Tradition Never Goes Out of Style: The Role of Tradition in Women’s Naming Practices

The goal of this project is to explore why, given United States women’s historical struggle to gain legal and social acceptance of nontraditional naming forms, the overwhelming majority of women continue to follow tradition and adopt their husbands’ names upon marriage. To begin to explain this phenomenon, this study focused on Catholic women, who changed their names between 1940 and 1998. This article illustrates the role tradition plays in participants’ worldview and how tradition influences their behavior and attitudes toward naming practices. The naming behaviors and attitudes of the women in this study are then analyzed within a larger sociocultural and political context.     

Book Reviews

Good teaching should be inclusive of all students. There are very strong arguments for making courses/units/modules as inclusive as possible, based on issues of equity and access. Inclusive teaching has been a catch cry in recent times and most universities have policies related to this issue. However, research into the effectiveness of measures taken to ensure that teaching caters to all students is rare. The scarcity of such information may be due to the difficulty in finding an appropriate method of evaluation. One of the means to evaluate teaching of a unit or course is to obtain feedback from students. Although information collected through this method may be subjected to biases, student perceptions can still provide useful data that can be incorporated into a broader evaluation system. This paper discusses an investigation into the inclusive nature of a large number of units offered at The University of Western Australia over 3 years. Student ratings in relation to the issue of inclusivity were also explored for possible influences of the year level of courses, broad discipline areas and student gender. The results of this study indicate that these three factors could affect how students view the inclusive nature of particular units.     

The Use of a Standardized Simulation and Process Tracing for Studying Clinical Problem-Solving Competence

Greater understanding of the clinical judgment and problem-solving processes used by counselors and psychologists could add significantly to a working knowledge of how competent practitioners function. This investigation used a standardized treatment planning simulation and a process tracing strategy to qualitatively examine how 15 mental health clinicians solved a typical client management problem. Purposes of the study included (a) demonstration of an empirical methodology for conducting research into clinical problem solving; (b) preliminary observation about the relationship between cognitive processes of inquiry and subsequent treatment planning; and (c) identification of hypotheses about critical factors involved in mental health problem solving that warrant further research. This report describes how those objectives were met and reviews their implications for training and assessment of mental health professionals.