The impact of family of origin on social workers from alcoholic families and implications for practice : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Social Work at Massey University

Social work education and social work practitioners involved in intervention in the lives of families, have long recognised that prior life experience impacts on their work. However, little research appears to have been carried out in this area, particularly in New Zealand. The current study is an attempt to redress this situation on a small scale by exploring with a group of six (6) social workers who are adult children of alcoholics (ACoA), their understanding of their family of origin experience and its effect on their current practice. The present study is an exploratory one, drawn from the life histories of six social workers, who have identified themselves as growing up in an alcoholic family. Based on the perceptions of the social workers involved, and an understanding of the relationship between their life history and how they practice, the project explores the concepts and themes that emerged within the study and the connections between them including the similarities and differences. Findings suggest that although participants have experienced the conflict, trauma, physical and emotional abuse commonly found in families with alcoholic parents, they have shown themselves to have a capacity for successful adaptation, positive functioning and competence. These factors have been identified conceptually as resiliency. The impact of these protective factors as well as the cost of resiliency appeared relevant to the participants and to their social work practice. These findings align with previous theory and research, particularly in regard to the importance of the triad of protective factors individual, family and environmental. Further, as the research developed, the relevance of the theory of attachment became significant. Findings in this area indicated that despite their generally abusive backgrounds, participants had formed early positive attachments which similarly influenced subsequent interpersonal relationships. The outcomes of this research give rise to questions for further research by social workers, other professionals and educators wanting to examine the possible impact of family of origin experience, particularly for the children of alcoholic families, upon social service practitioners and their practice

Exploring Dynamic Capabilities in Open Business Models: The Case of a Public-Private Sector Partnership

The case explores and offers insight into the boundary-spanning dynamic capabilities evidenced by the entrepreneurial CEO of a private-sector family-owned firm from the sensing, seizing and transforming/reconfiguring perspectives during the opportunity identification, evaluation and pursuit of the co-creation of a public-private sector partnership in collaboration with the CEO of a public-sector firm. This partnership, which is situated in a city-region in the North of England, is seen through the lens of an open business model whereby value is co-created and captured outside the boundary of a single firm, and which involves significant financial uncertainty being assigned from the public to the private sector

Toward Auto-netnography in Consumer Studies

The purpose of this paper is to offer an argument for a wider acceptance and adoption of online auto-ethnography - or auto-netnography as an alternative social media research method to online ethnography - or netnography - when undertaking consumer research. As an online research method, netnographies have attracted increasing attention from researchers in various inter-disciplinary studies during recent years but the method is still not considered mainstream. Whilst the proliferation of online communities using various social media platforms is increasingly supporting consumers when making product/service choices, the adoption of netnographies appears to leave room for an extension towards the consideration by consumer researchers of how auto-netnography could highlight these researchers' own personal experiences in online communities. Auto-netnography allows the researcher to capture their own online experiences as a consumer would through social observation, reflexive note taking, and other forms of data. Contemporary technology can also provide a more innovative approach with artificial intelligence offering an alternative dimension. We contend there is a need for consumer researchers - both academic and practitioner - to further reflect on and discuss the deployment of auto-netnography in order to contribute to further exploration of online communities through the qualitative lens

Travelling waves in a model of quasi-active dendrites with active spines

Dendrites, the major components of neurons, have many different types of branching structures and are involved in receiving and integrating thousands of synaptic inputs from other neurons. Dendritic spines with excitable channels can be present in large densities on the dendrites of many cells. The recently proposed Spike-Diffuse-Spike (SDS) model that is described by a system of point hot-spots (with an integrate-and-fire process) embedded throughout a passive tree has been shown to provide a reasonable caricature of a dendritic tree with supra-threshold dynamics. Interestingly, real dendrites equipped with voltage-gated ion channels can exhibit not only supra-threshold responses, but also sub-threshold dynamics. This sub-threshold resonant-like oscillatory behaviour has already been shown to be adequately described by a quasi-active membrane. In this paper we introduce a mathematical model of a branched dendritic tree based upon a generalisation of the SDS model where the active spines are assumed to be distributed along a quasi-active dendritic structure. We demonstrate how solitary and periodic travelling wave solutions can be constructed for both continuous and discrete spine distributions. In both cases the speed of such waves is calculated as a function of system parameters. We also illustrate that the model can be naturally generalised to an arbitrary branched dendritic geometry whilst remaining computationally simple. The spatio-temporal patterns of neuronal activity are shown to be significantly influenced by the properties of the quasi-active membrane. Active (sub- and supra-threshold) properties of dendrites are known to vary considerably among cell types and animal species, and this theoretical framework can be used in studying the combined role of complex dendritic morphologies and active conductances in rich neuronal dynamics

Gap junctions and emergent rhythms

Gap junction coupling is ubiquitous in the brain, particularly between the dendritic trees of inhibitory interneurons. Such direct non-synaptic interaction allows for direct electrical communication between cells. Unlike spike-time driven synaptic neural network models, which are event based, any model with gap junctions must necessarily involve a single neuron model that can represent the shape of an action potential. Indeed, not only do neurons communicating via gaps feel super-threshold spikes, but they also experience, and respond to, sub-threshold voltage signals. In this chapter we show that the so-called absolute integrate-and-fire model is ideally suited to such studies. At the single neuron level voltage traces for the model may be obtained in closed form, and are shown to mimic those of fast-spiking inhibitory neurons. Interestingly in the presence of a slow spike adaptation current the model is shown to support periodic bursting oscillations. For both tonic and bursting modes the phase response curve can be calculated in closed form. At the network level we focus on global gap junction coupling and show how to analyze the asynchronous firing state in large networks. Importantly, we are able to determine the emergence of non-trivial network rhythms due to strong coupling instabilities. To illustrate the use of our theoretical techniques (particularly the phase-density formalism used to determine stability) we focus on a spike adaptation induced transition from asynchronous tonic activity to synchronous bursting in a gap-junction coupled network

Dendritic cable with active spines: a modeling study in the spike-diffuse-spike framework

The spike-diffuse-spike (SDS) model describes a passive dendritic tree with active dendritic spines. Spine-head dynamics is modelled with a simple integrate-and-fire process, whilst communication between spines is mediated by the cable equation. Here we develop a computational framework that allows the study of multiple spiking events in a network of such spines embedded in a simple one-dimensional cable. This system is shown to support saltatory waves as a result of the discrete distribution of spines. Moreover, we demonstrate one of the ways to incorporate noise into the spine-head whilst retaining computational tractability of the model. The SDS model sustains a variety of propagating patterns

Pulsating fronts in periodically modulated neural field models

We consider a coarse grained neural field model for synaptic activity in spatially extended cortical tissue that possesses an underlying periodicity in its microstructure. The model is written as an integro-differential equation with periodic modulation of a translationally-invariant spatial kernel. This modulation can have a strong effect on wave propagation through the tissue, including the creation of pulsating fronts with widely-varying speeds, and wave-propagation failure. Here we develop new analysis for the study of such phenomena, using two complementary techniques. The first uses linearized information from the leading edge of a traveling periodic wave to obtain wave speed estimates for pulsating fronts, and the second develops an interface description for waves in the full nonlinear model. For weak modulation and a Heaviside firing rate function the interface dynamics can be analyzed exactly, and gives predictions which are in excellent agreement with direct numerical simulations. Importantly, the interface dynamics description improves upon the standard homogenization calculation, which is restricted to modulation that is both fast and weak