No abstract

This article defines and operationalizes the concept of spiritual competence. Most social workers have received little training on spiritual competence, which is a concern for at least three reasons:(1) Most practitioners affirm the importance of addressing spirituality in practice settings; (2) The NASW Code of Ethics requires services that address spirituality to be characterized by cultural competence; and (3) major accrediting agencies, such as the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), now require practitioners to explore client spirituality. To help practitioners understand and implement spiritual competence in their work with clients, a three-dimensional definition of spiritual competence is delineated, discussed, and illustrated with a three-part case example.

Initial pilot interviews with women whose husbands were in the first year of retirement revealed that problems of "impingement"--perceptions of husbands as intruders into their worlds-as-lived--were cited, in response to open-ended items, as the most difficult aspect of husbands' retirement. An impingement index, consisting of items constructed from those responses, was administered to the original panel of 83 women whose husbands were now in the fourth year of retirement, and to a new panel of 61 women whose husbands had been retired for one year. Paired T-tests revealed one significant difference in perceptions of impingement between the two groups of wives, and not in the expected direction. Indeed, wives in year 4 were more often bothered by some impingement conditions than wives in year 1, and these were significantly related to self-assessments of marital satisfaction. Results have implications for "adjustment" to life transitions, including situations that may inhibit initiation of adaptive responses, degree of investment in social roles, and issues of expectation.

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of hope and internal locus of control on the health and well-being of older women of Mexican origin who have been diagnosed with cancer. The study was conducted using data from Wave 2 of the Hispanic Established Populations for the Epidemiological Study for the Elderly (H-EPESE), a survey of 3050 Mexican American elders living in five southwestern states. To examine the effects of locus of control and hope on self-reported health, somatization, negative affect, and restriction of activity as dependent variables, we applied multiple regression (OLS) analysis to a sub sample of 109 women who reported having a diagnosis of cancer. We used four models to sequentially assess the effects of control variables, locus of control plus control variables, hope plus control variables, and both locus of control and hope plus control variables on each of the four dependent variables. The results indicated that locus of control was significantly associated only with three of the four dependent variables and hope was significantly associated with more favorable outcomes for each of the dependent variables. Implications for practice and further research are discussed.

As an element of anticipatory socialization, ability to predict future roles accurately may impact subsequent adaptation. Part of a larger study of retirement and marital quality, this longitudinal research examined husbands' and wives' (n = 61 couples) anticipations of change (more/less/same) in six individual and joint activities following husbands' retirement, and compared them with couples' reported experiences a year after husbands had retired. With the exception of household tasks, continuity in levels of activity from pre-to post-retirement was greater than couples had anticipated. Cross-classification of responses at baseline and Time 2 indicated only modest congruence between anticipated and experienced change in activities. Accuracy of anticipation was not related significantly to retirement satisfaction as hypothesized, but direction of retirement-satisfaction mean scores, especially among wives, suggest that future testing would be warranted.