State of the art in U.S. multicultural social work practice: Client expectations and provider challenges

ABSTRACT

To obtain a comprehensive view of the level of knowledge and development achieved in multicultural social work practice, I conducted a scoping review of U.S. empirical literature for the 10-year period from 2007 through 2016. The review revealed that across the board racial and ethnic minority clients continue to experience marginalization and report low satisfaction with services. Conversely, providers are subject to some tensions and biases toward multicultural practice exacerbated by employers’ lack of emphasis on cultural competence. The problematic findings from the review suggest that our current approaches to cultural competence may need to be reexamined.     

Optimal designs under a multivariate linear model with additional nuisance parameters

The purpose of this paper is to characterize optimal designs under a multivariate linear model with additional nuisance parameters. We give relationships between optimality of designs in univariate models and in their multivariate extensions with known and partially known dispersion matrices.     

Polish complementary schools in Iceland and England

Since 2004, the opening of labour markets has spurred a considerable number of Poles to emigrate e.g. to Iceland and England. Families with school age children have had the challenge of adapting to foreign environments and school systems. Polish complementary schools have played an important, albeit ambivalent, role in this process. Through focus group interviews with students in Polish complementary schools in one city in Iceland and one city in England, we gathered information showing common threads between both schools as well as differences in their structure, role, origin and the student motivation to participate. Saturday schools abroad are considered to be less demanding by students than regular schools back in Poland, but more so than regular Icelandic/English schools, which many rate as unsatisfactory in terms of their academic development. The tension between the need for freedom and high expectations for the academic outcome of education influences student opinions, not only about schooling, but also about the host society.     

Touch,Compliance, and Homophobia

As has already been indicated in numerous studies, touching or holding someone by the arm while asking for something increases our chances of having our request fulfilled. However, the three experiments presented in this article which were conducted in Poland, indicate that in the conditions when a man requests something from another man, touch actually negatively affects the chances for request fulfillment. This effect seems to be linked to the strong male homophobia characteristic of the society within which the experiments were carried out.     

Interval estimation of parameters in an unbalanced mixed two-fold nested classification-the last-stage uniformity case

A procedure for the construction of exact simultaneous confidence intervals on functions of the fixed-effects parameters and on functions of variance components in an unbalanced, mixed, two-fold nested classification is introduced. The type of model considered in this paper enables the construction of such intervals to be based on the corresponding ANOVA table using its mean square ratios.     

Bounds on dispersion of order statistics based on dependent symmetrically distributed random variables

We consider a fixed number of arbitrarily dependent random variables with a common symmetric marginal distribution. For each order statistic based on the variables, we determine a common optimal bound, dependent in a simple way on the sample size and number of order statistics, for various measures of dispersion of the order statistics, expressed in terms of the same dispersion measure of the single original variable. The dispersion measures are connected with the notion of M-functional of a random variable location with respect to a symmetric and convex loss function. The measure is defined as the expected loss paid for the discrepancy between the M-functional and the variable. The most popular examples are the median absolute deviation and variance.     

Simultaneous choice of time points and the block design in the growth curve model

The aim of this paper is to consider the optimality in the growth curve model with respect to two aspects: time and the block design and to show some relations between information functions for different designs. The A-, D- and E- optimality are studied.     

Packing <Emphasis Type="Bold">[1, Δ]</Emphasis>-factors in graphs of small degree

Given an undirected, connected graph G with maximum degree Δ, we introduce the concept of a [1, Δ]-factor k-packing in G, defined as a set of k edge-disjoint subgraphs of G such that every vertex of G has an incident edge in at least one subgraph. The problem of deciding whether a graph admits a [1,Δ]-factor k-packing is shown to be solvable in linear time for k = 2, but NP-complete for all k≥ 3. For k = 2, the optimisation problem of minimising the total number of edges of the subgraphs of the packing is NP-hard even when restricted to subcubic planar graphs, but can in general be approximated within a factor of by reduction to the Maximum 2-Edge-Colorable Subgraph problem. Finally, we discuss implications of the obtained results for the problem of fault-tolerant guarding of a grid, which provides the main motivation for research.     

A constrained optimum experimental design problem for model discrimination with a continuously varying factor

We present the theoretical background and the numerical procedure for calculating optimum experimental designs for non-linear model discrimination in the presence of constraints. The design support points consist of two kinds of factors: a continuous function of time and discrete levels of other quantitative factors. That is, some of the experimental conditions are allowed to continually vary during the experimental run. We implement the theory in a chemical kinetic model discrimination problem.     

Effects of human-related disturbance on breeding success of urban and non-urban blue tits (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Cyanistes caeruleus</Emphasis>)

There is a need to study the effects of urbanization on wildlife in order to understand the ecological implications of increasing urbanization and find out how to reduce its threats to biodiversity. The blue tit evolved as a forest species and prefers deciduous and mixed forests, whereas its nesting in urban habitats is a more recent phenomenon. Our long-term study of blue tit populations has been conducted in two habitats: an urban parkland (frequently visited by people) and a deciduous forest outside of the city. Using linear mixed modeling, we revealed that a relationship of blue tit breeding success (and the number of fledglings) with thermal conditions in May differed between the urban parkland and the forest. While the relationship was positive in the forest, it was negative in the parkland. In addition, breeding success in the parkland increased with increasing number of rainy days in May. We argue that the main possible reason for such patterns is human activity in the parkland, which interferes with tit parental care, especially the regular feeding of nestlings, whereas it is evidently associated with weather conditions. Human disturbance in the forest is likely to be negligible.