Resettled Refugees and Food Insecurity in the U.S.; Exploring the Caseworker’s Role

When refugees arrive in their new resettlement country, they are designated to work with a caseworker employed with a resettlement agency who helps them acclimate to their new environment and break down new challenges. Food insecurity is one such challenge that resettled refugees face. This study looked at the role that caseworkers play in helping clients navigate food security. Eight caseworkers from three resettlement agencies participated in semistructured qualitative interviews. Data analysis revealed four categories: the caseworker’s role, linking clients to benefits, concerns about food, and caseworkers’ perspectives. The main concerns revolved around federal food assistance benefits, reflecting past study findings, and warrants further investigation into the efficacy of such programs. Moreover, the caseworkers’ perceived role in terms of food security was vague and inexplicit from the Cooperative Agreement protocols. Food security focused training could improve caseworker’s capacity to help clients adapt to their new food environment.     

Exploring intergenerational communication and stress in refugee families

More than half of the refugees who have resettled to the United States in recent years have been youth. Refugee youth have often witnessed or experienced violence and family separation prior to resettlement and face barriers to successful resettlement such as language and educational challenges. These factors elevate risk for mental and emotional distress, and protective factors like strong familial relationships are important to promoting mental well‐being. This study utilized focus groups with 36 refugees ages 18 to 25 from four ethnic groups to explore conceptualizations of and communication about mental and emotional distress within and outside of family systems. Youth reported a nuanced conceptualization of their premigration and postmigration stressors and their patterns of communication about distress in three domains: (a) exposure to traumatic stress prior to resettlement, (b) stressful experiences in resettlement, and (c) communication about mental health inside and outside of family groups.     

The Identity of Displaced Christian Karen in the Context of Resettlement

More than 200,000 displaced Karen from Burma have been “warehoused” in displaced persons' camps on the Thai-Burma border for more than 20 years. Recently, the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) has embarked on the durable solution of resettlement to third countries for these people. In this paper, the experiences and perceptions of resettlement of Christian Karen are explored through the findings from two focus groups with recently arrived refugees, augmented by contextual discussions with Christian Karen community leaders in Australia. Focus group participants displayed a strong and overt sense of identity, both as individual Karen and as part of the Christian Karen community, locally and trans-nationally, indicating that Christian Karen identity remains intact during displacement and strongly influences the resettlement experience for this group.     

Client Experiences of Trauma-Informed Care in Social Service Agencies

This paper describes a qualitative study of individual client interviews (n?=?26) from four social service agencies to understand how clients experience trauma-informed care services and implementation challenges. We used the Fallot and Harris framework to explore client experiences of the five core concepts of trauma-informed care (safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment) using semi-structured interview questions with each client. The four agencies consisted of: refugees (n?=?4), substance abuse (n?=?8), older adults (n?=?12), and maternal/child health (n?=?2), and the agencies varied in size, service goals, and clientele. The results of the study suggest that clients’ experience of these concepts was shaped by the actions of other clients, and these experiences were either mitigated or hindered by actions of the agency employees. Agency policies either supported or enhanced their experiences as well. The results also suggest that it was challenging for agencies to provide for all of the trauma-informed care (TIC) concepts at the same time. We discuss the implications of these findings for social service delivery in a range of agency types. Future research should examine the effects of trauma-informed policies on client experiences of each TIC domain.     

“It's not all tied up with bureaucrats and funding”: Autonomous volunteer participation in the rural resettlement of refugees

This paper reports on a study that explored the experiences, perceptions and motivations of a new type of autonomous volunteer emerging in modern society, in particular, those working to assist in the rural resettlement of refugees in Australia. The volunteers filled a gap left by under resourced government and community services. In‐depth semi structured interviews revealed that their motivation was due in part, to the lack of bureaucratic' red tape'. Their drive to address social issues was based also in part on values to see social justice expressed in their community. Some challenges and tensions due to cultural differences were identified. Questions for community development and social capital are raised. Implications are raised for volunteer groups' and resettlement organisations' policy and practice to enhance the resettlement process for both the host community and those with a refugee background.     

Caregiver involvement in behavioural health services in the context of child welfare service referrals: a qualitative study

Human service agencies serve a growing number of adults with behavioural health needs. Despite these agencies' key role in identifying need and facilitating services, many individuals do not receive care or end services prematurely. Few studies have explored the experiences of families referred to behavioural health services by such agencies or the extent to which families' perceptions of service need align with those of treatment providers and frontline workers. This study presents findings from a qualitative study of caregivers involved with child welfare agencies who were referred to behavioural health services. Researchers reviewed agencies' case records and conducted in‐depth interviews with 16 caregivers, 9 child welfare caseworkers and 12 behavioural health treatment counsellors. Findings suggest that when deciding to engage in services, caregivers weigh not only their individual and family behavioural health needs but also potential agency intervention, including loss of child custody. Many professionals reported that involvement with a child welfare agency hindered the caregiver's disclosure of behavioural healthcare needs. Implications for managers and practitioners are discussed.     

ANALYSIS OF CLIENT CAREERS FOR PROGRAM EVALUATION

The present study analyzes the careers of clients, both within and between agencies. Several phases of the careers of 316 adolescent clients are examined as part of a process evaluation of Professional Youth Services (PYS). Clients' movement within PYS is described to provide on understanding of when and why clients leave a helping agency and to describe some of the characteristics of clients who are most likely to have their treatment interrupted. In addition, clients' "between agency" movement is analyzed by exploring the other human service agency involvements) of clients; in this way the role of PYS in the larger service delivery network is clarified.     

Effective workload management in child welfare: Understanding the relationship between caseload and workload

A common assumption in public social service organizations is that workload may be positively associated with caseload. However, few empirical studies have examined what specific characteristics of caseload affect caseworkers' workloads in the child welfare system. This study attempts to address this gap by identifying specific individual and regional factors that influence both subjective and objective dimensions of workloads. Survey data were collected from 1,244 caseworkers at one public child welfare agency in a Midwestern state in the United States. The data indicated that both perceptions of unmanageable workloads and self‐reported overtime work were significantly higher when caseworkers had a greater number of cases than the state caseload standard for the investigations units and worked with at least two different types of cases simultaneously (e.g., working with both investigation and ongoing service cases). Additionally, sufficient staffing numbers to meet caseload demands at the regional level significantly decreased the odds ratio of having to do overtime work. The major findings suggest that the objective and subjective dimensions of workload vary by individual‐ and regional‐level variables. Practice implications are discussed for effective and efficient workload management in the public child welfare system.     

Practices of activation in frontline interactions: Coercion,persuasion, and the role of trust in activation policies in Germany

Following Michael Lipsky's well‐known argument that policy is made in the daily encounters between street‐level bureaucracy and citizens, a growing body of research emphasizes that actors and organizations delivering social and labor‐market policy play a crucial role in welfare‐state politics. Using qualitative data collected at three local employment agencies in Germany, this article explores worker‐client relations as a crucial mechanism through which activation policies are translated into practice. The analysis investigates how caseworkers define their role and their relationships with clients. The findings show that it is essential for caseworkers to achieve client compliance. In such a context, building relationships of trust is a strategic instrument in overcoming possible barriers to co‐operation in the caseworker‐client interaction. Caseworkers develop strategies to create the impression of trustworthiness and to motivate both unemployed clients and employers to become trust‐givers in the caseworker‐client relation. While research has often stressed the dichotomy between disciplining and enabling elements of activation policies, our explorative study shows that persuasion and trust‐building are a further important dimension of the frontline delivery of activation policies. These strategies reflect the importance of emotional aspects of frontline work.     

Importance Counts: The Role of Relative Importance of Service Elements in Client Satisfaction Measures

ABSTRACT

It is not uncommon for social work service providers, researchers, and evaluators to develop measures to obtain client satisfaction data relevant to their particular service settings. These measures are often constructed through a set of (usually Likert-type) satisfaction rating response items for each of the service elements relevant to their settings. Scores from these multiple items are then either summed or averaged to produce global satisfaction scores. By summing or averaging satisfaction scores across all items, one implicitly assumes that all survey items that represent various service elements carry equal weight. This assumption of equal weight is somewhat counterintuitive because individual clients may perceive certain survey items or service elements to be more important, or carry more weight, than others. Analyzing data from interviews with 112 clients of an elderly case management service agency in a large city in the Midwest region of the United States, this study examined this equal weight assumption in an elderly case management service setting. Results indicated that not all service elements were considered equally important, which called into question the common practice of summing or averaging satisfaction scores of various service elements to represent global client satisfaction.     

The role of roles in uniquely human cognition and sociality

To understand themselves as playing a social role, individuals must understand themselves to be contributing to a cooperative endeavor. Psychologically, the form of cooperation required is a specific type that only humans may possess, namely, one in which individuals form a joint or collective agency to pursue a common end. This begins ontogenetically not with the societal level but rather with more local collaboration between individuals. Participating in collaborative endeavors of this type leads young children, cognitively, to think in terms of different perspectives on a joint focus of attention - including ultimately an objective perspective - and to organize their experience in terms of a relational-thematic-narrative dimension. Socially, such participation leads young children to an understanding of self-other equivalence with mutual respect among collaborative partners and, ultimately, to a normative (i.e. moral) stance toward “we” in the community within which one is forming a moral role or identity. The dual-level structure of shared endeavors/realities with individual roles/perspectives is responsible for many aspects of the human species' most distinctive psychology.     

The New American Social Work Gospel: Case Management of the Chronically Mentally III

Correspondence to Dr R. A. Cnaan, School of Social Work, University of Pennsylvania, 3701 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. Summary Case management is currently the most popular mode of servicedelivery in the United States, especially in community programsfor chronically mentally ill people. Proponents of case managementclaim that it is cost-effective and that it assures provisionof necessary services to clients. In this paper I do not challengeits effectiveness but argue that case management neither empowersclients nor is it free of drawbacks. Given that many countriestend to model the United States, foreign social workers andother human service professionals should first examine the usefulnessof case management vis-à-vis their own cultural and economiccontexts, especially in the light of its many drawbacks.     

Social workers' perceptions of their power and service outcomes

While social workers are becoming increasingly interested in methods of client empowerment, little attention has yet focused on the links between workers' own power and the services they provide to clients. The authors examine the link between workers' perceptions of their power on the job and perceived service outcomes. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were conducted on survey responses from 591 direct practice social workers in Israel. Results indicate that power perceptions are significantly associated with an array of perceived service outcomes. These findings highlight the relevance of self-efficacy and control theory in understanding social workers' efforts toward effective service delivery. Further, they underscore a need to consider more carefully direct practitioners' own power concerns as they increasingly consider empowerment of their clients.     

Trial and error: attending to language barriers in child welfare service provision from the perspective of frontline workers

This paper reports on a qualitative study that used focus groups to gather data from the perspective of child protection workers on their experiences in providing services to clients with limited English proficiency (LEP). The goals of the study were to understand processes of relationship building and service provision that could contribute to improved practice. Focus groups are ideal in obtaining data on how a group deals with particular situations and for understanding their decision‐making processes. Measures to ensure rigour and trustworthiness were taken throughout the study. Findings provide rich and multilayered insights into the complexity of providing services for families with LEP showing that agencies use bilingual workers as well as interpreters for services. Participants noted, however, that services continued to be inconsistent with unclear guidelines and training about how and when to access interpreters. Lack of training for bilingual workers was also identified. Confidentiality issues, barriers to engaging with clients, problems with the quality of interpretation and role confusion together with benefits including interpreters being cultural and language ‘conduits’ and links to culturally specific services; enhanced communication decreasing the possibility of inaccurate assessments and lessening power differentials; and help with workload were noted.     

新冠肺炎疫情下美国生物安全战略的失灵与修复

生物安全越来越成为国家安全的重要组成部分,国际社会也意识到突发性的、新生的传染病治理是生物安全的重要内容。因此,对于生物安全问题,我们亟需提高警惕,高度重视。虽然美国在构建生物安全体系上取得重大成就,建立了四大支柱,但随着新冠疫情袭来,美国生物安全战略存在的问题逐渐凸显。本文重点研究在疫情防治过程中,美国生物安全战略的四大支柱在特朗普执政时期是如何失灵的,以及拜登政府的防疫措施在四大支柱方面将如何体现。同时,从美国国内、国际形势出发评估了拜登政府采取的生物安全措施的影响及面临的挑战。在梳理、探讨美国生物安全体系建设的得失之后,本文从国内和国际视角讨论了中国生物安全战略建设所应汲取的经验与教训。     

Homelessness in Europe and the United States: A Comparison of Prevalence and Public Opinion

Random samples of 250–435 adults were interviewed by telephone in five different nations ( N = 1,546): Belgium, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the United States. The interview included questions on respondent attitudes, knowledge, and opinions regarding homelessness; respondents' own personal experiences with homelessness and homeless people; and demographic characteristics of the respondents. The highest rates for lifetime literal homelessness were found in the UK (7.7%) and United States (6.2%), with the lowest rate in Germany (2.4%), and intermediate rates in Italy (4.0%) and Belgium (3.4%). Less compassionate attitudes toward the homeless were also found on many dimensions in the United States and the UK. Possible explanations of these findings, drawn from various theoretical perspectives, and policy implications are provided .     

Disciplining Disability under Danish Active Labour Market Policy

This article explores how caseworkers are re‐constructing disability in the Danish welfare system and disciplining themselves and clients according to the active labour policy paradigm. Combining Foucault's ideas about discipline with Maynard‐Moody and Musheno's method of interpreting street‐level bureaucrats' stories ( Foucault 1977 ; Maynard‐Moody and Musheno 2003 ), we analyze caseworkers' stories about their clients, fellow caseworkers and themselves to understand how they practice the ideology behind active labour policy. Our analysis uses Møller's (2009 ) interviews with 24 Danish caseworkers who administer social welfare and sick leave benefits based on disability as the primary eligibility criterion. We selected stories told by caseworkers that exemplify archetypes of good and bad citizens, good and bad clients, and good and bad caseworkers. Through interpretative analysis, we elucidate how caseworkers make sense of active labour policy and internalize the pressures of managerial reforms to discipline both citizens and each other.     

Storytelling as a tool: A family-based intervention for newly resettled Syrian refugee children

The conflict in Syria has resulted in a humanitarian emergency and one of the largest refugee crises in history. The Canadian government has welcomed over 40,000 Syrian refugees. Stressors caused by instability, conflict, and the resettlement process put refugee children at high risk for mental health problems. Anxiety is a common problem experienced by refugee children. Thus, early intervention is crucial to promote their adequate adaptation and development. This study explores the impact and value of a culturally specific family-based storybook intervention for newly resettled Syrian refugee children. Six refugee families participated. Anxiety symptoms were measured before and after the intervention, and families shared their experiences, thoughts, and feedback regarding the intervention. The results showed a significant decrease in children's anxiety symptoms. Furthermore, qualitative analyses demonstrated that the intervention was culturally relevant to Syrian refugee families and that it was effective in promoting children's overall well-being, agency, and family connectedness.     

The Geriatric Worker in a Community Mental Health Clinic:

Special geriatrics services are now a reality in many community mental health clinics, thus making it timely for clinicians and administrators to look at the problems faced by geriatric workers in that setting. This article addresses the problems in the worker's role by first comparing it to those of other special population mental health workers. Systemic difficulties and structural problems of the job are examined with emphasis on the worker's experiences and feelings. The author contends that the worker's issues parallel those of elderly clients. Solutions for changing negative aspects of the separate service role are discussed and their impact on service delivery described.