Family building is seldom a straight-line march to the finish, even for those fortunate individuals who avoid a detour into the ethical and legal minefield of assisted reproductive technology (ART). Importantly, intended parents and their third-party helpers often lack fundamental information about the parties’ status to any child created – who is a parent, what rights the respective parties possess, and how those rights are protected. Unless appropriately addressed, these issues may contribute to misunderstandings, misperceptions, and confusion, all of which may be laid at the feet of the fertility counselor. In order to practice preemptive crisis management, fertility counselors must recognize risky situations, analyze them with a critical eye, practice within the parameters of competence, ethics, and legal sound stricture, and apply best practice principles. Collaboration with qualified legal practitioners who understand third-party reproduction law is essential to that end.

Extraordinary reproductive technologies are continuing to evolve for people needing medical assistance to have a child, which are replete with complex psychosocial issues. Optimal patient care involves the collaboration of numerous healthcare professionals (physicians, nurses, laboratory scientists, administrative staff, as well as counselors) working together to provide reproductive medical services. This chapter provides a biopsychosocial model for the medical and psychosocial assessment and treatment of individuals and couples seeking reproductive medical assistance. Beginning with an overview of infertility and reproductive physiology/pathophysiology, evaluation and treatment are discussed from a collaborative perspective of medical and psychosocial management. All aspects of reproductive medical care are presented from the lifestyle choices to assisted reproductive technologies including IVF, gamete donation and gestational surrogacy. The complex psychological challenges of patients dealing with significant medical conditions and the consequences of invasive medical procedures, coupled with treatment failures and loss are examined. In addition, a collaborative approach to decision-making in treatment and family building alternatives is discussed. The chapter also serves as a springboard to topics in the second edition of Fertility Counseling covering therapeutic approaches, assessment and preparation in assisted reproduction, addressing the needs of diverse of populations, practice issues, and special topics on pregnancy loss, reproductive trauma and resiliency, postpartum adjustment, and the pregnant therapist.

In Chapter 5, I take on the question about why only a minority of people in each community used the handpumps. My answer exposes the micro and macro politics of the rural water project and the differences between the water at the well and at the handpump. The handpumps represented hybrid objects produced from an assemblage of modernisation ideologies, global development discourses, social power relations, national and local politics, and local meanings and practices. In the communities, many people felt alienated from this new type of water and the values it represented. The handpumps were framed as a neutral technology that would bring community-wide benefits, yet they were used only by people in the Frelimo political party who lived near the sites and could afford the tariffs. The handpumps entrenched existing inequalities and brought tensions between Frelimo and Renamo into the light. The outcomes of the project were broader and more ambivalent, uneven, and contingent than the project evaluation tools were designed to measure.

As highlighted earlier, whenever things go wrong, the immediate and inevitable response is to call for better rules, new rules, different rules, new institutions, or better institutions to apply the rules that already exist – or a combination of the above. This is curious, as usually there are some rules in place, and often enough, those rules were considered perfectly fine before things went wrong. Moreover, there is not always a lack of institutions to apply them either, whether on the international or domestic level. Still, time and again, rules are manipulated, ignored, stretched, departed from, bent, or reinterpreted. Even relatively clear and settled rules can suffer this fate, let alone rules that are less clear. It is the general argument of this book that a focus on virtue ethics may well come to be of assistance.

The principles of public health promotion have been outlined in previous chapters within this textbook. Planning, implementation and evaluation should be viewed as three equally necessary and complementary components of any public health program. This chapter provides an introduction to planning and evaluation with respect to public health promotions and interventions. This chapter focuses primarily on overarching concepts. It identifies a simple, six-stage public health planning model that assists project teams to move from the initial identification of a need through implementation to assessment of the outcomes, with the evaluation also identifying any needs that remain partially or completely unmet. The concepts of planning and evaluation should be viewed as part of an ongoing process; the planning of public health interventions should be informed through reviewing outcomes of relevant previous projects while the evaluation phase should then provide observations and recommendations for future programs.

This chapter illustrates how to apply explicit Bayesian analysis to scrutinize qualitative research, pinpoint sources of disagreement on inferences, and facilitate consensus-building discussions among scholars, highlighting examples of intuitive Bayesian reasoning as well as departures from Bayesian principles in published research.

The final chapter brings the insights of the book together under the overarching question of whether the Sustainable Development Goals have had any political impact after their adoption in 2015. The chapter draws the conclusion that the Sustainable Development Goals have so far had only limited effects in global, national and local governance. We mainly see discursive effects of the goals with some normative and institutional effects as well. The global goals have however not (yet) become a transformative force in and of themselves. Their effects are neither linear nor unidirectional. While the 2030 Agenda and the 17 goals with their 169 targets constitute a strong set of normative guidelines, their national implementation, translation to the local level, and dissemination across societal sectors remain a political process.

Problems and potential solutions do not speak to themselves: people recognize them and size them up in an active process of cognition. The open-ended nature of problem-solving activities requires that our minds can avoid being paralyzed by several infinite regress problems that conventional economics overlooks. This chapter explores how people allocate their attention between implementing solutions to problems and scanning for new problems and how they judge whether incoming information signifies a problem. It draws parallels with how scientists and object recognition technologies operate via systems of rules, and it presents an original synthesis of Hayek’s theory of the mind (a forerunner to modern theories of brain plasticity), Kelly’s personal construct psychology, Koestler’s work on creativity, Simon’s theory of satisficing and the dual-system view of thinking, and of the role of associative memory processes suggested by Kahneman. The analysis explains how “what comes to mind” is determined as we try to find matches between incoming stimuli and templates from our memories and how we resolve cognitive dissonance between what we expect and what initially seems to be going on.

The inquiry-based approach to learning has been successfully applied in science education. Inquiry-based learning is defined as an approach involving active, research-based learning in the classroom to acquire new knowledge and competences, either individually or collaboratively, in self-regulated learning settings. In this chapter five general inquiry phases are being discussed: Orientation, Conceptualization, Investigation, Conclusion, and Discussion. These phases and their corresponding sub-phases are interlinked in an inquiry cycle. While experiencing each phase the students will acquire research-based skills and further develop a wide range of soft skills as long as instructors provide adequate guidance and support.

The first part of the chapter provides an overview of assessment as an integral element of undergraduate research’s continued success and sustainability. Building from this introduction, the remainder of the chapter explains the EvaluateUR method, a proven approach to assessing the skills and competencies of undergraduate research students and for improving student learning. The EvaluateUR method documents student growth in academic and workplace-related knowledge and skills and fosters meaningful student–mentor dialog to strengthen students’ awareness of their academic strengths and weaknesses. The chapter includes a summary of the findings from an independent evaluation of the method and concludes with remarks about how the method is being adapted to support the assessment of course-based undergraduate research experiences and students competing in remotely operated underwater vehicle competitions.