Living with persistent pain: experiences of older people receiving home care.

Background. Although the topic of pain among older people has received increasing interest, little is still known about how pain is experienced or handled by those who no longer manage independently but depend on professionals for help with daily living. Developing pain management for older people requires such knowledge. Aim. To explore sense of self, sense of pain, daily living with pain, sense of others and ways of handling pain in older people with persistent pain. Methods. Interviews with 90 older people receiving home care from nursing auxiliaries in their own homes or in sheltered accommodation were collected from January to June 2000. A typology of older people in persistent pain was developed. Activities for handling pain were examined using content analysis. Findings. Respondents' experiences of themselves and their pain varied. Two groups of older people, considered as 'competent and proud' and 'confident and serene', expressed satisfaction in spite of pain, while the groups 'misunderstood and disappointed' and 'resigned and sad' expressed dissatisfaction. The most common strategies used were medication, rest, mobility, distracting activities and talking about pain. Respondents chose strategies by balancing the advantages of the activities against the disadvantages these brought for their daily living. Conclusion. This study indicates that characteristics of the older people, such as their way of experiencing themselves, how pain affects their daily life and how they perceive effects and side-effects of pain management are areas that need to be identified when staff assess pain and plan pain management. Caring for older people in pain could be improved by listening to and believing their complaints, evaluating effects and side-effects from medications and nonpharmacological pain management and by emphasising the importance of common everyday activities such as mobility and distraction to relieve pain

The Influence of Dormitory Architecture On Resident Behavior

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66943/2/10.1177_001391657300500402.pd

Review Section : Nature/Nurture Revisited I

Biologically oriented approaches to the study of human conflict have thus far been limited largely to the study of aggression. A sample of the literature on this topic is reviewed, drawing upon four major approaches: comparative psychology, ethology (including some popularized accounts), evolutionary-based theories, and several areas of human physiology. More sophisticated relationships between so-called "innate" and "acquired" determinants of behavior are discussed, along with the proper relevance of animal behavior studies for human behavior. Unless contained in a comprehensive theory which includes social and psychological variables, biolog ically oriented theories (although often valid within their domain) offer at best severely limited and at worst highly misleading explanations of complex social conflicts. The review concludes with a list of several positive contributions of these biological approaches and suggests that social scientists must become more knowledgeable about them.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68270/2/10.1177_002200277401800206.pd

Psychology and aggression

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68264/2/10.1177_002200275900300301.pd

Why are migrant students better off in certain types of educational systems or schools than in others?

The main research question of this paper is the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school composition, track level, and country of origin on the educational achievement of 15-year-old migrant students. We focus specifically on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic background on achievement scores and the extent to which these effects are affected by characteristics of the school, track, or educational system in which these students are enrolled. In doing so, we examine the ‘sorting’ mechanisms of schools and tracks in highly stratified, moderately stratified, and comprehensive education systems. We use data from the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) wave. Compared with previous research in this area, the paper’s main contribution is that we explicitly include the tracks-within-school level as a separate unit of analyses, which leads to less biased results concerning the effects of educational system characteristics. The results highlight the importance of including factors of track level and school composition in the debate surrounding educational inequality of opportunity for students in different education contexts. The findings clearly indicate that the effects of educational system characteristics are flawed if the analysis only uses a country- and a student level and ignores the tracks-within-school level characteristics. From a policy perspective, the most important finding is that educational systems are neither uniformly ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, but they can result in different consequences for different migrant groups. Some migrant groups are better off in comprehensive systems, while others are better off in moderately stratified systems

Husband's and wife's culture participation and their levels of education: A case of male-dominance

Contains fulltext : 28411.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)In this study we seek to broaden the debate on women and class analysis to married women’s and men's educational attainment, and its impact on cultural behaviour. Analogous to the earlier discussion, the question is raised whether the husband's education dominates his wife’s behaviour. First, to examine spouses' interdependent cultural behaviour, we apply a simultaneous equation model. Our analysis, based on longitudinal data from Dutch household surveys, shows some evidence of a declining male dominance across cohorts. The findings also suggest that the total effect of the wife's education on her husband’s cultural behaviour has increased over time. Second, we apply diagonal reference models to study educationally mixed couples more elaborately by testing several interaction effects. Although both women’s and men’s relative positions are associated with a differential sahence of the spouse’s education, there is no evidence indicating that the lower educated spouse is primarily 'borrowing' from his or her higher educated partner. Instead of such a 'status maximimization' effect the higher educated spouse adapts more strongly to the lower educated spouse. In particular, women in the oldest cohort seem to be characterized by this 'status minimization'. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed