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Rehabilitation professionals may unknowingly rely on stereotypes and specious beliefs when dealing with people with disabilities. One such belief is that an individual's adjustment to disability proceeds through well-defined stages or phases. Literally hundreds of publications based primarily on clinical observations promote various stage or phase theories of psychosocial adjustment to chronic illness and disability despite contradictory empirical findings. Developments in mathematics, physics, biology, economics, and psychology over the last four decades, however, have led to the formulation of theories that suggest new models of the adjustment process. Specifically, we believe Catastrophe, Chaos, and Complexity Theories hold considerable promise in this regard, and yet these theories have received relatively little attention in the rehabilitation research literature. The purpose of this article is to review these theories and suggest applications in adjustment to chronic illness and disability.

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This study examined occupational outcomes for successfully closed state-federal vocational rehabilitation (VR) consumers in the 2008 fiscal year using the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system. The study replicated previous research by Walls and Fullmer (1997) that investigated the top 50 job titles and the top five occupations by disability categories after vocational rehabilitation. Median hourly wages for VR participants are reported and compared with those of the general labor force (GLF). Findings and implications are discussed, and suggestions are offered to rehabilitation counselors about how to expand consumers' job and career options.

The purpose of this study was to compare factor structures from Taiwanese teachers' ratings with diagnostic definitions of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as described in the DSM-III-R, DSM-IV, and ICD-10; to examine how factor structures of Taiwanese teachers' ratings of ADHD symptoms compare with factor structures reported in research using school-based American participants; and to examine gender differences. One hundred and twenty-one homeroom teachers from six public elementary schools in Taipei County, Taiwan, rated two boys and two girls randomly selected from their homerooms using the ADHD checklist. Findings from this study support the concurrent validity of the DSM-IV ADHD factor structures of hyperactivity-impulsivity and inattention. Comparability of these findings with school-based U.S. studies suggests the cross-cultural congruency of behaviors associated with ADHD.