Abortion,Partial-Birth Abortion,and Adolescent Access to Abortion: An Overview for Social Workers

Although the U.S Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion in 1973, intense controversy over access, legality, and morality has persisted ever since that landmark decision. National opinion data collected from 1975 to 2007 show that a majority of Americans support a woman's right to an abortion, but this right is increasingly under attack, and recent proposed changes to abortion access are not in line with how most Americans feel. This paper considers public opinion trends in the sharply divided arenas of abortion, partial-birth abortion, and adolescents' rights to access abortion with a critical eye to social work practice. We explore several opportunities for social workers to advocate for clients, including legislative advocacy, reform through litigation, social action, and social policy analysis.     

Significance of protesters’ words during Gezi Park protests: finding implicit meanings in sticky notes and tweets

Based on archival and qualitative field research, this paper describes how the philanthropic investments of the Max L. Rosenberg Foundation contributed to the emergence of the historic California Farm Worker Movement. The author argues that foundations do not always have articulated or clear-cut political agendas to dilute organizing campaigns; instead moments of agreement (and antagonism) emerge and are fluidly negotiated as points of convergence appear and disappear. This paper reveals the three critical periods in which the Max L. Rosenberg Foundation invested in farmworker organizations in California's Central Valley: the dustbowl migrant education period of the 1930–1940s, the self-help housing projects of the 1950s, and the early leadership training campaigns of the Farm Worker Movement of the 1960s. This paper makes a significant contribution to resource mobilization theory by showing how private funding of a particular social movement (and therefore perhaps others if examined) was most aligned with the goals of the movement at the open-ended idealist beginnings. This alignment ruptured during the heat of the late 1960s when demands were made on picket lines and through international boycotts and became most problematic in the wake of significant defeats when movement organizations reshaped and professionalized themselves around foundation grants and ceased to represent their original constituents.     

Movement Building and the United States Social Forum

Despite the growing academic literature on the World Social Forum process, few scholars have attempted to systematically analyze the social, cultural, and political impact of the forums. This has to do in part with the inherent difficulties of assessing movement consequences, which is particularly complicated for an activity geared toward creating ‘open spaces.’ This article presents an analytic framework for evaluating the impact of the social forums through an analysis of the 2010 United States Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit from the perspective of a local Boston-based delegation called the Boston Freedom Rides. We then use that framework to consider the impact of the 2010 USSF, bridging the academic literature on movement outcomes with activist perspectives. We make two related claims. First, the social forums, and the USSF in particular, should be viewed and their impact assessed in light of their generativity as ‘movement-building machines’: infrastructures designed for the production of social capital, networks, solidarities, meanings, frames, identities, knowledges, strategies, skills, and repertoires. Second, with respect to the Freedom Rides, the 2010 USSF contributed to movement building on multiple levels, but more so within rather than across movement sectors. Our goal is less to make a definitive argument about the impact of the 2010 USSF than to provide a helpful way of thinking about movement building as a social movement outcome, which can be applied and refined through further comparative and longitudinal research. We thus favor breadth over depth in outlining a broad framework for future inquiry.     

Perceptions about Skin Colour and Heritage: The Experience of Anglo-Indian Women in Western Australia

Anglo-Indian women have been described as ‘mixed-race’ and ‘hybrid’. This paper explores the identity of 26 Anglo-Indian women in Western Australia. The process of immigration to and settlement in Australia provides a major focus. Two components of identity that emerged were perceptions about skin colour and Indian heritage. 22 women who participated in this study emigrated from India between 1947 and 1996. Four other women were Australian-born. This qualitative study involved in-depth, semi-structured interviews with the participants who expressed varying levels of identification with Anglo-Indian identity. Realisations about prejudice and discrimination came to the fore during the interview process. This paper picks up on these realisations, investigates the social environments within which they developed and their implications for the identities of Anglo-Indian women.     

Older Women with Cardiovascular Disease: Perceptions of Initial Experiences and Long-Term Influences on Daily Life

ABSTRACT

In 2004, we conducted qualitative interviews with 29 White women diagnosed with cardiovascular disease (CVD) living in Southwest Virginia, aged 69 to 92 years (M age = 79.2 years; SD = 6.8); time since diagnosis ranged from 1 to 50 years (M = 14.3; SD = 11.2). We explored the women's initial illness episode and the influence of CVD on their current daily functioning, family activities and relationships, and social engagement. The women were slow to seek help for CVD symptoms. Postrecovery, 62% of women perceived their heart disease as influencing change in their daily lives. The influence of CVD varied depending on how congruent behavior changes were with their sense of self.     

Economic Restructuring and Changing Prevalence of Female-headed Families in America1

Abstract Industrial restructuring has altered economic circumstances in the U.S., but the influences of these changes on family structure are not clear. This study examines whether industrial restructuring influences female headship and whether these effects differ in nonmetro and metro counties. Results based on data from the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Census of Population and Housing Summary Tape Files indicate several conclusions. First, female headed households increased more rapidly in nonmetro than metro counties from 1980 to 1990, although there was a great deal of variation across counties. Second, industrial restructuring contributed to change in female headship in nonmetro and metro counties, and changes in various industries had differing effects on female headship. Third, overall gains in women's employment in a county had no influence on formation of female headed households, gains in men's employment deterred female headship, and gains for women in specific industries tended to slow formation of these households. Fourth, controlling for changes in median income and part-time work did little to reduce the industry-specific influences on change in female headship. The results suggest that linkages between industrial restructuring and family structure do exist, although the models are less able to explain changes in female headship in nonmetro than in metro counties.     

Modelling and simulation to improve decision‐making in clinical development

Modelling and simulation are buzz words in clinical drug development. But is clinical trial simulation (CTS) really a revolutionary technique? There is not much more to CTS than applying standard methods of modelling, statistics and decision theory. However, doing this in a systematic way can mean a significant improvement in pharmaceutical research. This paper describes in simple examples how modelling could be used in clinical development. Four steps are identified: gathering relevant information about a drug and the disease; building a mathematical model; predicting the results of potential future trials; and optimizing clinical trials and the entire clinical programme. We discuss these steps and give a number of examples of model components, demonstrating that relatively unsophisticated models may also prove useful. We stress that modelling and simulation are decision tools and point out the benefits of integrating them with decision analysis. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A critical review of race and ethnicity in the leadership literature: Surfacing context,power and the collective dimensions of leadership

Leadership studies focusing on race–ethnicity provide particularly rich contexts to illuminate the human condition as it pertains to leadership. Yet insights about the leadership experience of people of color from context-rich research within education, communications and black studies remain marginal in the field. Our framework integrates these, categorizing reviewed studies according to the effects of race–ethnicity on perceptions of leadership, the effects of race–ethnicity on leadership enactments, and actors' approach to the social reality of race–ethnicity. The review reveals a gradual convergence of theories of leadership and theories of race–ethnicity as their relational dimensions are increasingly emphasized. A shift in the conceptualization of race–ethnicity in relation to leadership is reported, from a constraint to a personal resource to a simultaneous consideration of its constraining and liberating capacity. Concurrent shifts in the treatment of context, power, agency versus structure and causality are also explored, as are fertile areas for future research.     

Assessing Trade‐offs among Multiple Objectives for Humanitarian Aid Delivery Using Expert Preferences

Humanitarian aid agencies deliver emergency supplies and services to people affected by disasters. Scholars and practitioners have developed modeling approaches to support aid delivery planning, but they have used objective functions with little validation as to the trade‐offs among the multiple goals of aid delivery. We develop a method to value the performance of aid delivery plans based on expert preferences over five key attributes: the amount of cargo delivered, the prioritization of aid by commodity type, the prioritization of aid by delivery location, the speed of delivery, and the operational cost. Through a conjoint analysis survey, we measure the preferences of 18 experienced humanitarian logisticians. The survey results quantify the importance of each attribute and enable the development of a piecewise linear utility function that can be used as an objective function in optimization models. The results show that the amount of cargo delivered is the most valued objective and cost the least important. In addition, experts prioritize more vulnerable communities and more critical commodities, but not to the exclusion of others. With these insights and the experts’ utility functions, better humanitarian objective functions can be developed to enable better aid delivery in emergency response.