Costs of Forced Retirement: Measuring the Effect of Lost Work Opportunity on Health.

Objective: Unemployment is a known health stressor that also increases early retirements. This study addresses mixed literature on retiree health and underreporting of forced retirement to better identify potential health impacts of lost work opportunity.

Methods: A Lost-work Opportunity Score (LOS) was created using variables from the Health and Retirement Study assessing unemployment, forced retirement, and earlier-than-planned retirement for 2576 respondents.

A Mixed-Methods Examination of Lost Occupational Choice in Retirement.

Lost work opportunity and forced retirement demonstrate negative health impacts related to occupational deprivation. Measuring occupational loss during the retirement transition can be problematic. The objective of the study is to clarify measurement of involuntary retirement in its relationship to occupational loss and deprivation.

Qualitative study identifies life shifts and stress coping strategies in people with multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an auto-immune disease in which the body's immune system attacks the central nervous system. The demyelination of the nerve fibers can lead to physical, emotional, and cognitive impairments. We wanted to learn about challenges of living with the illness and how people deal with stress.

Occupational Science Concepts Essential to Occupation-Based Practice: Development of Expert Consensus.

Importance: What occupational science (OS) knowledge may be essential to occupational therapy practice has not been systematically explored.

Objective: To identify and gain expert consensus on OS concepts viewed as essential to occupational therapy practice.

Design: A complex, convergent mixed-methods Delphi design with an international panel of OS experts randomly assigned to two parallel groups.

Toward Robust Assessments of Student Knowledge of Occupation.

Importance: Occupational therapy students must master knowledge of occupation, yet how educators assess such knowledge has not been explored. In this study, we elucidate robust assessment practices that can help students master knowledge of occupation.

Objective: To examine practices that educators use to assess knowledge of occupation.

Assignment Artifacts and What They Reveal About How Occupation Is Addressed in U.S. Occupational Therapy Curricula.

Importance: Artifacts convey essential skills, tools, and concepts to students. Studies of artifacts can therefore illumine priorities for learning.

Objective: To describe the skills, tools, and concepts that assignment artifacts required students to learn, especially in relation to occupation.

A National Survey of Learning Activities and Instructional Strategies Used to Teach Occupation: Implications for Signature Pedagogies.

Importance: Occupational therapy practitioners' professional identities and distinctive contributions to health care connect essentially to their knowledge of occupation. Thus, the strategies educators use to convey occupation to students and the perspectives embedded in those strategies are critical topics for researchers.

Objective: To generalize findings from a previous qualitative study of how educators in 25 U.

Curriculum-Level Strategies That U.S. Occupational Therapy Programs Use to Address Occupation: A Qualitative Study.

Objective: This study's objective was to describe curriculum-level strategies used to convey occupation to occupational therapy students.

Method: The study used a descriptive qualitative research design. Fifteen occupational therapy and 10 occupational therapy assistant programs participated in interviews, submitted curriculum artifacts such as syllabi and assignments, and recorded teaching sessions.

A Way of Seeing: How Occupation Is Portrayed to Students When Taught as a Concept Beyond Its Use in Therapy.

Objective: The concept of occupation is core to learning occupational therapy, yet how occupation is taught has not been widely studied. We explored how occupation is addressed in 25 U.S.

Explicit or Hidden? Exploring How Occupation Is Taught in Occupational Therapy Curricula in the United States.

Objective: Occupation is considered core and threshold knowledge for occupational therapy, yet how it is conveyed through education is not well understood. This study examined how the concept of occupation was taught in occupational therapy and occupational therapy assistant curricula in the United States.

Method: Using a qualitative descriptive research design, in-depth interviews, video recordings, and artifacts of teaching occupation were collected from 25 programs, chosen using stratified random sampling.

Energizing Occupation as the Center of Teaching and Learning.

The concept of occupation has experienced a renewal in the past 3 decades and is widely accepted as the core subject in occupational therapy. Professional education has a critical stewardship role in continually enhancing how occupation is taught and understood to enrich new occupational therapy practitioners' ability to grasp the purpose of the profession and reason clinically in complex practice environments. The authors discuss three questions that frame approaches educators can use to effectively centralize occupation in teaching and learning environments: (1) To what degree is a curriculum and its courses and class sessions subject centered? (2) To what degree do instructional processes create links to occupation? and (3) To what degree do instructional processes expose and promote complex ways of knowing needed for learning occupation? Keeping occupation in the foreground is important to facilitate new research, teaching methods, and curricular relevance to practice.

Value and challenges of research on health professions' core subjects in education.

Professions are organized around central concerns, or core subjects. Knowledge of a field's core subject is indispensable to effective practice, reasoning, and professional identity. In health professions education, however, core subjects are often obscured by the plethora of topics and skills that must be taught, rendering them largely implicit in the learning process.

Case study on effect of household task participation on home, community, and work opportunities for a youth with multiple disabilities.

Objective: This case study explored how household task engagement influenced participation in the home, community and work for a youth with multiple disabilities.

Participants: Participants were the first author's single father and her brother, who has spina bifida and intellectual disability.

Methods: Researchers used a case study design with mixed methods.

"Still there is beauty": one man's resilient adaptation to stroke.

The study was designed to generate understanding of the phenomenon of resiliency following stroke, its role in supporting continuity of identity and ways in which occupational therapists might foster resiliency. The authors used a qualitative case study design to collect data during two face-to-face interviews. These were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using thematic analysis, narrative analysis, narrative smoothing, and content analysis using resiliency theory.

Occupation emerges in the process of therapy.

Objective: The current literature offers no cohesive definition of occupation-based practice. Current definitions emphasize intervention forms and contexts, which do not reflect the complexity of practice. This article demonstrates that the therapeutic relationship and the meanings that are created in the therapy process are central aspects of occupation-based practice.