Female offenders’ experiences within the criminal justice system and the way in which they become involved with the criminal justice system are very different than that of male offenders. Previous research that has been conducted on female offending does show that womens’ contact with the criminal justice system can often be related to histories of abuse and to mental illness, and that these can also be related to subsequent re-contacts with the criminal justice system. Abuse, mental illness and gender, along with control variables (age, aboriginal identity, LSI-OR score), were investigated in a sample of 522 male and female Ontario Provincial offenders. When males and females were compared at the bivariate level using a chi-square comparison, females were found to be significantly more likely to re-contact. Abuse and mental illness were not found on their own to be significantly related to re-contact, but when the relationship between the three variables was examined, mental illness was found to be both significant and positively correlated to both gender and abuse. Examination into the relationship between the variables found a strong relationship between gender and abuse, gender and mental illness, mental illness and abuse as well as strong relationship in the three way interaction between gender, mental illness and abuse. The cross tabulation demonstrated that women who had experienced abuse were identified as being much more likely to be suffering from a mental illness. Logistic regression was used to model the relationship between re-contact, gender, abuse and the risk for re-contact. All possible interactions (as noted above) were included in the model, but the model that best fit the data included only the controls (age, aboriginal identity, LSI-OR score), gender, abuse, mental illness and the interaction between mental illness and gender. Results indicated that there was a significantly higherrisk for re-contact for females with mental illness, compared with men with mental illness or or to men and women without mental illness.. Even though abuse as a single variable or as part of an interaction was not found to be significantly related to re-contact, it is still of importance to note that the chi-square comparisons demonstrated that abuse is significantly related to gender and mental illness, therefore the relationship was still important when looking at the implications of the research. It is recommended that future research further investigate the different needs of male and female offenders and the role that experienced physical, sexual and emotional abuse, mental illness and gender plays in not only offending behaviour, but in the treatment and rehabilitation of offenders within the provincial correctional system.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--West Virginia University, 2009. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 163 p. Includes abstract.

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. Natalie Sachs-Ericsson, Florida State University, School of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Psychology. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 23, 2003). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 1999. Graduate Programme in Philosophy. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 252-278). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ43452.

No description available.

This study explored the perspectives on place of eight people with severe mental illness living, for one year or longer, in an urban psychiatric hospital. The research questions were: how do people with severe mental illness view the psychiatric hospital as place?; and how do they make meaning of the experience of living in hospital. The research employed a phenomenological approach, as described by Giorgi (1985). Using purposive sampling, one time, semi-structured, individual interviews were conducted. The audio recorded interviews were transcribed and thematically coded using Giorgi’s (2005) method. The meanings of the participants’ experiences are captured by the meta-theme: this is not a home; it’s a hospital. Four additional major themes emerged; and each of the major themes also had sub-themes The findings of this study challenged commonly held assumptions on how people living long term in a psychiatric hospital view the hospital as place and on institutionalization.

This study explored the perspectives on place of eight people with severe mental illness living, for one year or longer, in an urban psychiatric hospital. The research questions were: how do people with severe mental illness view the psychiatric hospital as place?; and how do they make meaning of the experience of living in hospital. The research employed a phenomenological approach, as described by Giorgi (1985). Using purposive sampling, one time, semi-structured, individual interviews were conducted. The audio recorded interviews were transcribed and thematically coded using Giorgi’s (2005) method. The meanings of the participants’ experiences are captured by the meta-theme: this is not a home; it’s a hospital. Four additional major themes emerged; and each of the major themes also had sub-themes The findings of this study challenged commonly held assumptions on how people living long term in a psychiatric hospital view the hospital as place and on institutionalization.

This case study evaluates the process of affirmative business development within a federal correctional psychiatric facility for federal offenders with mental illness serving long or indeterminate sentences. It examines how the business associates (i.e., offenders with mental illness who are self-employed in the affirmative business) change through working in the affirmative business, and what challenges and benefits they experience. The aim is to disseminate knowledge that will assist in developing supported employment opportunities for offenders with serious mental illness. Qualitative and participatory research methods are used to give a descriptive account of the experience of 14 business associates within a critical paradigm. The framework that guided this study included the Canadian Model of Occupational Performance and Engagement (CMOP-E); the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB); and a Community Economic Development (CED) approach. Strategies were incorporated to maintain rigor and ensure trustworthiness and quality of the findings. The data outlined the first 6 years of the affirmative business. Interviews and observations were conducted during year 7 and 8 of the affirmative business. Reviews of documents and artifacts were current and historical in nature. Three overlapping phases of business development, outreach, and replication are discussed along with their corresponding core tasks of skepticism, tensions of growth, and transformation. Within each phase, six overlapping themes emerge: business development; personal growth, recovery, and hope; ongoing support; the prison environment; volunteerism; and the community. Self-employment within the affirmative iii business emerges as having an encouraging effect on promoting empowerment and recovery, increasing self-reliance and self-efficacy, helping symptoms, learning new ways to resolve conflict, and improving understanding of employment support needs. / Thesis (Master, Rehabilitation Science) -- Queen's University, 2010-04-26 15:43:13.848

No description available.

Research in several domains has revealed that when individuals are asked to estimate the probability that their judgments are correct, they reveal an overconfidence effect. Judgments produced in decision environments such as psychodiagnosis, which are by their nature ambiguous and complex, appear to be most vulnerable to overconfidence. By implication, this phenomenon threatens the validity of clinical judgment and subjects clients to risks of flawed diagnoses and unsuitable treatments. / In an effort to identify variables implicated in judgment confidence and overconfidence, this study examined the relationship between four different inferential biases (dispositionalism, confirmationism, truncated data search, and narrow problem formulation) and diagnostic confidence in the context of a psychological assessment task. A second aspect of this study examined the effect of clinical experience on psychodiagnostic confidence. Thirty-six clinicians (18 experienced professionals and 18 clinical trainees) were individually presented a written client casefile, which was segmented and serially presented, to read and clinically interpret aloud. Analyses of participants' verbal protocols revealed that one of the four inferential biases studied (i.e., dispositionalism) accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in psychodiagnostic confidence scores. The author concludes that other clinician variables likely moderate the relationship between particular heuristics and judgment confidence. Regarding the second hypothesis, the data revealed no difference between experienced clinicians and clinical trainees in the degrees of psychodiagnostic confidence manifested in their verbal protocols. / The author proposes that effective remedies to overconfidence begin in training programs that lead students through problem-solving experiences that can invalidate facile, premature, and dubious diagnostic judgments. The author delineates a number of strategies that may be used by educators to achieve this end.