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At least 1,171 records · Page 65Linked to original sources
PubMed1995

The limits of empirical studies on research ethics.

The results of empirical research in psychology and psychiatry are increasingly being used to formulate as well as understand problems at the interface of law and psychiatry. There has been a proliferation of studies, such as the determinants of individual competence or threat to self or others, the results of which are influencing policy and legislative decisions as well as buttressing holdings in court cases. In this article, I explore the issues of interpretation of epidemiological studies, particularly the role of ideological positions on the design and results of empirical findings, the importance of the way data are interpreted, and the role of ideologies in the way research findings are presented to provide support for policy positions. Two levels of analysis are involved in determining the validity of a study. The first addresses the questions of whether the study meets the statistical and epidemiological requirements for reliable results. These include considerations such as the appropriateness of the study design and methods for gathering and interpreting data. The second focuses on the underlying framework of the study. This involves factors such as the perspectives and values of those conducting the study, the explicit and implicit dominating ideologies where they operate, and the extent to which the study is constructed to reaffirm specific ideologies. This level of analysis is essential for disclosing the influences of ideologies on the results of studies and the way in which data are interpreted. In this article, I try to demonstrate through critiques of selected studies that the first stage of analysis is insufficient without an examination of underlying preconceived values to establish the meaningfulness of results.

Aged↗
PubMed2002

Prediction of graduate major from cognitive and self-report test scores obtained during the high school years.

Using information from Project TALENT's 11-yr. follow-up (Wise, et al. 1979), 8 graduate major groups were formed for males, 6 for females. Three of the female groups were supplemented by undergraduate majors to increase sample size. Descriptive canonical discriminant analyses were conducted in each sex, high school grade, and separate sets of cognitive and self-report predictors that were administered in high school. Finally, analyses of the combined predictors were conducted in both sexes for the 9th grade only. Two to four canonical discriminants were retained for interpretation on two criteria: lambda probabilities and size of eigenvalues. Discrimination among groups is more effective in males than in females and in later than in earlier grades. Self-report tests discriminate more effectively among graduate major groups than cognitive ones in the cognitively restricted range of talent. Gains in differentiating among groups from adding cognitive to self-report predictors in the 9th grade are relatively modest. The two sets of predictors define overlapping if not identical dimensions. The first two cognitive functions are important supplements to a measure of general intelligence. For both sexes, a combination of mechanical, spatial, and mathematical tests distinguish science majors from those in the humanities and social sciences who appear on a verbal function.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1991

Occupational science: academic innovation in the service of occupational therapy's future.

Occupational science is a new scientific discipline that is defined as the systematic study of the human as an occupational being. A doctoral program in occupational science has been established at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. With its emphasis on the provision of a multidimensional description of the substrates, form, function, meaning, and sociocultural and historical contexts of occupation, occupational science emphasizes the ability of humans throughout the life span to actively pursue and orchestrate occupations. In this paper, occupational science is described, defined, and distinguished from other social sciences. A general systems model is presented as a heuristic to explain occupation and organize knowledge in occupational science. The development of occupational science offers several key benefits to the profession of occupational therapy, including (a) fulfillment of the demand for doctoral-level faculty members in colleges and universities; (b) the generation of needed basic science research; and (c) the justification for and potential enhancement of practice.

Education↗
PubMed1992

Family medicine education in Canada.

Within the sphere of health and welfare, Canada has more in common with the Scandinavian countries than with the United States. This article describes and discusses the unique role of the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the education and training for family medicine, both on the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in Canada. The development of the Master of Clinical Science in Family Medicine degree programme at the University of Western Ontario is considered to be an important vehicle for strengthening academic family medicine in Canada. The amalgamation of current knowledge not only from clinical sciences and educational research, but also from the social sciences, is seen as fundamental to the continued improvement of this discipline.

Canada↗
PubMed2000

Social and cultural perspectives on hunger, appetite and satiety.

The aim of this review is to show how hunger, satiety and appetite can be seen as a central research subject for the social sciences, both as the locus where food consumption is bodily regulated and as the nexus where biology, social praxis and cultural meanings meet and are negotiated by the individual. The number of people developing overweight and obesity is increasing, as is the prevalence of eating disorders and weight preoccupation. These tendencies can be considered as expressions of a polarization of eating habits in modern societies, where lack of control or exaggerated control over eating are still more common phenomena. At the same time the tendencies may be seen as the result of a more general ambivalence in relation to food, which influences the experiences of hunger, satiety and appetite and their regulating effect on food consumption.

Appetite↗
PubMed1976

[International strategies in medical education: technical assistance and technical cooperation].

This article reviews the evolution of international activity for national development in general and for medical education in particular. The concepts of traditional technical aid and the new method of technical cooperation are studied. That method appeared just before the beginning of this decade as a response to needs existing at the time to coordinate development with the emerging international economic order. This article discusses the emphasis given to strategy in this new concept of international activity. Strategy, in this sense, consists of a clear definition of goals and objectives by the countries themselves, mobilization of local resources, and full participation of national personnel in all phases of the process. The projects promoted by the Pan American Health Organization in applying technical cooperation to the field of health manpower training are discussed. Such activities include: coordinating the above mentioned training, providing overall support for institutional development, training professors and administrators, developing educational technology, creating and developing a network of biomedical information, developing social sciences as applied to medicine, and encouraging medical, epidemiological, social, and operational research.

Education, Medical↗
PubMed1995

Improving human welfare through appropriate technology: government responsibility, citizen duty or customer choice.

This paper explores recent attempts to improve the effectiveness of environmental health programmes and projects by reference to the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1980-1990) and beyond. Reference is made to how water and sanitation as technical interventions have drawn upon the natural sciences, notably concepts of race and sex, and the social sciences including culture and gender, for their authority and legitimacy. A new and apparently progressive movement, the Water Decade sought to challenge the powerful and enduring high tech image of development on which much western environmental and social transformations have been based. Beginning as a critique of modernism with a commitment to basic needs as human rights, it was driven by a recognition that sophisticated technology could not satisfy human health needs. Alternative technologies would, by contrast, cater for a more extensive and varied market and would promote participatory approaches to service delivery. The paper demonstrates how, during the course of the Decade, sections of the aid community began to redefine basic needs as commodities involving the efficient marketing and delivery of a product with minimal state intervention. Within a shifting international political and economic context, it examines the changing role of the expert and the links being forged between large donors, non-governmental organisations and the private sector. The significance of this reformulated progressivism for the development debate is then considered, notably in relation to concepts of citizenship, consumer choice and the role of the state.

Community Health Planning↗
PubMed2003

We-intentionality: an essential element in understanding human culture?

Culture is a powerful cause of human behavior, yet there have been few attempts to synthesize the biological and social sciences in order to provide an explanation of culture and hence to lay the foundations for a comprehensive human science. This essay explores one possible way of doing this by outlining the likely psychological mechanisms that give rise to the unique human capacity for creating social reality. The core assumption is that "we-intentionality," which is key to understanding social constructions, can and must be linked to specific evolved psychological traits, and hence placed within a neuroscience perspective.

Behavior↗
PubMed2000

The triumph of the segregationists? A historiographical inquiry into psychology and the Brown litigation.

Psychologists testified at the trials of Brown v. Board of Education and helped write briefs that were submitted to the Supreme Court on appeal. Psychologists were once proud of what they did in Brown but are now seen as liberal reformers who masked their political wishes in the guise of social science. The argument that psychologists involved with Brown were social reformers rather than objective scientists dates to the segregationist critique of Brown. The author traces the history of the critique of the Brown psychologists from its segregationist origins to its acceptance by mainstream social scientific and historical scholars. The author concludes that the critique is based on a misreading of what the Brown psychologists did during the litigation.

Black or African American↗
PubMed1993

Processing narratives of self-destructive behavior in routine medical encounters: health promotion, disease prevention, and the discourse of health care.

This study asked how patients and doctors process self-destructive behaviors that warrant preventive action, such as smoking, substance use, and sexual practices. Although many suggestions have appeared about how physicians should encourage health promotion and disease prevention by counseling patients about self-destructive personal habits, few studies have examined actual encounters to assess how patients and doctors communicate about these matters, and prior research rarely has considered the social context of self-destructive habits. The present research has been influenced by a growing recognition of narratives, embedded in the sociocultural context of medical encounters, as an important analytic focus in the study of patient-doctor communication. Our conceptual work extended perspectives from literary criticism, critical theory, and narrative analysis in the humanities and social sciences to focus on elements of sociocultural context, ideology, social control, underlying structure, and superficially marginal features of discourse in medical encounters. Based on a critical review of both quantitative and qualitative techniques in research on patient-doctor communication, we developed an interpretive method with systematic criteria to guide the sampling of encounters, transcription of recordings, interpretation of transcripts, and presentation of findings. We applied the interpretive method to 50 encounters selected randomly from a stratified random sample of 336 audiotaped encounters involving patients and primary care internists. As shown by two illustrative encounters, the discourse of health care reinforces ideologic principles of professional surveillance and individual control in dealing with patients' self-destructive tendencies. Contextual issues remain largely marginal features of the discourse, despite their pertinence to the goal of prevention. Narrative analysis provides a useful method to study the processing of self-destructive behavior in medical encounters. Future studies should continue to assess the variability of discourse in dealing with self-destructive behavior and should begin interventions to test the efficacy of differing discourse styles. Meaningful improvements in health-care discourse depend partly on difficult changes in the social context of medicine, including policies that address social conditions contributing to substance abuse and other forms of self-destructive behavior.

Adult↗