in this study leaving residential care had very serious ongoing problems in daily living. Problems which in many cases rivaled or exceeded the challenges faced prior to entering residential care. About one-third of these children had left home and many had unstable living arrangements or were “on the streets”. With the exception of living on their own and involvement in delinquent activities, and notwithstanding moderately more evidence of “successful” or partially “successful” adaptations, the after care daily living portraits of younger cohort residential care graduates were not notably more encouraging. About half of these younger children did not return to their original homes 6 after residential care. Serious areas of concern shared by both groups of children include continuing major adaptation problems at school and continued high levels of pressure on the parents and siblings of many of these children. Parent and Family FunctioningCaring for the focal child permeates every facet of daily life for these families including work, health, and relationships. Parents experience prolonged elevated levels of daily stress trying to juggle work schedules, appointments with professionals, household activities, and the needs of family members with caring for the focal child. Family climate is markedly tense and frequently involves conflict, particularly with the focal child. Relationships among other family members suffer as well, with parents reporting increased marital strain and little time to devote to siblings of the focal child. Caring for the focal child is taxing on parents’ own physical and mental health. Most families (70%) reported experiencing substantial relief, at least for a short period of time, from tensions within the home when the focal child entered residential care. Child Functioning Over Three Selected Developmental PeriodsOne of the interpretative challenges inherent in these stories is understanding the connection between the behaviour of these children, which is strikingly similar, and evidence suggestive of these children having a variety of problems, life histories and family environments. It can be argued that these children arrive at a similar point from many different trajectories. Who are the children represented in this sample? How are we to understand their difficulties? When it comes to understanding the behaviour of the focal children, both its presentation and its genesis, these stories raise as many questions as they answer. These stories challenge the notion of a single or root cause of extreme unmanageable behaviour. Instead they offer a complex and unsettling portrayal of these children, their familial and social environments, life histories, their strengths and challenges. These stories caution against the use of blanket or catch-all interpretations to help us understand the problematic behaviour of these children. ConclusionDespite the positive view of residential treatment held by parents long after treatment ends, the data suggest relatively poor outcome patterns for children leaving residential care. Serious areas of concern shared by both groups of children include continuing major adaptation problems at school and continued high levels of pressure on the parents and siblings of many of these children. The clearest area of benefit from these residential placements, at least in the short run, is for family members other than the focal child. This is an important consideration, given the incredible pressures families manage when the focal child is at home, and the extreme disruptions in family life described in these stories. An obvious question emanating from these stories is what can be expected for these children - in school, employment and relationships - over the years ahead. There is almost no support in our study for helping strategies predicated on “curing” or changing the focal child through short-term or medium-term interventions so that he or she can prosper in everyday life. Variations in living arrangements, enhancing school and employment opportunities, and continuing support to these children and their families with the challenges of daily living merit serious attention

An acoustic phonetic analysis of African American English: A comparative study of two dialects

In this thesis, I contribute acoustic phonetic data and analysis to the study of African American English (AAE). For this research, I collected speech samples of self-identified AAE speakers and speakers of a dominant coexisting dialect, the Northern Cities Shift (NCS). I analyze these samples to determine if vowel quality and vowel duration are consistently and predictably varied between the two dialects. Labov\u27s Chain Shift Principles are used as the context for the results. In my analysis, I find that both vowel quality and duration are different between AAE and NCS in ways previously undocumented in the linguistic literature. The quality analysis relies on evidence from the vowel [ æ ]. I find that AAE shares a distinct quality feature of NCS, raised [ æ ], despite the fact that this feature is said not to be present in AAE. This vowel functions as the pivot point for the chain shift in the NCS data but does not cause a vowel shift in AAE data analyzed in this thesis. In the analysis of vowel length, I rely on data from the front tense/lax vowel pairs, [ i ; ] and [ e ; ] in both dialects. ɪ ɛ I find that vowel length is consistently longer in AAE than in NCS. Additionally, I find that in NCS, the tense/lax pairs maintain a difference in length in which the tense vowels are longer than the lax vowels. In AAE, I find that the tense vowels are shorter than the lax vowels. I conclude that the length differences found in these data sets indicate that Labov\u27s feature [ +/- peripheral ] is not a feature of the AAE front tense/lax vowel pairs, [ i ; ɪ ] and [ e ; ɛ ] and that this prevents a vowel shift in AAE that should occur in response to the presence of the raised [ æ ]. ii

Orangutan Vision, Looking Preferences, and Passive Looking-Time Versus Active Touchscreen Paradigms

Key aspects of orangutan picture preference, looking paradigms, and vision were assessed in three manuscripts. These studies have important contributions to research on comparative vision and animal picture perception, as well as practical applications for orangutan research. The first manuscript assessed visual preferences for pictures of primates. Orangutan looking-time was coded as they watched simultaneous slideshows on two laptop computers. Orangutans preferred photographs of unfamiliar orangutans over unfamiliar humans, and familiar orangutans over unfamiliar orangutans. When comparing familiar orangutans, they preferred adults over infants, and males over females. These preferences were then compared to preferences reported across primates which show variable results, likely due to complex social factors and context. A second manuscript assessed passive looking-time and active touchscreen paradigms. Passive and active paradigms can produce discrepant results, and the validity of these paradigms had not been empirically assessed in animals. Three methods were compared: looking-time at slideshows on two laptops, a touchscreen that displayed pictures when touched, and simply holding up pairs of printed images. All three methods detected the expected preference for pictures of animals over non-animals. This can be considered evidence of the reliability of these paradigms, equivalence of passive and active methods, and support for continued use of looking-time and touchscreens in orangutan research. The final manuscript assessed the contrast sensitivity function (CSF). Orangutans were trained to select vertical or horizontal lines, and then the CSF threshold was estimated by increasing the spatial frequency and decreasing the contrast of the stimuli. Orangutan CSF was similar in shape and position on the frequency scale to those of humans and macaques, but overall sensitivity was lower. We propose that this was due to testing conditions and low motivation. Across these three manuscripts orangutans demonstrated overall vision and looking behaviour that was similar to humans, however with high variability likely due to competing interests, low motivation, and individual differences

Teachers Building Dwelling Thinking with Slideware

Teacher-student discourse is increasingly mediated through, by and with information and communication technologies: in-class discussions have found new, textually-rich venues online; chalk and whiteboard lectures are rapidly giving way to PowerPoint presentations. Yet, what does this mean experientially for teachers? This paper reports on a phenomenological study investigating teachers’ lived experiences of PowerPoint in post-secondary classrooms. As teachers become more informed about the affordances of information and communication technology like PowerPoint and consequently take up and use these tools in their classrooms, their teaching practices, relations with students, and ways of interpreting the world are simultaneously in-formed – conformed, deformed and reformed – by the given technology-in-use. The paper is framed in light of Martin Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951) and “The Thing” (1949). In these writings, Heidegger shows how a thing opens a new world to us, revealing novel structures of experience and meaning, and inviting us to a different style of being, thinking and doing. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, May 2010, Volume 10, Edition

Siege and Response: Families’ Everyday Lives and Experiences with Children’s Residential Mental Health Services (SUMMARY REPORT)

Our purpose in interviewing families who had a child placed in residential children’s mental health treatment was to provide insight into the lives and service experiences of these families as they struggle to care for their child and find appropriate services. As we endeavored to code, categorize, and make sense of the information shared with us by families several other more pointed purposes emerged as integral to our efforts. More specifically we became interested in understanding the functioning of children requiring residential mental health treatment before, during, and after treatment with the aim to comment on general patterns of change for these children across these three time periods. Secondly, we also aimed to characterize parents’ perceptions of their families’ involvement with residential treatment. In particular we address parents’ understanding of the services, their relationships with service providers, and parents’ perceptions of their children’s experiences. And thirdly, in order to provide a family context for children’s difficulties and the ensuing service involvement, we also discuss family functioning highlighting key family patterns under the domains of work, daily life, and relationships. The inclusion of prevalent family functioning patterns also helps us to address the popular notion that children requiring residential treatment come from highly dysfunctional and potentially 3 harmful families. Each of these three purposes are addressed in turn in an effort to provide a more complete picture of the families involved in residential treatment and their service experiences. We conclude with some implications for service delivery and thoughts to pursue in future investigations