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We use excavations of low-status houses to explore Postclassic political and economic transformations in the lower Río Verde Valley, Oaxaca. Following the collapse of Classic period political institutions, commoners experienced greater economic and political autonomy. Residential excavations at Río Viejo indicate that commoners took advantage of the absence of regional authority to gain greater control over surplus craft products, especially cotton thread, as well as access to social valuables and long distance trade. By the Late Postclassic period, the region was once again dominated by powerful rulers. Yet household excavations at Tututepec show that Late Postclassic commoners continued to control some surplus craft production and had access to social valuables like copper and polychrome pottery via market exchange. We argue that Late Postclassic political relations were a product of negotiations among elites and commoners that in part reflect the greater economic autonomy and political power that Early Postclassic people had acquired.
The aim of the study was to assess the prevalence of abuse among the residents of long-term care facilities in Israel, and its associations with risk indicators. Seventy-one such residents aged 70 or more years were assessed in the internal and orthopaedic departments of two university medical centres for possible abuse by carers at the long-term facilities from which they were admitted. The study collected socio-demographic and health profiles and a list of maltreatment or abusive acts, and administered the Signs of Abuse Inventory and the Expanded Indicators of Abuse Questionnaire. Among the 71 residents, 31 per cent reported some form of maltreatment, most being instances of disrespectful behaviour. Signs of abuse, mostly of neglect, were detected in 22.5 per cent of the sample. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that higher scores on risk indicators and higher dependence on others for the activities of daily living significantly associated with reported abuse, while age, gender, risk indicators and lower blood albumin level (being an indicator of worse nutritional and health status) significantly associated with identified signs of abuse. It is concluded that direct questioning mainly discloses instances of disrespectful behaviours and humiliation, while the assessment of signs of abuse is more sensitive to cases of neglect. Risk indicators were found to be reliable indicators of abuse. Routine screening for these indicators is recommended to improve detection and thereby to prevent abuse in long-term care facilities.
The UK's national population structure, in line with most Western societies, is ageing rapidly. The combination of falling fertility and increasing longevity is having an impact on family structures and resultant relationships, with the emergence of long vertical multi-generational families replacing the former laterally extended family forms. This is occurring at a time when UK government policy is placing increasing reliance on families to provide health and social care and support for the growing number of frail older people. While there has been extensive research on family care within the majority white population, there is less understanding of the elder family care provision for the UK's growing older ethnic population. This paper discusses the changing demographics, new government policy on promoting independent living and its implications for family care provision, and reviews our current understanding of family care and support for older people within the UK’s varied ethnic minority families.
The Health of the Nation Outcome Scale for Children and Adolescents (HoNOSCA) is an established outcome measure for child and adolescent mental health. Little is known of adolescent views on outcome.
To develop and test the properties of an adolescent, self-rated version of the scale (HoNOSCA–SR) against the established clinician-rated version.
A comparison was made of 6-weekly clinician-rated and self-rated assessments of adolescents attending two services, using HoNOSCA and other mental health measures.
Adolescents found HoNOSCA–SR acceptable and easy to rate. They rated fewer difficulties than the clinicians and these difficulties were felt to improve less during treatment, although this varied with diagnosis and length of treatment. Although HoNOSCA–SR showed satisfactory reliability and validity, agreement between clinicians and users in individual cases was poor.
Routine outcome measurement can include adolescent self-rating with modest additional resources. The discrepancy between staff and adolescent views requires further evaluation.
The child and adolescent version of the Health of the Nation Outcome Scales (HoNOSCA) represents the first attempt at a routine outcome measure for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the U.K. Extensive field trials suggested that the scales were both acceptable to clinicians from the various disciplines working in this area and also valid and reliable. A growing number of services are now using the scales in audit and research, supported by the national HoNOSCA base that provides training and co-ordinates further developments.
The Gusii people, now numbering over a million, inhabit the southwestern corner of the Kenya highlands, elevated above the hot coast of Lake Victoria farther to the west (Figure 3.1). They have occupied this territory – with its cool climate, rich soil, and abundant rainfall – for perhaps two centuries, maintaining a distinctive Bantu language and ethnic identity amidst the Nilotic speaking peoples who surround them. Geographically isolated in 20th-century Kenya, the Gusii nevertheless have become known throughout the country since World War II, first for their productive agriculture, and more recently for their exceptionally high fertility and population growth.
The Gusii were precipitously introduced to Western culture in the first decade of the 20th century when they came under British rule and the first Christian missionaries arrived. Their lives have never been the same, and the pace of social change has increased with each successive decade up to the present. Yet their contemporary survival strategies, family life, and patterns of child care can only be understood in terms of traditions inherited from their ancestors. Here we present an overview of Gusii culture and institutions in precolonial times and how they changed between 1907 and 1974, of the Gusii life course as experienced by adults and learned by children, and of the community in which we studied Gusii young children and their parents from 1974 to 1976.
The first priority of Gusii parents is to provide an infant with the nurturance and protection to survive in the face of risks presented by physical hazards, infectious diseases, and seasonal food shortages. Gusii customs of infant care, as interpreted in the previous chapter, reflect an adaptive strategy for minimizing the survival risks and promoting physical growth in the first years of life, within a context of high marital fertility. The extent to which they actually achieve these goals is examined in this chapter. In considering whether folk practices of reproduction and infant care operate as an adaptive system, we pose three questions: (1) Do these practices normally result in adaptive outcomes, namely, increased probabilities of infant survival, as indicated by body size, physical growth, and motoric/behavioral maturation? (2) Are they responsive to variations in the age and health status of infants? (3) Are they responsive to environmental changes, for example, in the availability of food or medical care? We also consider the vulnerability of these practices, that is, the conditions under which they permit infant health and survival to be jeopardized.
In the mid-1970s, when the evidence presented here was collected, environmental risks to child survival in Gusiiland had changed from their values of 20 years earlier; this change must be taken into account in any assessment of the adaptiveness of infant care customs. During the 1974–1976 period, in general, food shortages posed more of a risk to infant health and survival than in earlier times.
Gusii parents share a cultural model of child care, but their central tendencies in implementing it, as described and examined comparatively in the previous chapters, do not convey adequately the diversity of environmental conditions in which Gusii infants are raised. We found as much variation in personality, family background, and current situation among the 28 sets of parents in our longitudinal sample as one would find in any population, and more socioeconomic differentials than one would find in rural African communities less affected by recent change. All of this translated into varying environments for their babies, who also varied in their temperamental responsiveness and in their birth order among the children of one mother. Although we could not investigate these individual variations systematically in our small sample, we can illustrate them with cases of particular conditions that run counter to the statistical norm or represent extremes within it, thus showing the imperfect realization of a cultural model in actual practice.
To exemplify this diversity, we chose parents differing in age and infants differing in birth order. Older parents tended to be wealthier, less educated, and more experienced in child care – wealthier because men in their 40s and 50s during the mid-1970s had inherited land at a time when it was more abundant and had had more time to accumulate possessions, but less educated because they belonged to a cohort in which school attendance was relatively rare.
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