Measuring competence in systemic practice: development of the ‘systemic family practice – systemic competency scale’ (SPS)

Ensuring that practitioners are competent in the therapies they deliver is important for training, therapeutic outcomes and ethical practice. The development of the Systemic Practice Scale (SPS) is reported - a measure to assess the competence of novice systemic practitioners trialed by Children and Young Person’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (CYP-IAPT) training courses. Initial reliability assessment of the SPS with twenty-eight supervisors of systemic practice evaluating students’ competence using an online recording of a family therapy session is detailed. The SPS was found to be a reliable measure of systemic competence across training settings. Rating variability was noted, with training and benchmarking to improve rating consistency recommended. Further research using the SPS to further establish the reliability and validity of the scale is required

Structural lubricity: Role of dimension and symmetry

When two chemically passivated solids are brought into contact, interfacial interactions between the solids compete with intrabulk elastic forces. The relative importance of these interactions, which are length-scale dependent, will be estimated using scaling arguments. If elastic interactions dominate on all length scales, solids will move as essentially rigid objects. This would imply superlow kinetic friction in UHV, provided wear was absent. The results of the scaling study depend on the symmetry of the surfaces and the dimensionalities of interface and solids. Some examples are discussed explicitly such as contacts between disordered three-dimensional solids and linear bearings realized from multiwall carbon nanotubes.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

A questionnaire to identify patellofemoral pain in the community: an exploration of measurement properties

Background Community-based studies of patellofemoral pain (PFP) need a questionnaire tool that discriminates between those with and those without the condition. To overcome these issues, we have designed a self-report questionnaire which aims to identify people with PFP in the community. Methods Study designs: comparative study and cross-sectional study. Study population: comparative study: PFP patients, soft-tissue injury patients and adults without knee problems. Cross-sectional study: adults attending a science festival. Intervention: comparative study participants completed the questionnaire at baseline and two weeks later. Cross-sectional study participants completed the questionnaire once. The optimal scoring system and threshold was explored using receiver operating characteristic curves, test-retest reliability using Cohen’s kappa and measurement error using Bland-Altman plots and standard error of measurement. Known-group validity was explored by comparing PFP prevalence between genders and age groups. Results Eighty-four participants were recruited to the comparative study. The receiver operating characteristic curves suggested limiting the questionnaire to the clinical features and knee pain map sections (AUC 0.97 95 % CI 0.94 to 1.00). This combination had high sensitivity and specificity (over 90 %). Measurement error was less than the mean difference between the groups. Test–retest reliability estimates suggest good agreement (N = 51, k = 0.74, 95 % CI 0.52–0.91). The cross-sectional study (N = 110) showed expected differences between genders and age groups but these were not statistically significant. Conclusion A shortened version of the questionnaire, based on clinical features and a knee pain map, has good measurement properties. Further work is needed to validate the questionnaire in community samples

The Effect of Crystallization on the Pulsations of White Dwarf Stars

We consider the pulsational properties of white dwarf star models with temperatures appropriate for the ZZ Ceti instability strip and with masses large enough that they should be substantially crystallized. Our work is motivated by the existence of a potentially crystallized DAV, BPM 37093, and the expectation that digital surveys in progress will yield many more such massive pulsators. A crystallized core makes possible a new class of oscillations, the torsional modes, although we expect these modes to couple at most weakly to any motions in the fluid and therefore to remain unobservable. The p-modes should be affected at the level of a few percent in period, but are unlikely to be present with observable amplitudes in crystallizing white dwarfs any more than they are in the other ZZ Ceti's. Most relevant to the observed light variations in white dwarfs are the g-modes. We find that the kinetic energy of these modes is effectively excluded from the crystallized cores of our models. As increasing crystallization pushes these modes farther out from the center, the mean period spacing between radial overtones increases substantially with the crystallized mass fraction. In addition, the degree and structure of mode trapping is affected. The fact that some periods are strongly affected by changes in the crystallized mass fraction while others are not suggests that we may be able to disentangle the effects of crystallization from those due to different surface layer masses.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, accepted on 1999 July 2 for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

Psychopolitics: Peter Sedgwick’s legacy for mental health movements

This paper re-considers the relevance of Peter Sedgwick's Psychopolitics (1982) for a politics of mental health. Psychopolitics offered an indictment of ‘anti-psychiatry’ the failure of which, Sedgwick argued, lay in its deconstruction of the category of ‘mental illness’, a gesture that resulted in a politics of nihilism. ‘The radical who is only a radical nihilist’, Sedgwick observed, ‘is for all practical purposes the most adamant of conservatives’. Sedgwick argued, rather, that the concept of ‘mental illness’ could be a truly critical concept if it was deployed ‘to make demands upon the health service facilities of the society in which we live’. The paper contextualizes Psychopolitics within the ‘crisis tendencies’ of its time, surveying the shifting welfare landscape of the subsequent 25 years alongside Sedgwick's continuing relevance. It considers the dilemma that the discourse of ‘mental illness’ – Sedgwick's critical concept – has fallen out of favour with radical mental health movements yet remains paradigmatic within psychiatry itself. Finally, the paper endorses a contemporary perspective that, while necessarily updating Psychopolitics, remains nonetheless ‘Sedgwickian’

We haven't got a seat on the bus for you or All the seats are mine: Narratives and career transitions in professional golf

In this article we explore how the stories an athlete tells throughout life in sport affect her career transition experiences. We base our enquiry on a social constructionist conception of narrative theory which holds that storytelling is integral to the creation and maintenance of identity and sense of self. Life stories were gathered through interviews with two professional women golfers (Christiana and Kandy) over a six‐year period. Through a narrative analysis of structure and form we explored each participant’s stories of living in and withdrawing from professional golf. We suggest Christiana told monological performance‐oriented stories which, while aligning with the culture of elite sport, resulted in an exclusive athletic identity and foreclosure of alternative selves and roles. On withdrawal, Christiana experienced narrative wreckage, identity collapse, mental health difficulties and considerable psychological trauma. In contrast, Kandy told dialogical discovery‐oriented stories which, while being in tension with the dominant performance narrative, created and sustained a multidimensional identity and self. Her stories and identity remained intact, authentic and continuous on withdrawal from tournament golf and she experienced few psychological problems

Narrative, identity, and recovery from serious mental illness: A life history of a runner

In recent years, researchers have investigated the psychological effects of exercise for people with mental health problems, often by focusing on how exercise may alleviate symptoms of mental illness. In this article I take a different tack to explore the ways in which exercise contributed a sense of meaning, purpose, and identity to the life of one individual named Ben, a runner diagnosed with schizophrenia. Drawing on life history data, I conducted an analysis of narrative to explore the narrative types that underlie Ben's stories of mental illness and exercise. For Ben, serious mental illness profoundly disrupted a pre-existing athletic identity removing agency, continuity, and coherence from his life story. By returning to exercise several years later, Ben reclaimed his athletic identity and reinstated some degree of narrative agency, continuity, and coherence. While the relationships between narrative, identity, and mental health are undoubtedly complex, Ben's story suggests that exercise can contribute to recovery by being a personally meaningful activity which reinforces identity and sense of self