Client Resources Research Articles

Can Personal Resources Make a Difference? An Exploratory Study of Chinese Cancer Patients in Palliative Care

Objective: Social work's emphasis on the strengths and personal resources of clients can enrich our understanding of palliative care patients. In this study, availability of various personal resources to patients is examined. Also explored are differences in psychosocial outcome between patients with a particular personal resource and those without it. Methods: Clinical data mining was the research method. Clinical records of deceased palliative care patients in the years 2003–2005 were reviewed. Univariate and independent t-tests were used to analyze the data. Results: A total of 935 patients were included. “Caregivers' support and acceptance” was found to be the most common personal resource that patients possessed. Findings indicated that patients who experienced “caregivers' support and acceptance” and “fullness in life” showed significantly fewer psychosocial symptoms than patients who did not possess these personal resources on admission to palliative care, and in the final days before death. Conclusion: This study is the first step toward further development of social work research in palliative care. Findings revealed that experiencing a sense of fullness in life and receiving support from family members and caregivers may be perceived as essential personal resources that enhance the search for meaning in terminal illness. Helping professionals like social workers may facilitate patients' development of these personal resources, possibly resulting in better psychosocial status.

Expanding ‘Community’ in the Community Response to Intimate Partner Violence

Community coordination refers to a formalized system of collaboration between various social service agencies to help meet the needs of specific populations. In cases of intimate partner violence (IPV), community coordination includes a system of policies, information sharing, and referrals between the criminal justice system and counseling centers and shelters for survivors. The life model of social work practice suggests that social workers utilize both formal and informal groups as environmental resources for clients. In an effort to address the failures of community coordinated responses to IPV, community needs to be reconceptualized to include these additional groups, especially employers.

Solution-Focused Group Work: Collaborating with Clients Diagnosed with HIV/AIDS

This article looks at the current trends and challenges faced by persons diagnosed with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). Given the lack of resources available to persons living with HIV/AIDS, a rationale for using solution-focused brief group therapy (SFBGT) is presented. The solution-focused approach builds on client resources to move them closer to their desired life despite having a life-threatening illness. SFBT is uniquely suited to facilitating positive outcomes with individuals living with HIV/AIDS. The overall aim of this article is to provide a theoretical explanation and justification of how SFBGT can effectively aid those diagnosed with HIV/AIDS to combat the obstacles they encounter. An example of a group format is also offered as a template for clinicians and practitioners.

Self‐Soothing — A Recursive Intrapsychic and Relational Process: The Contribution of the Bowen Theory to the Process of Self‐Soothing

The concept of self‐soothing originating in the psychodynamic tradition has attracted interest from therapists as a key skill in the managing and regulating of strong affect and emotional discomfort. While a capacity for self‐soothing is implicit in, and a vital prerequisite to, the process of differentiation, Murray Bowen also predicted that the outcome of increased differentiation is improved emotional equilibrium and a capacity for self‐soothing, clearly a recursive process. The attention of Bowen family systems theory to both the relational and intrapsychic aspects of human functioning provides a useful framework through which to explore these aspects of the dynamics of self‐soothing. This article describes some of the key processes involved in developing a self‐soothing capacity within an effort to define a more autonomous self in significant relationships. The author contrasts Family Systems thinking with other theoretical perspectives that speak to the importance of self‐soothing. Finally, the role of the therapist as a facilitator of an environment in which the self‐soothing resources of clients can emerge is considered alongside suggestions and strategies for how a therapist may contribute to a client's own efforts.

Assessing Criminal History as a Predictor of Future Housing Success for Homeless Adults With Behavioral Health Disorders

Homeless adults with serious mental illnesses and chronic substance abuse problems have few housing options, a problem compounded when a criminal background is present. This study compared the criminal backgrounds and other characteristics of homeless individuals who succeeded in housing (retained housing continuously for two years) and those who failed in housing. The study population consisted of homeless adults with behavioral health disorders who moved into supportive housing between January 1, 2000, and June 30, 2004, regardless of criminal background. Data about criminal history and other characteristics were extracted from existing records and analyzed for associations with housing success. Chi square tests and logistic regression analysis were used to find characteristics predictive of subsequent housing success or failure. Data were available for 347 participants. Most (51%) had a criminal record, and 72% achieved housing success. The presence of a criminal background did not predict housing failure. Younger age at move-in, the presence of a substance abuse problem, and higher numbers of drug crimes and property crimes were separately associated with more housing failure; however, when they were adjusted for each of the other variables, only move-in age remained associated with the outcome. The finding that criminal history does not provide good predictive information about the potential for housing success is important because it contradicts the expectations of housing operators and policy makers. The findings suggest that policies and practices that keep homeless people with criminal records out of housing may be unnecessarily restrictive.

Job satisfaction in a stable state child welfare workforce: Implications for staff retention

The findings of this study build on and extend previous research on factors that contribute to job satisfaction in public child welfare agencies. Because the study agency has stabilized its workforce, it provides a unique opportunity to examine other organizational and environmental factors that may make a more subtle, yet just as deleterious contribution to staff dissatisfaction. Based on survey responses from 927 respondents, five research questions were addressed: 1) How does job satisfaction compare to staff in other human service organizations nationally? 2. Are differences in staff characteristics related to job satisfaction? 3. Are there particular areas of job difficulty that predict job satisfaction? 4. Are there differences by job category in job satisfaction? 5. What staff or job-related factors predict job satisfaction overall? Study findings were consistent with others that have examined organizational dynamics, particularly role stressors, supervision, and performance recognition and rewards. Results indicate that length of employment, being a supervisor, and experiencing difficulties with working conditions, supervision, and the lack of external client resources predict the highest levels of job dissatisfaction. Implications for public child welfare organizations are discussed, including strategies for attending to those organizational factors that negatively affect employees' perceptions of organizational support.

A future location‐aware replacement policy for the cache management at the mobile terminal

AbstractWhile the traditional data shipping systems use physical information to organize data, a newer data caching technique maintains both associated answers (data items) of previous queries and their meaning (purpose). This form of information description is called semantic description, and it makes it possible to reason about and derive knowledge from the given description. In a distributed heterogeneous environment, such as the mobile environment, the semantic data caching paradigm is an important technique for improving the performance of wireless data dissemination systems. Data caching performance depends heavily on the replacement policy being used for the cache management. However, future location uncertainty, limited client resources and frequent client disconnections make cache management a challenge.This paper proposes a future location‐aware cache replacement policy to manage a semantic cache. The proposed replacement policy uses the validity of the data fetched from the server and the neighboring locations to decide which of the cache entries is less likely to be needed in the future, and therefore a good victim for eviction when cache space is needed. The replacement policy's preference for cached items to be evicted is modeled as a general function that declines with distance between the mobile user's current location and the candidate for replacement cached item's bound location. For better efficiency, the overall replacement granularity is dynamically achieved along three levels: ring, cell and data item. Simulation study of the proposed approach shows that it outperforms both the least recently used (LRU) and furthest away replacement (FAR) schemes, where only temporal locality is considered. Moreover, the proposed scheme is easier to implement than other research and development proposals. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Resourceful Dialogues: Eliciting and Mobilizing Client Competencies and Resources

Within the social constructionist (narrative, solution-focused and collaborative language systems) therapies, therapists have increasingly focused on identifying and mobilizing clients’ resources and competencies. How such client resources and competencies are identified and elaborated can be considered empirical matters for analysts of therapeutic discourse. The present paper examines resourceful sequences of dialogue in 12 single session lifestyle consultations for how counsellors conversationally engaged consultees, and for what transpired within these sequences of dialogue. These sequences were micro-analyzed using conversation analysis and retrospective comments from consultees and therapists involved in these sequences were solicited using a videotaped replay procedure known as comprehensive process analysis [Elliott (1989). In M. Packer & R. B. Addison (Eds.), Entering the circle: Hermeneutic investigation in psychology (pp. 165–184). Albany, NY: SUNY Press]. The combined conversation analyses and related comments for three of the 23 videotaped passages analyzed are reported with the aim of enhancing therapists’ conversational practices in hosting resourceful dialogues with clients.

Modelling and application of optimal-selection evaluation for manufacturing grid resource

Manufacturing grid (MGrid) is a new resource sharing platform. To reduce the decision-making time of selecting appropriate resources for special clients and to improve the quality of service (QoS) in MGrid, the evaluation indices library is established, which includes the general evaluation indices, the special evaluation indices and the individual evaluation indices. The notion of agent-based resource optimal selection evaluation is proposed in the MGrid and the architecture model and the particular algorithm are presented. The experimental results show that the model and the algorithm are feasible and effective for solving the problem of resource optimal selection in the MGrid system.

General Practitioners’ Use of Internet-Based Patient Materials for Partner Notification

To determine if general practitioners (GPs) would use chlamydia resources for partner notification (PN) when the address to a website was printed on positive results. Two surveys (pre-/postintervention) were sent to GPs before half were exposed to the website address on positive chlamydia results. Of 499 eligible GPs, 233 (48%) returned completed preintervention surveys and 173 of 233 GPs (78%) returned postintervention surveys. Partner letters increased from 13% (10/78) to 36% (28/78) (P = 0.0009) and brochures from 33% (26/78) to 54% (42/78) (P = 0.003) among those exposed to the website. There was no significant change among GPs not exposed to the website. GPs who reported practicing PN all of the time did not change but was greater than 93% in all groups. When a website was provided with useful documents on it, GPs were more likely to provide resources for clients to pass onto partners.

Where Can I Find Reliable, Easy-to-Understand Information and Resources for My Clients Regarding Dietary Supplements?

Where Can I Find Reliable, Easy-to-Understand Information and Resources for My Clients Regarding Dietary Supplements?

SOOM: Scalable Object-Oriented Middleware for Cooperative and Pervasive Computings

In the age of pervasive computing, ubiquitous collaboration has become an every-day life paradigm. Without an ideal computing infrastructure, issues with ubiquitous collaboration, such as network unreliability, platform heterogeneity, and client's resource constraints, are inevitable. The traditional replication scheme copes with network unreliability by replicating all the objects of a shared application together at once. This is, however, suitable for neither cooperative applications nor mobile computing devices. These problems can be naturally addressed by using a fine-grained replication scheme that enables a portion of the application objects to be replicated. This paper presents an object-oriented middleware that is capable of dynamically and transparently replicating remotely shared Java applications in a partially and on-demand incremental manner. It is also able to maintain various consistency semantics and enables the coexistence of fine-grained replications and conventional remote method invocations. Empirical results indicate several practical benefits of the middleware.

Efficient and Tailored Resource Management for the P2P Web Caching

While web proxy caching is a widely deployed technique, the performance of a proxy cache is limited by the local storage. Some studies have addressed this limitation by using the residual resources of clients via a p2p method and have achieved a very high hit rate. However, these approaches treat web objects as homogeneous objects and there is no consideration of various web characteristics. Consequently, the byte hit rate of the system is limited, external bandwidth is wasted, and perceived user latency is increased. The present paper suggests an efficient p2p based web caching technique that manages objects with different policies so as to exploit the characteristics of web objects, such as size and temporal locality. Small objects are stored alone whereas large objects are stored by dividing them into numerous small blocks, which are distributed in clients. On a proxy cache, header blocks of large objects take the place of objects themselves and smaller objects are cached. This technique increases the hit rate. Unlike a web cache, which evicts large objects as soon as possible in the case where clients fulfill the role of backup storage, large objects are given higher priority than small objects in the proposed approach. This maximizes the effect of hits for large objects and thereby increases the byte hit rate. Furthermore, we construct simple latency models for various p2p based web caching systems and analyze the effects of the proposed policies on these systems. We then examine the performances of the efficient policies via a trace driven simulation. The results demonstrate that the proposed techniques effectively enhance web cache performance, including hit rate, byte hit rate, and response time.

Cooperative Caching in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Based on Data Utility

Cooperative caching, which allows sharing and coordination of cached data among clients, is a potential technique to improve the data access performance and availability in mobile ad hoc networks. However, variable data sizes, frequent data updates, limited client resources, insufficient wireless bandwidth and client′s mobility make cache management a challenge. In this paper, we propose a utility based cache replacement policy, least utility value (LUV), to improve the data availability and reduce the local cache miss ratio. LUV considers several factors that affect cache performance, namely access probability, distance between the requester and data source/cache, coherency and data size. A cooperative cache management strategy, Zone Cooperative (ZC), is developed that employs LUV as replacement policy. In ZC one‐hop neighbors of a client form a cooperation zone since the cost for communication with them is low both in terms of energy consumption and message exchange. Simulation experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of LUV based ZC caching strategy. The simulation results show that, LUV replacement policy substantially outperforms the LRU policy.

On the Design, Analysis, and Implementation of a Generalized Periodic Broadcast Server

Periodic broadcast is an effective paradigm for large-scale dissemination of popular videos. Considerable research efforts have gone into designing many excellent periodic broadcast protocols in terms of minimizing the server network bandwidth and the client resources. However, there are only few implementations of periodic broadcast protocols available. In this paper, we present a Generalized Periodic Broadcast Server (GPBS) architecture that supports many periodic broadcast protocols. Based on this architecture, we use mathematical analysis to formulate and solve a new optimization problem whose solution provides insights into the server's memory and disk resources allocation. We also discuss our implementation of a video server which embodies the GPBS architecture and analysis. The video server implements three representative broadcast protocols. Our work facilitates implementation and deployment of many other periodic broadcast protocols

Reducing outgoing traffic of proxy cache by using client-cluster

Many web cache systems and policies concerning them have been proposed. These studies, however, consider large objects less useful than small objects in terms of performance, and evict them as soon as possible. Even if this approach increases the hit rate, the byte hit rate decreases and the connections occurring over congested links to outside networks waste more bandwidth in obtaining large objects. This paper puts forth a client-cluster approach for improving the web cache system. The client-cluster is composed of the residual resources of clients and utilizes them as exclusive storage for large objects. This proposed system achieves not only a high hit rate but also a high byte hit rate, while reducing outgoing traffic. The distributed hash table (DHT) based peer-to-peer lookup protocol is utilized to manage the client-cluster. With the natural characteristics of this protocol, the proposed system with the client-cluster is self-organizing, fault-tolerant, well-balanced, and scalable. Additionally, the large objects are managed with an index based allocation method, which balances the loads of all clients well. The performance of the cache system is examined via a trace driven simulation and an effective enhancement of the proxy cache performance is demonstrated.

Perceived importance and integration of the human-animal bond in private veterinary practice

To determine perceptions of the human-animal bond (HAB) among veterinarians in private practice and evaluate how these veterinarians incorporate the HAB in their practices. Survey. 1,602 veterinarians in private practice in Washington state. Participants were contacted and asked to complete a survey. Response rate was 26% (415/1,602). Most respondents agreed that veterinarians will be more successful if they recognize and facilitate the HAB, that facilitating the HAB was important to their practices, that they actively evaluated the degree of bonding between clients and their animals, and that the bonding between a client and his or her animal affected the way they practiced medicine. However, > 50% of respondents did not train veterinary technicians and front office staff members in the HAB or encourage veterinary technicians or front office staff members to learn about the HAB. Fifty-one percent of respondents offered few or no HAB resources to clients. When asked to quantify the importance of 10 nontechnical skills associated with private veterinary practice, respondents ranked communication skills, ethical reasoning, and business management first, second, and third; the HAB was ranked fifth. Results suggest that for veterinarians in private practice in Washington state, there is a dichotomy between how important they consider the HAB to be in their practice and the degree to which they facilitate the HAB with regard to communication, training, and client resources. More research on the HAB is necessary to better understand what the HAB encompasses and its implications for private practitioners.

A zone co‐operation approach for efficient caching in mobile ad hoc networks

AbstractMobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) presents a constrained communication environment due to fundamental limitations of client resources, insufficient wireless bandwidth and users' frequent mobility. Caching of frequently accessed data in such environment is a potential technique that can improve the data access performance and availability. Co‐operative caching, which allows the sharing and co‐ordination of cached data among clients, can further explore the potential of the caching techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, called zone co‐operative (ZC) for caching in MANETs. In ZC scheme, one‐hop neighbours of a mobile client form a co‐operative cache zone. For a data miss in the local cache, each client first searches the data in its zone before forwarding the request to the next client that lies along routing path towards server. As a part of cache management, cache admission control and value‐based replacement policy are developed to improve the data accessibility and reduce the local cache miss ratio. An analytical study of ZC based on data popularity, node density and transmission range is also performed. Simulation experiments show that the ZC caching mechanism achieves significant improvements in cache hit ratio and average query latency in comparison with other caching strategies. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Opening the doors of art museums for therapeutic processes

The art museum, although an arena for education purposes, is still a novel venue for art therapy. However, art therapists are beginning to enter the doors of these institutions and incorporating art objects into treatment options for their clients. Concurrently, museums are searching for ways to widen their audience base and to attract non-traditional populations into their halls. Art therapists can be of great use to museums by bringing non-traditional groups to the museum and museums can be of value to art therapists by providing a rich resource for clients and for art therapy. This article summarizes the impact of the historical aspects of art museums and the role of the art museum educator to assist the art therapist in understanding how to approach art museums for client use. Additionally, an art therapy pilot project is described in which a local art museum was utilized to assist middle school students increase their awareness of the concept of family.

Broadcast-Based Spatial Queries

Indexing techniques have been developed for wireless data broadcast environments, in order to conserve the scarce power resources of the mobile clients. However, the use of interleaved index segments in a broadcast cycle increases the average access latency for the clients. In this paper, the broadcast-based spatial query processing methods (BBS) are presented for the location-based services. In the BBS, broadcasted data objects are sorted sequentially based on their locations, and the server broadcasts the location dependent data along with an index segment. Then, a sequential prefetching and caching scheme is designed to reduce the query response time. The performance of this scheme is investigated in relation to various environmental variables, such as the distributions of the data objects, the average speed of the clients and the size of the service area.