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The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a preliminary study based on a novel structured mental health education programme – Innate Health Education and Resilience Training (iHEART) – in a cohort of secondary school adolescents in the UK.

A curriculum-based ten-week programme was delivered by trained facilitators. In total, 205 students enrolled in the study. An additional 64 participants were within an age-matched non-intervention control group. A non-randomised control mixed methodology approach was used. All students, pre- and post-programme, completed a quantitative questionnaire – the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Survey. Qualitative measures were used to assess participants’ perceptions of changes in their resilience and mental well-being.

Those who received the intervention showed a small improvement in mental well-being relative to those who did not, with a similar change in resilience. Qualitative findings regarding impulse control and emotional resilience provided positive findings.

iHEART may be a promising new intervention offering a step change in mental health education for improving resilience, mental well-being and the ability for participants to navigate psychological challenges.

To understand how parents make the decision to implant their deaf young children with cochlear implants, focusing specifically on the concepts of normality, medicalization, and stigma.

I conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with the hearing parents or parent of children with cochlear implants. In all but two families I interviewed the primary caretaker which in all cases was a mother. In the remaining two interviews, I interviewed both parents together. Because of the relative scarcity of families with children with cochlear implants, and the difficulty in connecting with these families, I used a convenience sample, and I did not stratify it in any way. The only requirement for parents to be interviewed is that they had at least one deaf child who had been implanted with at least one cochlear implant. Although this is a small sample, the findings are transferable to other families with the same sociodemographic characteristics as those in my study.

Parents in the study focused on three key concepts: normality, risk analysis, and being a good parent. Dispositional factors such as the need to be “normal” and the desire for material success for one's children appeared to moderate the cost-benefit calculus.

This interview project concentrated on hearing families who had implanted their deaf children with cochlear implants; it does not include culturally Deaf parents who choose to use American Sign Language (ASL) with their Deaf children. Understanding how Deaf families understand the concepts of normality, medicalization, and stigma would shed light on how a distinctly “abnormal” group (by a statistical conception of normal) – ASL-using Deaf people-explain normality in the face of using a non-typical communication method. One can learn a lot by studying the absence of a phenomena, in this case, not implanting children with cochlear implants. It is possible that the existential threat felt by some Deaf people, specifically the demographic problem presented by cochlear implants, led Deaf educators or parents to resist being the subject of research.

Overwhelmingly the sample was female, and white. Only two participants were male, and none of the participants were non-white. The lack of diversity in the sample does not necessarily reflect a lack of diversity of children receiving cochlear implants. Medicaid, which disproportionately covers families of color, covers cochlear implants in most cases, so low SES/racial intersectionality should not have affected the lack of diversity in the sample. However, the oral schools are all private pay, with few scholarships available, so low SES/racial intersectionality in the sampling universe (all children who attend oral schools), may have played a part in the lack of racial diversity within the sample.

Parents in this study were very specific about the fact that they believed cochlear implants would lead to academic, professional, and personal success. They weaved narratives of normality, medicalization, and stigma through their stories. Normality is an important lens from which to see stories about disability and ability, as well as medical correction. As medical science continues to advance, more and more conditions will become medicalized, leading to more and more people taking advanced medical treatments to address problems that were previously considered “problems with living” that are now considered “medical problems” that can be treated with advanced science.

This chapter's contribution to the sociological cochlear implant literature is it's weaving of narratives about normality, stigma, and medicalization into parental stories about the cochlear implant decision-making process. Most literature about the cochlear implant decision-making process focus on cost-benefit analysis, and logical decision-making processes, whereas this paper focuses on decision-making factors stemming from bias, emotions, and values.

The growth of telecommuting is occurring at an ever‐expanding rate and bringing with it the challenge to organizations to enhance development opportunities for both telecommuters and their managers. Reports a survey of the use of telecommuting by a sample of 91 companies among the top 1,000 firms in Canada. Found that telecommuting is typically introduced for reasons of economic efficiency, and little thought is given to the development needs of telecommuting employees despite a clear need for telecommuting expertise. Concludes that telecommuting will bring significant changes in management‐employee relationships and the need for new designs in human resource development programmes.