Specific Professional Profiles Research Articles

Né ἰατρίνη né μαῖα: i saperi «speciali» della iatromaea/ἰατρόμαια

Abstract Neither ἰατρίνη nor μαῖα: the «special» knowledge of the iatromaea/ἰατρόμαια Especially in the last thirty years both the ἰατρίναι/medicae and the μαῖαι/obstetrices have received particular attention from scholars both for a more precise framing of these female «professions» within activities that are not exclusively manual but also intellectual, and in order to reconstruct the legal status, the possibilities of social affirmation and the opportunities of economic income of these two specific professional profiles. The subject of analysis here is a figure in its own right, that of the iatromaea/ἰατρόμαια, a term attested by very rare epigraphic mentions in Latin and Greek, absent from the databases of papyrus texts and a veritable hapax in literary testimonies. After reviewing the inscriptions that certify the existence of this word and the hypotheses formulated by moderns regarding its possible meaning, the paper attempts to trace the professional profile of this specialist, identifying, through a comparison with the sources, similarities and differences with the other types of therapists and making an interpretative proposal in conclusion regarding the specific knowledge and skills of the iatromaea/ἰατρόμαια.

Intermediate actors and their significance for the historical formation of specific professional profiles and labor markets in public adult education

ZusammenfassungDie Erwachsenenbildung ist durch vielfältige Berufsbilder und Beschäftigungsverhältnisse geprägt, aus denen sich zugleich die Existenz heterogener Teilarbeitsmärkte für diesen Sektor erklärt. Am Beispiel des öffentlich verantworteten Erwachsenenbildungsbereichs der Volkshochschulen behandelt der Beitrag die historische Genese von spezifischen Berufsbildern und dazugehörigen (Teil‑)Arbeitsmärkten. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf dem Berufsbild für hauptberufliche pädagogische Mitarbeitende (HPM) und Leitungskräfte, das als Referenzmodell in der Reformära der 1960er und 1970er-Jahre vor dem Hintergrund neuer Förderungsstrukturen für hauptberufliche Stellen konzipiert wurde. Es wird untersucht, welche Akteure und rechtlichen Normierungen die Formierung dieses spezifischen Berufsbilds beeinflusst und zu seiner Verbreitung und Durchsetzungsfähigkeit geführt haben. Dazu werden Ergebnisse aus einer historischen Stellenanzeigen- und Dokumentenanalyse vorgestellt, die sich u. a. auf Verbände, bildungspolitische Akteure und gesetzliche Grundlagen beziehen. Für die Analyse der empirischen Befunde wird theoretisch an die Konzepte Situation, Intermediäre und Forminvestition aus der konventionensoziologischen Forschung zur Genese von Berufskategorien und Arbeitsmärkten angeknüpft. Die Ergebnisse beleuchten nicht nur die Bedeutung von Intermediären für die Etablierung von Berufsbildern und Arbeitsmärkten, sondern zeigen auch die Auswirkungen auf die Organisationsebene und die impliziten Handlungsspielräume für die einzelnen Volkshochschulen im Untersuchungszeitraum.

Social Representation and Assessment of Salespeople Personality for Job Performance: An Overview and an Italian Piece of Research

The paper deals with the relationship between the Big Five personality traits ( Agreeableness , Conscientiousness , Extraversion , Openness and Neuroticism / Emotional Stability ) and sales performance in the perspective of the social representation of salespeople personality. The first part of the article provides an overview of the topic, while the second half reports the results of a study carried out with 220 Italian salespeople (16 females) and correlating their answers to a personality test named FLORA – an Italian measure of 24 work-related personality characteristics developed and validated for the assessment of specific professional profiles in organizations and based on the Big Five Model – with their sales figures. According to hypotheses, Conscientiousness , Extraversion and Openness are positively related and Agreeableness is negatively related to sales performance, which is also consistent with the social representation of salespeople personality. Emotional Stability does not prove to be a Big Five directly related to sales performance, but the three facets of Emotional Stability measured by FLORA ( Stress tolerance , Frustration tolerance and Self-control ) are positively and significantly related to the length of service, while the length of service, in turn, is related to job performance. This supports an indirect relation between Emotional Stability and sales performance passing through the length of service.

QUALIDADE DOS CUIDADOS DE ENFERMAGEM: DIFERENÇAS EM HOSPITAIS DE PORTUGAL E TURQUIA

Objetivo: analisar a percepção dos enfermeiros acerca das atividades que contribuem para a qualidade dos cuidados de enfermagem em serviços hospitalares portugueses e turcos.Método: estudo multicêntrico, quantitativo, transversal, realizado em um hospital de cada país, envolvendo 211 enfermeiros de cada cenário. Utilizou-se a Escala de Percepção das Atividades de Enfermagem que Contribuem para a Qualidade dos Cuidados. Realizado de agosto de 2017 a março de 2018.Resultados: verificou-se que os enfermeiros portugueses tiveram médias mais elevadas em todos os domínios, exceto nas atividades relativas à continuidade de cuidados, ao sistema de registros e no conhecimento das políticas institucionais. Os achados sinalizam aspectos que carecem de investimentos.Conclusão: as percepções dos enfermeiros, mesmo em países diferentes, demonstram um perfil profissional específico que reforça a utilidade da conceptualização nesta área do conhecimento como um contributo para o bem-estar e promoção da saúde dos indivíduos.

Psychiatric Rehabilitation in Italy: Cinderella No More—The Contribution of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Technicians

:In Italy, the skills needed to conduct psychosocial interventions properly have been complied in a specific mental-health academic and professional profile; this profile defines the professional competencies of the “psychiatric rehabilitation technician” (PRT). The PRT is an Italian mental health profile, created after the Italian psychiatric reform, called the “Law 180”, in 1978. Our article focuses on the history of the development of the specific professional profile of the PRT. The article also describes the rehabilitation staff in routine practice in Italy and Europe and gives some suggestions for further improving the mobility of such professionals in Europe.

Big Five for work and organizations: FLORA (Role Related Personal Profile), an Italian personality test based on the Five-Factor Model and developed for the assessment of candidates and employees

The needs for personality assessment in organizations are peculiar. For example, personality measures for the assessment of candidates or employees should be related to job performance. Even strong correlations between personality tests and job performance might not be sufficient, though, because some tests make use of a language people working in organizations are not accustomed to and, therefore, the personality profiles obtained by those tests may sound meaningless or even abstruse to organizational managers and decision makers. The paper reports the results of the qualitative actions and the quantitative operations carried out in order to create and validate a new Italian personality test (named FLORA) based on the Five-Factor Model (FFM) and expressly developed for the assessment of specific professional profiles in organizations. The qualitative actions consisted of 32 interviews with 16 job profiles. Content analyses of interviews led to the identification of 28 personality traits distributed into the 5 categories of the FFM. For each trait, 6 items were generated. Another 8 items were added to form a Lie Scale. The quantitative operations involved a validation sample of 407 employees, a confirmation sample of 418 other employees and the monitoring of the concurrent validity with another test (n = 1028) and job performance (n = 220). After analyses, FLORA seems to meet the criteria to be a test based on the FFM and usable for the assessment of specific professional profiles as its dimensions are uncorrelated with the Lie Scale and correlated according to hypotheses to both another test and job performance.

Sense of Coherence as a Determinant of Psychological Well-Being Across Professional Groups of Aid Workers Exposed to War Trauma.

The present study aims to test whether sense of coherence (SOC) acts as a determinant of positive psychological functioning in aid workers directly exposed to warfare. Specifically, we performed multiple regression analyses to compare different groups of aid workers in terms of the effects of SOC and cumulative trauma on their psychological distress. Palestinian helpers, both professional and non-professional ( N = 159) completed three self-reported measures: the General Health questionnaire, Sense of Coherence Scale, and Impact of Events Scale. The findings bear out the predictive power of SOC and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in relation to mental health across different professional groups. In particular, volunteers without a specific professional profile, psychiatrists, medical doctors, and less markedly counselors seemed to protect their mental health through a SOC. Clinical implications and recommendations for training and supervision are discussed.

Conceptualising Linguistic and Cultural Mediation

This editorial discusses some issues associated with the definition of ‘language and culture mediation’, in order to contextualise the reflections found in this special issue. This expression, rather controversial in some countries, is often used to describe activities of assistance to foreigners, mainly migrants, similar to or coinciding with public service interpreting. A component of mediation is also recognised in the translator’s profession as s/he mediates between the source text and the final readers, and between the relevant cultures. But language and culture mediation can be interpreted more broadly, to refer also to situations of cultural contact involving a process of culture learning and synthesis. In this interpretation, rather than specific professional profiles, it designates various activities and situations involving mediation between cultures, e.g. in tourism communication, or in the promotion of culturally relevant products for export. Hence, it is argued that many problems surrounding the denomination ‘language and culture mediation’ are due to its use in specific contexts, while, if used as a superordinate, this expression can embrace various actions, activities and professional profiles having the common property of granting mutual accessibility to languages and cultures.

Effectiveness of employee welfare schemes: differences of specific professional profiles

Corporate social responsibility studies prove that an employee is increasingly a key stakeholder for companies. Firms are starting to think about their workforce as a real opportunity to manage and improve their human and economic capital. Employee welfare and benefit schemes are particularly important in this perspective and top companies are investing significantly in this direction. On the basis of an empirical cross-analysis, conducted on a questionnaire addressed to its own employees, by one of the world's biggest multinational groups, and in which the level of satisfaction of benefits and welfare schemes is investigated, significant results emerged: the utility of benefits is marginally higher in women than in men; an evident direct linear relationship exists between job standing and benefit satisfaction, with the exception of factory workers; seniority and age variance of employees do not imply different marginal utility in benefits. Furthermore, the implementation of some limited cost benefits would generate higher marginal utility in employees than of other, more expensive and exclusive, benefits.

Psicología Jurídica en España: Delimitación Conceptual, Campos de Investigación e Intervención y Propuesta Formativa dentro de la Enseñanza Oficial

Legal Psychology as psychologist´s professional specialty has had an exponential development since the end of the Eighties until the present time, considering itself a consolidated field within Applied Psychology. Inexplicably, nevertheless, this maturity of Legal Psychology has not been reflected with its incursion in the new curricular itineraries elaborated from the European Space of Superior Education. This paper handles, as an explanatory hypothesis of this situation, the difficulty of integrating this disciplinary field due to the diverse scopes of investigative interest and intervention. It is intended, therefore, to generate debate between academics and professionals of Legal Psychology in altars to the search of the consensus that impels a firm reinforcement not only of specific professional profiles within the scope of Legal Psychology but also as a discipline within Psychology. A unique concept to define the field, different areas in which to group the professional investigation and practices, are being proposed, as well as it is being suggested a project of Official Masters in Legal Psychology as departure point for the debate. The academic recognition of Legal Psychology, along with guaranteeing the future projection of this discipline in its applied and investigative areas, will allow to continue offering a professional and qualified performance adapted to future challenges, to the mainly society and specifically the world of the law.

Le sociologie invisibili

- In Italy, the acknowledgement of practical relevance and usefulness of the sociological knowledge is still an open problem, in the frame of a general condition of weakness of knowledge workers, both in society and in the labour market. Anyway, beside the "visible sociologies", that is the "official" and legitimate ones, which mainly find place in the academic world and health services, others sociological approches are emerging. These latter are "invisible", because not recognized in specific professional profiles, even if they find place in many different public and private working places.Keywords: sociology, visibility, professional, legitimate knowledge, association.Parole chiave: sociologia, visibilitÀ, professionale, saperi legittimi, associazione.

Utilisation originale de l’approche par compétences en supervision formative en Afrique subsaharienne

Context: Supervision activity is a privileged way for the development of identification tools of needs for training and assessment, based on a situational approach of competences. Objectives: To present results in terms of a construction pro- cess, development of tools and first applications of an innovating research centred on the logic of a competence-based approach for health professionals' continuing development; to illustrate the links between expertises in engineering competences from the world of education and those from public health sector. Subject/material: A referential framework for the formative supervi- sion was based on: 1) a field of research action in the Diourbel medical region in Senegal; 2) a systemic modelization of the pro- blem setting; 3) the use and the adaptation of a competence-based approach to the health sector. Results: referential of compe- tences and assessment of competences were elaborated for two functions: the District Head Medical Officer and the Head of post Nurse. The Supervision is used to develop a competence-based approach related on the logic of formative evaluation in professio- nal situations. Discussion: The referential of competences assures a global and as exhaustive as possible integration of activities and tasks expected from the analysed specific professional profile. The referential allows a coherent and continuous didactic transposition through the training and learning process. The potential of these elaborated tools is multiple and the framework of action research in terms of pedagogical innovation should be reinforced.