The Massachusetts Welfare to Work Program: How Well Will It Serve Its Customers?

The author examined the initial two-year Massachusetts Welfare to Work plans to identify early signs of potential program strengths and weaknesses when the states were just beginning to implement it. She surveyed the then current literature that defines the work-first philosophy and its social context, outlining the essential elements of work-first programs for participants\u27 success. The author then reviewed Massachusetts\u27s sixteen regional plans to determine the degree to which they incorporated these elements in their program designs. Finally, she outlined the challenges, potential risks, and advantages that arise when national social policy shifts and local planners and policymakers must adapt theory to practice

The School Improvement Industry: A Case Study of Framingham

This study looked at school improvement in the Framingham public schools from three perspectives. We were interested in finding out if the administration and school committee, local businesses with an interest in education, and agencies that provide training and technical assistance to schools have similar ideas regarding how the Framingham schools should improve. We conducted interviews with administrators and members of the school committee, local businesses and businesses involved in school/business partnerships, and six agencies that provide training and technical support to schools in the Greater Boston area. We found that although all groups shared many interests, the businesses and school improvement agencies relied on the school system to provide direction for their efforts. Simultaneously, the school committee and administration were unable to create a shared vision owing to the political nature of their relationship

Bartenders Know Best: An In-Depth Analysis of the Impact of Tourism on Local Barbadian Culture

The purpose of my thesis is, through my own field research, to analyze the impact of tourism on local Barbadian culture. Caribbean tourism draws strong criticisms from anthropologists due to the region’s geographical location and environmental landscape, its history of colonialism, and the economic vulnerabilities that result from the wealth discrepancy between the local people and the tourists that vacation there. On the very small and densely populated island of Barbados, nearly every person is impacted by tourism. The focus of my ethnography is the cultural exchanges between guests and hosts, most specifically bartenders. A bar harbors many important elements of the Caribbean tourism literature; neocolonialism, service versus servitude, and authenticity and genuineness. Bartenders arguably have the most intimate and in-depth interactions with tourists, and their encounters with tourists are extremely representative of many issues surrounding Caribbean tourism, providing a good way to explore the impacts of tourism on local culture in a very micro setting. I use my knowledge of the culture and my first-hand interviews with bartenders to draw my own conclusions about the role of tourism in Barbados, how the locals feel about it, and whether it is as detrimental to social life as the literature suggests

Examining the Attitudes and Knowledge of Pregnant Teens on the Topic of SIDS

Background: Norfolk has the second highest teen pregnancy rate and third highest infant mortality rate in Southeastern Virginia. SIDS is the third leading cause of infant death in Virginia. Providing a group education intervention modeled after centering pregnancy gives teen mothers the opportunity to learn and receive support in a safe space in hopes of making a positive impact on their attitudes and knowledge regarding SIDS. Hypothesis: Do the attitudes and knowledge of pregnant teens and recent teen mothers change positively after a group education intervention on sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Method: Quasi-experimental non-randomized group trial. This includes pregnant females ages fifteen to nineteen in Norfolk, Virginia at a city general hospital. The data will be collected from a pretest before and posttest after a group education intervention on SIDS. Data Collection: Hypothesis testing will be conducted using a t-test to determine group differences in attitudes and knowledge after the intervention. Participants will also be completing a PRAMS demographics survey. Goal: To see if the SIDS education intervention has an impact on the knowledge of teen mothers in efforts to reduce the current SIDS rate contributing to Norfolk\u27s high infant mortality rate

Less Citation, Less Dissemination: The Case of French Psychoanalysis

The future of all publishing is open to question, and this is especially true in the case of psychoanalytic publishing. Stepansky (2009) has explored the future of psychoanalytic publishing with a particular emphasis upon how the digital era has had an impact upon the decline of scholarly publication in the United States. If this trend continues, the survival of contemporary psychoanalytic research will depend upon its capacity to embrace and utilize digital publishing. Echoing this perspective, we tried to determine whether the seemingly small international visibility of contemporary French psychoanalytic research could be related to its lack of acknowledgment of the impact of digitalization on rules of writing and publishing. We believe that achieving visibility doesn\u27t chiefly depend on overcoming a language barrier (not such an issue for younger generations), cultural differences, or geographical distance (made irrelevant by the Internet). Rather, our intuition is that French psychoanalytic work would become more visible if it demonstrated familiarity with psychoanalytic work in English, citing it and engaging in dialogue. Anglo-American psychoanalytic publications follow a specific rule of digitalized, database-anchored research. This rule is that the bibliometric value of a journal, which largely conditions its academic visibility and value, depends on the algorithmic measure of the number and type of cites that it receives from published articles published. (This is the case, in different ways, with the commonest algorithms: Thomson\u27s Impact Factor and SCImago\u27s Journal and Country Rank.) In other words, the algorithmic measure of this value ultimately depends on whether and how researchers cite a given journal—these citation practices will then, in turn, make it a more desirable publishing venue. The bottom line is that citations have a real effect, as they directly contributing to the space of academic publishing by differentiating journals both numerically and hierarchically. It is plausible to imagine that an increase in the number of Anglo-American journal citations in French journals would be likely to produce a rise in international visibility for French journals. Of course, this is speculative and cannot (yet) be put to test. Let us begin with a preliminary effort: to draw on an original database in order (a) to determine whether French psychoanalytic productions are visible internationally, and (b) to clarify the citation practices comparatively between the French and Anglo-American contexts. To the best of our knowledge, this issue has not been addressed so far; in providing preliminary data and reflections, our hope is modest: to inspire discussion and debate. To that end, we first measure the citational visibility of French vs. Anglo-American psychoanalytic journals across all disciplines and languages (their respective global outreach); we then relate this outreach measure to a geographic breakdown of psychoanalytic article citations, in order to make sense of specific geographical differences in citation practices

Atenuarea impactului COVID-19, în România, prin gestionarea corespunzătoare a deșeurilor medicale periculoase

The research paper analyzes the ways of disposing of hazardous medical waste, which also includes infectious medical waste, and proposes some solutions to solve the identified problems. Regarding the evolution of medical waste quantities, in the context of the pandemic caused by COVID-19, it is obvious that large additional quantities of hazardous medical waste are generated. In Romania, the total amount of hazardous medical waste, generated by medical units with beds registered a jump: from a quantity of 8,900 tons of hazardous medical waste in 2012, it reaches 13,031 tons in 2018. It should also be noted that, the total medical waste, in the period of seven years (2012-2018) decreased from 33,732 tons to 15,424 tons (decrease of 54% or 18,308 tons). In 2018, there were several treatment / final disposal stations in Romania for the processing of medical waste: 11 incinerators operating in a centralized system; 14 thermal decontamination treatment plants at low temperatures operating in a centralized system; 23 treatment equipment operating within the sanitary units; 5 transfer stations used for certain categories of medical waste. The existing installations have a cumulative capacity of approx. 15,000 t / year: 11 thousand tons disposal by incineration and 4,000 t by cryogenic treatment. However, there is no information on the quality of existing installations, the degree of wear, the degree of load capacity, the performance achieved, etc. Thus, currently, in 14 counties there is no treatment facility for thermal decontamination at low temperatures of hazardous medical waste; there are also a number of 20 counties that do not have any centralized capacity for incineration of hazardous medical waste. In order to process the high volume of medical waste generated in the process of prevention and treatment of patients infected with the COVID-19 virus, this paper proposes a series of measures, investments and mechanisms

The Nature of Attachment Relationships and Grief Responses in Older Adults: An Attachment Path Model of Grief

BACKGROUND: Various researchers have theorized that bereaved adults who report non-secure attachment are at higher risk of pathological grief. Yet past findings on avoidant attachment representations and grief have yielded limited and contradictory outcomes. Little research has been conducted with older adults to identify the psychological processes that mediate between self-reported attachment representations and the patterns of grief. OBJECTIVE: To examine the impacts of avoidant attachment and anxious attachment dimensions on emotion and non-acceptance, in response to the loss of a conjugal partner, and the mediating effect of yearning thoughts. DESIGN: Men (N = 21) and women (N = 68) aged 60 years and above who had lost a partner within the last 12 to 72 months were invited to participate. Participants rated their levels of yearning thoughts about the deceased, emotions and non-acceptance on the Texas Revised Inventory of Grief (TRIG-Present), and their type and level of general romantic attachment on the Experiences In Close Relationship questionnaire (ECR). RESULTS: Structural equation modelling (SEM) indicated that individuals who reported higher levels of avoidant attachment reported less emotional responses and less non-acceptance. SEM also showed that individuals who reported higher levels of anxious attachment reported greater emotional responses and greater non-acceptance. SEM further indicated that these relationships were mediated by yearning thoughts. CONCLUSION: People adopt different grief coping patterns according to their self-reported attachment representations, with the nature of their yearning thoughts influencing the process. Grief therapy may be organized according to individual differences in attachment representations

An Integrative-Relational Approach in Schizophrenia: From Philosophical Principles to Mentalization-Based Practice

In this paper, we explore psychosis and schizophrenia as prototype disturbances, where mentalizing failures are widely seen. We attempt to describe how the process of rekindling mentalizing within attachment relationships (here, the patient-therapist relationship) can have a protective effect not just on the onset of the disturbance, but also when psychosis is already actively installed. We start by discussing mentalizing in training, practice and supervision. We also try to understand it contextually, as a relational concept, within the history of psychological therapies