Coping Among Adult Female Victims of Domestic Violence

This paper examines the current literature regarding coping among battered women. It considers a number of contextual factors that are related to women's choices in coping with partner abuse, including factors related to the relationship (e.g., frequency and severity of abuse, length of relationship) and women's resources (e.g., social support, financial resources). Relationships between different forms of coping and psychological outcomes are also examined. As the research in domestic violence coping is somewhat lacking in coherence, theories, and models from the broader coping literature are used to organize the findings from the domestic violence field. Methodological concerns, such as research methods, measurement issues, and sampling, are raised throughout the paper. Suggestions for future research are made.     

‘I just drifted into it’: constraints faced by publicly funded family lawyers

This paper draws on interviews with English family lawyers who do publicly funded work, and examines their reasons for entering family law. Generally, lawyers did not deliberately choose to enter family law, and instead explained that they ‘drifted’ into the field. On closer inspection, however, rather than ‘drifting’ into family law, it would appear that the careers of publicly funded family lawyers are strongly constrained by structural and cultural factors. These findings have important implications for attracting and retaining family lawyers.     

Exploring University Mission-Identity Perceptions: Predictors of Faith Maturity

Two studies examined mission-identity perceptions as predictors of faith maturity among students at a faith-based university. Study 1 (n = 304; 222 women, 82 men) assessed the relationships among students in the general student population. Study 2 was a replication of Study 1, but included students involved with a campus ministry organization (n = 94; 69 women, 25 men). In Study 1, innovative and inclusive mission-identity perceptions were significant, positive predictors of vertical and horizontal faith maturity. The findings of Study 2 were consistent with those of Study 1, with one exception. Specifically, no evidence of a relationship between mission-identity perceptions (innovative and inclusive) and horizontal faith maturity was found in Study 2. Results may offer insight into the factors that influence students' spiritual development at faith-based universities.     

Competition,the Global Crisis,and Alternatives to Neoliberal Capitalism: A Critical Engagement with Anarchism

Since the mid-1980s, and particularly throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, the imperative of capitalist competition has become a totalizing and all-pervasive logic expanding to ever more social domains and geographical areas around the world. Sustained by neoliberal competition regulation and other regulatory provisions, excessive competition (over-competition) in the process of capital accumulation has become a major global force with highly detrimental social and environmental downsides. From the vantage point of a historical materialist perspective, the article provides an explanatory critique of capitalist competition and the atomistic and reductionist social scientific precepts that serve to legitimize the neoliberal type of competition regulation. By critically engaging with principles and values central to anarchism, such as equity, solidarity, cooperation, mutual aid, and environmental sustainability, the article seeks to outline an alternative vision to the ideas and social practices that have sustained the existing competition order thus far.     

Automatic Encoding of Ambiguous Child Behavior in High and Low Risk for Child Physical Abuse Parents

Recent theory and research suggest that physically abusive parenting behavior might be understood as originating from: 1) greater accessibility of hostile/negative schema, and/or 2) lower accessibility of benign/positive schema. This study examined whether parents at high and low risk for child physical abuse (CPA) differed in the extent to which they spontaneously encoded ambiguous caregiving contexts in negative versus positive terms. Twenty-five high and forty-one low risk for CPA parents were asked to memorize a set of sentences that described ambiguous caregiving situations. After a brief delay, participants were asked to recall the sentences. During recall, cues were given (e.g., negative and positive words) to facilitate recall. According to the cued-recall paradigm, to the extent that recall was facilitated by negative/positive cues, it was inferred that negative/positive meaning was activated when the ambiguous sentences were encoded. Although all parents tended to recall more information in response to negative relative to positive cues, the influence of cue type on recall was greater for high CPA risk parents. That is, high, compared to low, CPA risk parents obtained significantly higher recall difference scores (M = 4.6 versus M = 2.3); with higher recall difference scores indicating greater recall in response to negative relative to positive cues. Present findings are consistent with the proposition that high and low CPA risk parents differ in how they spontaneously encode information in ambiguous caregiving contexts.     

Sudden death as a complication of bacterial endocarditis

Three cases are reported to demonstrate the range of possible lesions and wide variation in lethal mechanisms that may be found in cases of unexpected death subsequently shown to be due to bacterial endocarditis. Case 1: A 36-year-old man was found dead on his bedroom floor surrounded by drug paraphernalia. At autopsy, acute myocardial ischemia was present caused by coronary artery ostial occlusion complicating acute bacterial endocarditis of the aortic valve. Case 2: A 54-year-old man with chronic renal failure was found dead in bed at home. At autopsy, a left middle cerebral artery territory cerebral infarct was present due to septic embolization from bacterial endocarditis involving the aortic valve. Case 3: A 23-year-old man was found collapsed in a pool of blood. At autopsy, upper airway hemorrhage from an arteriobronchial fistula was present caused by septic pulmonary infarction from previous endocarditis of a congenital ventricular septal defect. This report demonstrates that bacterial endocarditis may still be a cause of sudden and unexpected death presenting to forensic mortuaries and that the underlying mechanisms may involve complex sequences of pathological changes that compromise vascular function.     

The urban context: a place to eliminate health disparities and build organizational capacity

This study seeks to examine the process of building the capacity to address health disparities in several urban African American neighborhoods. An inter-organizational network consisting of a research university, community members, community organizations, media partners, and foundations was formed to develop a community-based intervention designed to provide health promotion and disease prevention strategies for type 2 diabetes and hypertension. In-depth qualitative interviews (n = 18) with foundation executives and project directors, civic organization leadership, community leaders, county epidemiologist, and university partners were conducted. Our study contextualizes a process to build a public health partnership using cultural, community, organizational, and societal factors necessary to address health disparities. Results showed 5 important factors to build organizational capacity: leadership, institutional commitment, trust, credibility, and inter-organizational networks. These factors reflected other important organizational and community capacity indicators such as: community context, organizational policies, practices and structures, and the establishment of new commitments and partnerships important to comprehensively address urban health disparities. Understanding these factors to address African American health disparities will provide lessons learned for health educators, researchers, practitioners, foundations, and communities interested in building and sustaining capacity efforts through the design, implementation, and maintenance of a community-based health promotion intervention.     

“He did everything he possibly could for me”: medical malpractice claimants’ experiences of lawyer–client relations

Lawyers are obliged to act in the interests of their clients, however, it is not clear how lawyers should do this in practice. Should lawyers follow their clients' instructions without deviation, should they actively manage their clients' expectations, or as many studies suggest, do lawyers place their own interests first? This paper examines how lawyers interact with medical malpractice claimants. It reveals that lawyers take a client-aligned approach, where lawyers acknowledge their client's goals, but do not necessarily do what the client says. We argue that this approach is made necessary by legal and organisational constraints which limit the ability of lawyers to produce the types of outcomes that their clients want.