Theorising Social Work Sense-Making: Developing a Model of Peer-Aided Judgement and Decision Making

This article addresses the challenges of sense making in social work practice and presents a descriptive model of peer-aided judgement to facilitate critical debate and knowledge creation. The model is founded in Hammond's Cognitive Continuum Theory and developed in direct application to social work practice. It seeks to expand currently available models of social work judgement and decision making to include processes and outcomes related to informal peer interaction. Building on empirical studies and multiple contemporary literatures, a model of peer-aided judgement is hypothesised, comprising four distinct and interacting elements. By modelling these fundamental aspects of the processes and outcomes of peer-aided judgement, this article provides a tool for illuminating the everyday unseen value of peer interaction in practice and a framework for critical debate of dilemmas and propositions for professional judgement in social work practice. This article concludes by examining some of the implications of the model and its potential use in the further development of theory, methodology and practice.

Using the Lens Model and Cognitive Continuum Theory to Understand the Effects of Cognition on Phishing Victimization

With the growing threat of phishing emails and the limited effectiveness of current mitigation approaches, there is an urgent need to better understand what leads to phishing victimization. There is a limited body of phishing research that identified cognitive automaticity as a potential factor, but more research on the relationship between user cognition and victimization is needed. Additionally, the current phishing research has not considered the characteristics of the environment in which phishing judgments are made. To fill these gaps, this work used the analysis capabilities afforded by the double system lens model (a judgment analysis technique) and the cognitive continuum theory, specifically the task continuum index and the cognitive continuum index. By calculating a task continuum index score, the cognition best suited for the email sorting task was identified. This calculation resulted in a value which indicated that more analytical cognition was most effective. The cognitive continuum index score evaluated the participants’s cognition level while making judgments. The relationships between these measures and achievement were evaluated. Results indicated that more analytical cognition was associated with lower rates of phishing victimization. This work provides a deeper insight into the phishing problem and has implications for combating phishing.

The Role of Nurses’ Uncertainty in Decision-Making Process of Pain Management in People with Dementia

Pain in people with dementia (PWD) is underassessed and undertreated. Treatment of pain in people with dementia goes awry because of poor assessment, poor treatment, and factors related to nursing decision-making skills. Several theoretical models addressed the role of nurses’ critical thinking and decision-making skills in pain treatment, like the cognitive continuum theory (CCT) and the adaptive pain management (APT). Only the Response to Certainty of Pain (RCP) model was the first model to posit relationships between nurses' uncertainty, pain assessment, and patient outcomes. Gilmore-Bykovskyi and Bowers developed the RCP, which incorporates the concept of uncertainty and how it relates to the problem of unrelieved pain in PWD. The RCP model has the potential to provide good understanding of the problem of unrelieved pain in people with dementia. It also could help to develop a research study that brings comfort to an often neglected and vulnerable population.