The study is a qualitative analysis of 19 interviews with Israeli women who have lost a first pregnancy to miscarriage. Neither the public nor health care professionals are fully aware of the implications and significance of miscarriage to the woman who has lost the pregnancy. The goal of this study was to understand and give voice to the women's experience. Five themes were revealed--the greater the joy, the more painful the crash; the nature and intensity of the loss; sources of support; life after the miscarriage; and recommendations to professionals. The experience of miscarriage was found to be grounded in the meaning of being a woman, as the loss of the pregnancy undermines the women's basic belief in their fertility and as a result threatens their meaning and role as women.

A study cannot be a good study unless proper ethical standards have been maintained. This article examines ethical thinking and practice in qualitative social work research. A review of a randomly selected sample of articles published in social work journals in the past decade was conducted, centered around four main issues: (a) prevention of harm; (b) empowerment-related aspects of the research process; (c) research-related benefits for participants and others; and (d) researchers’ technical competence. Our findings suggest that, as a general trend, ethical considerations are marginal in most phases of the studies that are reported in our journals. This raises questions as to the meaning of ‘proper ethical standards’ in qualitative social work research and as to the extent research ethics are regarded as important by researchers and journal editors in our field.

The study is a phenomenological analysis of 10 focus groups with Israeli women who were hospitalized because of high-risk pregnancy. The goal of this study was to understand the lived experience of hospitalization due to high-risk pregnancy. Five themes were recognized: (1) the desire to nurture and the social pressure to do so; (2) the personal and social meaning of a family; (3) loss of normal experiences of life and childbearing; (4) the woman's needs versus the fetus's well-being; and (5) sources of strength and stress. Conflicting relationships recognized within and between the themes pointed to ambivalence as the core characteristic of the experience. Practical implications and further research are recommended to better inform health care personnel and social workers assisting these women.

Stillbirth (SB), death of a fetus in late stages of pregnancy or during birth, usually leads to extended and intense grief among women. However, their grief is often disenfranchised and they are denied the social right to mourn their loss. Constructivist theories recently assuming a central place in bereavement studies inform this article, which aims to identify the meaning that women who experience SB ascribe to their loss in general and to the lost figure. This tack may offer the opportunity to examine the consequences of the discrepancy between personal and environmental constructions of this loss on its personal construction and to learn about the essence of the loss. Within the domain of qualitative research, the current article draws on phenomenology and the research method that has emerged from this approach. Specifically, the article focuses on in-depth interviews with 10 women who experienced SB. Its findings suggest that for these women, the lost figure and the loss in general engender ambiguity both internally-that is, within the psyche of women themselves-and externally, within the women's social environment. Thus, ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt infused women's experience of SB. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

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The study examines descriptions by twenty-six elderly Israelis of a good death. The transcripts of personal interviews were analyzed using phenomenological methods to determine general and essential essences of the good death phenomenon. The good death was perceived as a multidimensional phenomenon based on eighteen general essences that were condensed into five essential essences that included the physiological, personal, interpersonal, social and cultural domains of life. The good death description further involved a critical component toward the ways in which death and dying are currently occurring in Israel. The research results call for Israeli policy-makers to more forcefully acknowledge and accommodate the different secular perspectives of the good death into law and to allow individuals more freedom and control over the dying processes and rituals following one's death.

The study is an exploratory attempt to examine family and life satisfaction of 212 noncustodial fathers 3 years following divorce, using path analysis to validate the hypothesized ordering among six dependent variables suggested by resource theory. Results indicated the significant predictors of family and life satisfaction were perceived economic well-being, cooperative communication during conflict and during coparenting, low importance of resource deprivation, and low frequency of conflict. Involvement with children was not a significant predictor of family and life satisfaction. Resource theory was helpful in generating the variables for the study and explaining noncustodial fathers' perceptions of the relationship dynamics between former spouses who are coparenting children.

The nature of the ongoing bond maintained by the bereaved with the deceased has attracted considerable attention, but studies have generally ignored postdeath relationships when loss occurs in utero. The goal of this research was to reach an interpretive understanding of the continuing bond experience among Israeli mothers who underwent feticide, examining the strategies they use in maintaining a postdeath relationship with a child they did not know, whose death they chose and witnessed, within a social context that ignores their loss and forces them to silence their grief. The results highlight two themes: (a) strategies for relinquishing connection with the baby and (b) strategies for maintaining a postdeath relationship. These processes partially correspond with two theoretical views that shed light on interpretation of the results: the dual process of coping with bereavement and relational dialectic theory. Implications of the results to the practice of health providers are outlined.