Personal beliefs and professional practice : a comparative study of Buddhist and socialist social workers in Britain and Japan as the basis of an analysis of the relationship between personal belief systems and social work practice

People with strong beliefs often argue that their beliefs have a powerful effect on their actions. This thesis takes one example of this argument by examining the relationship between social workers' beliefs and their professional practice. It starts with an introduction to the background of the research, then ideology and phenomenology are discussed as theoretical concepts, since ideology is the basic concept being analysed and phenomenology the methodological approach used. The phenomenological approach is used to discuss and analyse the results of interviews with four groups of social workers, two in which the social workers profess to use Buddhist concepts in their social work practice (one in Britain and one in Japan) and two (also one in Britain and one in Japan) in which the social workers profess to use Socialist concepts in their practice. These social workers were asked to be interviewed since they profess that their practice is affected by their personal ideology. The differences between personal ideology and operational philosophy are discussed. Three fundamental concepts of Buddhism and Socialism related to social work practice are analysed, and then used to compare the different relationships between personal ideology, operational philosophy and social work practice in the four groups, which emerged from the interviews. The development of social work practice and welfare ideologies in Britain and Japan are discussed. The interviewees are then described and the results of the interviews are summarised and analysed, before being compared to other relevant research findings. It is demonstrated that two groups (the Japanese Buddhist and British Socialist) show in the main, congruence between their personal ideologies, operational philosophies and social work practice, and that the Japanese Socialists and British Buddhists do not. This is discussed in terms of various theoretical issues. The two ideologies under research, and the welfare systems in Japan and Britain, are compared in terms of their differential effect on social work practice. Finally, some suggestions are made for further research, leading on from the results of this project

SURVEY OF BRITISH ASSOCIATION OF SOCIAL WORK MEMBERS AND THEIR USE OF RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY IN DIRECT PRACTICE

Acknowledgements The authors wish to extend special thanks to Dr. Michael Sheridan of Virginia Commonwealth University for her pioneering work in developing surveys on social worker=s views about spirituality in social work. She generously permitted us to build on her work in developing our own survey instruments. As we modified her original survey instrument for use in national and international studies, any limitations in design should be attributed to us. We would also like to thank Professor John Hoover of Saint Cloud State University for his expertise and his contributions to our revised survey and questionnaire design

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Distinct patterns of 1p and 19q alterations identify subtypes of human gliomas that have different prognoses†

We studied the status of chromosomes 1 and 19 in 363 astrocytic and oligodendroglial tumors. Whereas the predominant pattern of copy number abnormality was a concurrent loss of the entire 1p and 19q regions (total 1p/19q loss) among oligodendroglial tumors and partial deletions of 1p and/or 19q in astrocytic tumors, a subset of apparently astrocytic tumors also had total 1p/19q loss. The presence of total 1p/19q loss was associated with longer survival of patients with all types of adult gliomas independent of age and diagnosis (P = .041). The most commonly deleted region on 19q in astrocytic tumors spans 885 kb in 19q13.33–q13.41, which is telomeric to the previously proposed region. Novel regions of homozygous deletion, including a part of DPYD (1p21.3) or the KLK cluster (19q13.33), were observed in anaplastic oligodendrogliomas. Amplifications encompassing AKT2 (19q13.2) or CCNE1 (19q12) were identified in some glioblastomas. Deletion mapping of the centromeric regions of 1p and 19q in the tumors that had total 1p/19q loss, indicating that the breakpoints lie centromeric to NOTCH2 within the pericentromeric regions of 1p and 19q. Thus, we show that the copy number abnormalities of 1p and 19q in human gliomas are complex and have distinct patterns that are prognostically predictive independent of age and pathological diagnosis. An accurate identification of total 1p/19q loss and discriminating this from other 1p/19q changes is, however, critical when the 1p/19q copy number status is used to stratify patients in clinical trials