Parents of children with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) (n = 38) were surveyed to identify common and difficult obstacles to diabetes care. A list of these obstacles was cross-validated by a second parent sample (n = 47) who rated each item according to how common and difficult each item was for them. The list then was rated by a sample of diabetes professionals (n = 15) to evaluate the extent of agreement between parents and health care professionals regarding the frequency with which these obstacles occur and the difficulty they pose to everyday diabetes care. Professionals disagreed with parents regarding which obstacles were most common and difficult, generally rating problems as significantly more common and difficult (t = 5.20, P = < .001) than did the parents who experienced them. The results of the survey underscore the importance of health care providers evaluating the concerns of the local patient community when developing educational and treatment services for these patients.

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Three hundred and seventy-four thirty-minute television segments were observed in an investigation of televised portrayals of disability. These segments were randomly distributed across three time blocks and the three major networks. The presence/absence of disability was recorded using a twenty-second partial interval recording procedure. The definition of disability was restricted to the observation of an orthosis or prosthesis for support, protection, mobility, and/or spinal stability. Observations of disability were further evaluated to provide information regarding the focus of the presentation (i.e., irrelevant to plot, relevant to plot, or thematic) and the affective valence of the presentation (i.e., positive, neutral, or negative).Disability content occurred in less than 1 % of approximately 23,000 intervals observed. Most presentations of disability were irrelevant to plot and neutral in affective valence. Although certain variables, such as network and time of day, appear to be statistically related to the occurrence of disability, the extremely low frequency of disability-related presentations suggests that no single variable is meaningfully related to the presence of disability on television.Efforts to evaluate the presentation of disability on television have been flawed methodologically, making their interpretation difficult. For example, several studies have investigated disability on television based exclusively on program descriptions which appeared in 71K Guide (