First Generation Of Research Research Articles

Mental health research in the criminal justice system: The need for common approaches and international perspectives

There is a need for researchers and policy makers in the area of mental health and law to collaborate and develop common methods of approach to research. Although we have learned a great deal about the prevalence and needs of mentally ill offenders in jails and prisons, there are a number of research questions that remain. If the "second generation" of research is to be fruitful--and useful to policy makers--we need to be sure that the methods we employ are valid and that the findings we obtain are reliable. By collaborating with colleagues in other jurisdictions, we can begin to learn whether some of the existing findings are of a general nature, or dependent upon the system in which they were found. Similarly, while the first-generation research has alerted us to the needs of mentally ill offenders in jails and prisons, second-generation research is needed to help identify factors that may help prevent the "revolving door phenomenon," which results in mentally ill people being volleyed among mental health, criminal justice, and community settings. One area that has received embarrassingly little attention has been the need for considering the relationship between substance abuse and mental disorders. In our own work, we have found an alarmingly high degree of substance abuse among offenders, including mentally ill offenders. We have come to realize the importance of considering the role that substance abuse coupled with other mental disorders may play in the criminal justice system. As a result of this concern, the Surrey Mental Health Project recently hired a full-time drug and alcohol counselor whose job it is to work with inmates with substance abuse disorders while in the jail, and to help arrange continuing treatment resources upon their release. As Wilson et al. (1995) discuss, intensive case management projects may be particularly useful at targeting the unique needs of mentally ill offenders with multiple problems. Much of the research conducted with mentally ill offenders to date has focused primarily upon psychological and psychiatric questions--questions that are, as Hodgins (1995) indicates, epidemiological in nature. More attention must be paid to that research by policy makers and others who work with mentally ill offenders in the criminal justice system. As Hoyer et al. (1995) and Gould (1995) make clear, a number of unique policy questions arise when considering mentally ill offenders in the legal system.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Methodological Challenges and Innovations in Patient Outcomes Research

Between 1989 and 1992, the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) awarded funding to 14 special projects known as Patient Outcomes Research Teams (PORTs). These large, complex projects form the centerpiece of the first generation of research under the Medical Treatment Effectiveness Program. In carrying out their individual 5-year research plans, and through collaborative work of six Inter-PORT Work Groups, PORTs have contributed to methodological advances related to their specific clinical focus and to outcomes research in general. Each of the PORTs has followed a standard research model, involving the application of: systematic literature review, measurement of outcomes, analysis of cost and claims data, decision analysis, and strategies for disseminating findings. This article reports what has been learned by individual PORTs, and by AHCPR, regarding the usefulness of each of these methodologies, both for the ongoing projects and for the next generation of effectiveness research. Example from individual PORTs and work groups illustrate some of the methodological gains that have been made in effectiveness research and provide a glimpse of the work that remains to be done.

Red Apples, Liberal College Professors, and Farmers Who Love Bach

Red Apples, Liberal College Professors, and Farmers Who Love Bach

Advances in patient education in rheumatic disease.

Education of patients with arthritis began with an emphasis on conveying knowledge, grew to include behaviour change, compliance, and more general coping and management of disease and then progressed to consider physical and psychosocial health outcomes. Research continues in all these areas. Control, in many forms (locus of control, self perceived efficacy, learned helplessness), is now suggested to be a central mediating variable. Evaluation of programmes is moving away from programme v usual care towards comparison of alternative methods of delivery and matching of method to learner. The first generation of researchers in arthritis education tended to be care givers with little formal education in behavioural sciences and evaluation methodology; the programmes they designed were often empirically based. The current generation, nurtured in large part by funds from the Arthritis Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, is better trained in designing programmes grounded in behavioural sciences and educational theory. In the long run, collaborations with care givers and patients will considerably strengthen the effectiveness of education programmes for patients. A variety of educational strategies have been shown to change the knowledge, behaviour, and health of patients with arthritis for the better. Many methods seem to work, so long as the programme is planned, has a goal, and is accountable. There is much work still to be done to teach care givers to be better teachers, and patients to be better managers of their diseases, in concert with their doctors, and to focus on high risk groups. Although most work has been done with patients with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis, many of these findings can and should be safely generalised to less studied rheumatic diseases. Finally, we need to consider the patient first as a person, and to provide education through all avenues, not just the medical care system.

Evaluating the Evaluators: Accrediting Knowledge and the Ranking of Political Science Journals

The nature of the scientific enterprise requires that we, as professionals in the discipline of political science, do all we can to improve the quality of our collective endeavors. This means that we must give serious attention to practical concerns about how to evaluate our departments, our scholars in the field, and our individual research. As Christenson and Sigelman (1985, 964) note, all ideas win equal acceptance, and neither do all the scholars who generate these ideas or all the institutions that house these scholars. Giles, Mizel, and Patterson (1989, 613) state, publication in refereed journals is taken as a sine qua non for success in the discipline. It is generally accepted that tenure and promotion decisions, as well as merit salary increases, are heavily influenced by the quantity and quality of articles published in social science journals (Kawar, 1983; Giles, Patterson and Mizell, 1989). In addition, many library professionals are interested in the accreditation of knowledge for practical reasons. They assume that the quality of a journal affects user demand (Christenson and Sigelman, 1985). This recognition has stimulated recent attempts to rank political science journals to assist decisionmakers in evaluating faculty (see, for example, Giles, Mizel, and Patterson 1989) and presumably to assist library personnel in journal selection. In the first generation of research on this issue, two approaches have been used: the approach by Giles (1975; 1989) and his colleagues; and the approach used by Christenson and Sigelman (1985). The reputational approach surveys a representative sample of political scientists and asks them to evaluate selected journals. Respondents are typically asked to rate each journal in terms of the quality of its articles on a scale from 0 to 10 (i.e., poor to outstanding). The impact approach relies on assessing political science journals by ranking them by the number of citations of articles published in a particular year, divided by the total number of articles published (i.e., the ratio of citations to citable items for a given journal; see Christenson and Sigelman, 1985). Whether or not such attempts assist departmental chairpersons, faculty, and librarians depends, in part, on the credibility of the indices. While both of these approaches have been useful in the initial evaluation of a journal's status, they have limitations: they are based on soft data of rather limited utility or they are based on criteria too restricted for evaluating a journal's total significance.

The Numbers, Origins, and Destinations of Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Angolan Slave Trade

The “numbers game” (Curtin, 1969: ch. 1; Darity, 1985) remains a favorite event in academic jousting over the Atlantic slave trade, not only because unexpectedly detailed quantitative records continue to turn up in archival repositories but also, more recently, because of the suppleness with which scholars have applied data discovered by the first generation of researchers to new, and increasingly more sophisticated, historical problems. Old, relatively formal, analytical categories—decades; large, internally diverse stretches of the African coast; colonial/national aggregates on the American side of the Atlantic—although comparable among themselves, now seem more revealing of the data than of the history of the trade and are very salutarily giving way to questions and issues arising more directly from the experience itself: the causes of slave mortality, the economic strategies of slavers, age and sex distinctions among the slaves, the meaning of slaving for specific regions in Africa, and the trade’s contributions to events in Europe and the Americas. Use of quantitative data now presupposes the discovery of historically relevant categories of analysis and at the same time informs the meaning of the categories employed.

Researchers discuss latest findings, examine needs of homeless mentally ill persons.

In many respects these ten disparate local studies were first-generation research efforts that raised as many questions as they answered. Nevertheless they serve an important role because the research community can now ask more sophisticated questions than was possible a few years ago. The commonalities across the studies set the stage both for further research and for improved intervention techniques.

Moral Education: A First Generation of Research and Development. Ralph L. Mosher

<i>Moral Education: A First Generation of Research and Development</i>. Ralph L. Mosher