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As health care reform strategists increasingly recognize the critically important potential of effective everyday self-care decision making for reducing the burden of illness and the strain on health service systems, we must find ways to understand and support it. In this study, the authors investigate persons with expertise in self-care management of type 2 diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and multiple sclerosis to understand how everyday self-care decision making is learned and experienced. They used interview, think-aloud, and focus groups to construct an account of how persons affected by these chronic diseases make decisions in relation to the choices in their everyday lives and learn to manage the untoward effects of these conditions according to their unique contexts and values. The findings form a conceptual foundation for ongoing inquiry into this complex phenomenon and provide insights that might assist clinicians to understand more fully the responses and attitudes of those they serve.

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The paper concludes with a call for a new conceptualization of self-care decision making in chronic illness which sufficiently addresses the unique and complex nature of such decisions.

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Although familism has been studied in both Mexican American and Anglo families, there is controversy about whether familism in both groups is the same. Research has shown great within-group variability, and in addition, the kinship structure in the two groups is fundamentally different. This article explores the cross-cultural issues in conceptualizing familism and its relevance to caregiving among Anglo and Mexican American caregivers. Based on data obtained in an ongoing research program, the process of arriving at similarities and differences in the expression of familism is discussed using Berry's criteria for achieving cultural equivalence.

Primarily women, transcribers are essentially invisible persons, paid to serve as nameless, faceless technicians even though they participate in a transformative auditory experience. Transcribers are drawn into the lives of research participants through hearing the details of their everyday lives and extraordinary circumstances. Exploring the work worlds of transcribers, the authors point to the need to consider transcribers as persons. Transcribers may require the protection of ethical and institutional review committees to prevent emotional injury during the course of sensitive research. Protecting transcribers can include ethical review to examine the possibility of transcriber vulnerability and appropriate researcher interventions fully informing transcribers about the nature of the research and the data that will be collected before hiring takes place, establishing regular debriefing sessions, alerting the transcriber in advance of receiving particularly difficult interviews, and preparing transcribers for the termination of a study.

The monoterpene hydrocarbons of the cortical blister oleoresin of Abies grandis were compared, using gas chromatography, with those obtained from lesions that formed as a response of the tree to inoculation with cultured Trichosporium symbioticum, a fungus which is transmitted by the fir engraver beetle Scolytus ventralis. The resins from each source differed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Three terpenic compounds (tricyclene, camphene, and bornyl acetate) that are normally present in primary resin were not found in secondary resin. However, resins that formed in response to the inoculation contained higher concentrations of myrcene in three quarters of the trees and delta3-carene in one quarter of the trees that were sampled than resin from pitch blisters, which contained only trace amounts of these two compounds. These results suggest that conifers respond to fungus infection by producing monoterpenes which are more toxic, repellent, and (or) inhibitory to bark beetles and their associated fungi (e.g. myrcene and delta3-carene) at the expense of attractive or less biologically active compounds (e.g. camphene) which are present in the preformed resin system.