Staff cohesion in residential treatment

There is a continuous recognition in the literature of residential treatment of the need for studies to assess the impact of key variables which constitute a residential milieu on the treatment environment and, by implication, on the treatment outcome. One key variable is staff cohesion. The present study explored the effect of varying levels of staff cohesion on the treatment environment in a residential treatment center for disturbed adolescents. The results suggest that the variables Support, Personal Problem Orientation, Autonomy, Practical Orientation, and Staff Control are significantly affected by varying levels of staff cohesion. However, the clients' perception of their environment did not appear to be influenced by staff cohesion level.Received M.A. from University of British Columbia, B.C., Canada. Current interests are process of psychotherapy, interpersonal conflict resolution.     

The case of the unreliable SNP: recurrent back-mutation of Y-chromosomal marker P25 through gene conversion

The Y-chromosomal binary marker P25 is a paralogous sequence variant, rather than a SNP: three copies of the P25 sequence lie within the giant palindromic repeats on Yq, and one copy has undergone a C to A transversion to define haplogroup R1b (designated C/C/A). Since gene conversion is known to be active in the palindromic repeats, we reasoned that P25 might be liable to back-mutation by gene conversion, yielding the ancestral state C/C/C. Through analysis of a set of binary markers in Y-chromosomes in two large samples from Great Britain and the Iberian Peninsula we show that such conversion events have occurred at least twice, and provide preliminary evidence that the reverse conversion event (yielding C/A/A) has also occurred. Because of its inherent instability, we suggest that P25 be used with caution in forensic studies, and perhaps replaced with the more reliable binary marker M269.