Gerontological Counseling Grid: Making Judgments About Older Adults

The author describes the Gerontological Counseling Grid (GCG), an instrument for exploring experienced counselors' awareness of and judgments about older adults. Derived from Kelly's Role Construct Repertory Test, the GCG is based on the personal construct theory of understanding the way individuals make judgments and order their environments. The GCG provides a meaningful way to determine how individuals organize their implicit attitudes toward and evaluations of older adult groups. Administration procedures are presented and a case analysis of a GCG completed by a counselor trainee is presented.     

The Influence of Supervisory Racial Identity Interaction and Racial Matching on the Supervisory Working Alliance and Supervisee Multicultural Competence

Data from 105 counselor trainees indicated that supervisee–supervisor racial identity interactions were related to the supervisory alliance, and racial identity interactions and racial matching influenced supervisees' development of multicultural competence.     

The economic downturn and libraries: an international survey

There is some concern that libraries, particularly university libraries, are facing a very bleak future because of the word‐wide economic downturn. Much of the evidence regarding the economic problems and consequent impacts is parochial, far from robust, and there is a suspicion of stakeholders talking the situation up. This paper presents robust and independent evidence on the extent to which libraries from around the world are experiencing financial hardship, the impacts that result, and what the future looks like. Comparative analyses are made on the grounds of country, sector, and size of institution. The particular situation of university libraries is highlighted and the implications of the findings are examined from the perspective of scholarly publishers.     

Trust and Authority in Scholarly Communications in the Light of the Digital Transition: setting the scene for a major study

The paper provides the results of the first phase of the research project Trust and Authority in Scholarly Communications in the Light of the Digital Transition. It provides for an examination of the behaviours and attitudes of academic researchers as producers and consumers of scholarly information resources in the digital era in respect to how they determine authority and trustworthiness in the sources they use, cite, and publish in. The first phase of the study utilized focus groups to formulate research questions for the project as a whole. It provided the direction for the literature review, interviews, and questionnaires studies that would follow. Fourteen focus groups were held in the UK and US in order to obtain this information. A total of 66 science and social science researchers participated. The main findings were: (a) researchers play down difficulties of establishing trustworthiness, not because there are none, but because they have well‐developed methods of establishing trust; (b) citation‐derived metrics are becoming more important in regard to where researchers publish; (c) social media are ancillary to research, but are used for promotion of research and idea generation; (d) researchers are suspicious and confused about open access, but less so if produced by a traditional publisher; (e) there was a uniformity of perceptions/behaviour of researchers irrespective of differences in subject, country, and age; (f) although some early career researchers behave the same as their more senior colleagues this is because of a fear of the system: they actually think differently.