Elderly participation and empowerment : experiences of SAGE

The Hong Kong Society for the Age (SAGE) established in 1977 is one of the well-known Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) in responding to the rapid growing elderly population and the welfare needs of the senior in Hong Kong. Its services include Care and Attention Home, Elderly Hostels, Elderly Centres, Day Care Centres, Home Care Service. etc. The mission of SAGE is to ensure the elderly to have dignity and reasonable comfort in their old age. In 2008, SAGE aims to provide distinctive services to the elderly, i.e. elderly participation and empowerment (Homepage of Sage: http://www.sage.org.hk/eng/ideal.htm). This paper focuses how Sage as an elderly organization in Hong Kong empower older persons through active participation. In the past, the term “client” was widely used to describe those who approached SAGE for service or assistance. It was later changed to “Service User” or “Service Recipient”, a more appropriate term to describe the relationship as SAGE moves more towards the philosophy of a customer-oriented approach. However, the usage of this term implied a power relationship between the service providers, meaning those who “give”, and the service recipients, meaning those who “receive”. Therefore, the situation has been changed in order to emphasize “partnership” instead – a term that is devoid of status hierarchy with a fair chance of participation for both parties, which could result in a win-win situation. It is anticipated that there will be an even more progressive approach to include service users as “decision-makers”, so that they can have more say in deciding the type and mode of service provision, as well as in allocating resources. These changes not only denote the significance of enhancing the customers’ dual roles of being “partners” and “decision-makers” in the process of service provision, but also emphasis the importance of encouraging their participation through empowerment. With rapid development in information and technology, distinguish to before, the participations of the Hong Kong elderly are no longer conservative and invisible nowadays, this development promotes and enhances the active role and self-awareness in society among the elderly. Throughout the advocacy, guidance, and support of many community services in SAGE, it helps to echo the active involvement of the elders in the community. This involvement leads the elders becoming more aware of their collective strength and the power of voicing their concerns about social issues that directly or indirectly affect their own life and well-being. From SAGE experience, Elders’ involvement can be seen from the active roles they play in the organization and operation of different committees, including “Service Users’ Councils”, “Canteen Service Management Committees”, elder learning platform, etc., all these participation definitely enhance the well-being of the elders. However, elderly participation is still relatively low as regards to the whole society, and there exists considerable room for improvements at the policy-making and decision level. For example, at present, most elders’ involvements are mainly through invitations. Their opinions are generally sought on specific issues such as elderly education and welfare. From time to time, maybe, elderly representatives from different sectors of the community are invited to participate in focus group discussions initiated by the Elderly Commission of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, an official agency that is responsible for advocacy and policy decision-making concerning elderly welfare. Sometimes the elders themselves run some self-organized groups at local level, such as “The Hong Kong Association of Senior Citizens”, which helps play their active roles in sensitizing the Government and the community towards elderly-related issues. With these examples, how could we identify the benefits of the elderly participation? How do the elderly being empowered? A theoretical framework of participation and empowerment with a real experience in SAGE is going to explain in the next part

Human Mental Models of Humanoid Robots

Effective communication between a person and a robot may depend on whether there exists a common ground of understanding between the two. In two experiments modelled after human-human studies we examined how people form a mental model of a robot’s factual knowledge. Participants estimated the robot’s knowledge by extrapolating from their own knowledge and from information about the robot’s origin and language. These results suggest that designers of humanoid robots must attend not only to the social cues that robots emit but also to the information people use to create mental models of a robot.published_or_final_versio

Language Use as Carrier of Social Identity

In the present study, we examined the relationship of social identity (Hongkonger or Chinese) and rite attitudes toward bilingual code switching in a conversation between a Hong Kong person and a Chinese Mainlander. Students from a local university in Hong Kong (N = 159) listened to a four-turn conversation between a Hong Kong person and a Mainlander in a wedding party. As expected, when the speaker converged to rite Putonghua (the Mainland official language), those who claimed a Hongkonger identity judged the Hong Kong speaker less favourably; than did those who claimed a Chinese identity. In addition, participants who claimed a Chinese identity judged the Hong Kong speaker more favourably when he converged to Putonghua than when he maintained Cantonese (a Chinese dialect most commonly used in Hong Kong). Finally, social identity was unrelated to language attitudes when the Mainland speaker converged to Cantonese first. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Hong Kong dentists' preparedness for medical emergency in dental clinics

Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate the Hong Kong dentists’ and dental clinics’ preparedness for medical emergency in the dental clinic. Methods: Two custom designed questionnaires were developed, one for dentists and another for dental clinics, to collect the required information. The sampling frame for participants was the list of registered dentists published by the Hong Kong Dental Council on its website in January 2016. A total of 434 dentists and 143 dental clinics were selected from the list by systematic random sampling. The latter sample was supplemented by 10 randomly selected government dental clinics. The questionnaires were mailed the selected dentists together with a cover letter and a stamped return envelope. A reminder letter and another copy of the questionnaire were sent out two weeks after the first mailing. Results: 167 (38%) completed dentist questionnaires and 53 (35%) clinic questionnaires were collected. Most of the respondent dentists had some deficient knowledge on basic life support (BLS), their mean score was 3.5 out of a maximum of 5. Most (>60%) of the respondents thought they were competent in performing medical emergency procedures except giving intravenous injection. Moreover, most (>60%) of them held positive attitude towards having immediate availability of essential medical emergency equipment and drugs in their clinic. Dentists who were more recent graduates, those with postgraduate qualifications, and those who work with accompaniment generally had higher mean BLS knowledge scores. In the dental clinics, the most commonly kept medical emergency equipment/drug was instant glucose (70%) and followed by antihistamine (62%). Only a quarter of the clinics were equipped with AED, and 45% were equipped with oxygen cylinder. For 8 out of the 11 items, a higher proportion of the bigger clinics (>2 dental chairs) than the smaller clinics had the medical emergency equipment/drug available (Chi-square test, p<0.05). Conclusion: Hong Kong dentists have a moderate level of knowledge on BLS which should be enhanced through regular attendance at CE courses. Their knowledge level is affected by a number of their background and professional activities factors. Most dental clinics in Hong Kong have only few of the essential medical emergency equipment and drugs while the larger clinics are better equipped than the smaller clinics.published_or_final_versio

Perceived Cultural Importance and Actual Self-Importance of Values in Cultural Identification

Cross-cultural psychologists assume that core cultural values define to a large extent what a culture is. Typically, core values are identified through an actual self-importance approach, in which core values are those that members of the culture as a group strongly endorse. In this article, the authors propose a perceived cultural importance approach to identifying core values, in which core values are values that members of the culture as a group generally believe to be important in the culture. In 5 studies, the authors examine the utility of the perceived cultural importance approach. Results consistently showed that, compared with values of high actual self-importance, values of high perceived Cultural importance play a more important role in cultural identification. These findings have important implications for conceptualizing and measuring cultures.Psychology, SocialSSCI53ARTICLE2337-3549

Culture as common sense: Perceived consensus versus personal beliefs as mechanisms of cultural influence

The authors propose that culture affects people through their perceptions of what is consensually believed. Whereas past research has examined whether cultural differences in social judgment are mediated by differences in individuals' personal values and beliefs, this article investigates whether they are mediated by differences in individuals' perceptions of the views of people around them. The authors propose that individuals who perceive that traditional views are culturally consensual (e.g., Chinese participants who believe that most of their fellows hold collectivistic values) will themselves behave and think in culturally typical ways. Four studies of previously well-established cultural differences found that cultural differences were mediated by participants' perceived consensus as much as by participants' personal views. This held true for cultural differences in the bases of compliance (Study 1), attributional foci (Study 2), and counterfactual thinking styles (Study 3). To tease apart the effect of consensus perception from other possibly associated individual differences, in Study 4, the authors experimentally manipulated which of 2 cultures was salient to bicultural participants and found that judgments were guided by participants' perception of the consensual view of the salient culture

Towards a classification strategy for complex nanostructures

The range of possible nanostructures is so large and continuously growing, that collating and unifying the knowledge connected to them, including their biological activity, is a major challenge. Here we discuss a conception that is based on connection of microscopic features of the nanomaterials to their biological impacts. We also consider what would be necessary to identify the features that control their biological interactions, and make them resemble each other in a biological context