Some History of Clinical Sociology and Sociological Practice, Part I

From the beginning of the discipline, sociologists have used their knowledge to bring about change. This paper reviews the early antecedents of sociological practice, and then concentrates on three areas of practice as illustrative of practice. These are: studies in intergroup relations, before and after World War II; the studies of the morale of soldiers conducted during the Second World War; and the juvenile delinquency and poverty programs. After the end of World War II the focus of sociology shifted from the outside world to disciplinary concerns, and theoretical development was seen as incompatible with the use of sociology. Sociological practice has emerged as a social movement within sociology in response to the problems created by this shift in focus. This article ends with a description of the paradigm shift; a later article will discuss the recent emergence of sociological practice

Clinical Sociology and Adolescent Medicine: The Design of a Program

This article describes the uses of sociological theory and knowledge in the design and operation of an in-hospital program for the care of physically ill and injured adolescents. The central tasks of adolescence — resolution of the conflict between autonomy and dependency, the development of intimacy and competence, the ability to take on adult roles, and the development of the self — may be hampered by a total institution which depersonalizes patients and fosters dependency. The development of normative structures which encourage autonomy, continuity of role evelopment, appropriate levels of intimacy, and continued development of the self are encouraged by appropriate modifications of usual hospital routine. Normative support for these modifications is developed through educational programs for house staff (residents and interns), nurses, and others involved in the program. While the article emphasizes sociological concerns, the success of the program depends on contributions from an interdisciplinary team drawn from medicine, nursing, social work, and sociology

Evaluation of a Commodity Supplemental Food Program among the Aged Poor in Detroit

This article reports on the evaluation of a demonstration program in which elderly residentsof the Detroit area were provided foods through the Commodity SupplementalFood Program. Organized in a short period of time, the evaluation of this demonstrationprogram had to take into account the realities of program needs, and lack offunding for the evaluation. Elderly participants in the Focus:Hope Food for Senior

Resummation of Threshold, Low- and High-Energy Expansions for Heavy-Quark Correlators

With the help of the Mellin-Barnes transform, we show how to simultaneously resum the expansion of a heavy-quark correlator around q^2=0 (low-energy), q^2= 4 m^2 (threshold, where m is the quark mass) and q^2=-\infty (high-energy) in a systematic way. We exemplify the method for the perturbative vector correlator at O(alpha_s^2) and O(alpha_s^3). We show that the coefficients, Omega(n), of the Taylor expansion of the vacuum polarization function in terms of the conformal variable \omega admit, for large n, an expansion in powers of 1/n (up to logarithms of n) that we can calculate exactly. This large-n expansion has a sign-alternating component given by the logarithms of the OPE, and a fixed-sign component given by the logarithms of the threshold expansion in the external momentum q^2.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures. We fix typos in Eqs. (18), (27), (55) and (56). Results unchange

Neurodiverse Human-Machine Interaction and Collaborative Problem-Solving in Social VR

Social motor coordination is an important mechanism responsible for creating shared understanding but can be a challenge for Autistic individuals. Social virtual reality (VR) provides an opportunity to create a safe and inclusive environment for which interactions can be augmented to promote social interactivity. Due to the bi-directional nature of social interaction and adaptation, we created a framework to explore social motor coordination with a virtual artificial agent which can exhibit human-like behaviors. In this experiment, we assessed the interactive behaviors of participants completing a collaborative problem-solving task with the agent using multidimensional cross-recurrence quantification analysis (mdCRQA). Our results show that participants who discovered novel solutions to the task exhibited greater coupling to the artificial agent regardless of participant characteristics. Future work will explore how social VR environments can be augmented to promote social coordination