Assembling life history narratives from quantitative longitudinal panel data: What’s the story for families using social work?

Abstract

Embedded within quantitative longitudinal panel or cohort studies is narrative potential that is arguably untapped but might enrich our understanding of individual and social lives across time. This paper discusses a methodology to assemble the life history narratives of families using social work by drawing on quantitative data from the British Household Panel Survey. It explores whether this person-centred approach helps us to understand the counter-intuitive results of a parallel multivariate analyses, which suggest that families using social work fare worse than similar others over time. Our findings are tentative, due to the experimental use of this narrative method and the limits of social work information in the data-set. Nonetheless, the life histories presented bring to light complexities, diversity and the non-linear pathways between families’ needs, support and outcomes that the aggregates obscure. We conclude that reconstructing families’ lives in this way, especially in the absence of complementary longitudinal qualitative data, affords the wider opportunity to interrogate and better understand the findings of quantitative longitudinal studies.     

Family Instability and the Transition to Adulthood

Children's experience of repeated family structure change has a robust association with compromised development across the early life course. Implicit in prior research is the expectation that disparities in cognition and behavior accumulate through childhood and adolescence to influence the transition to adulthood. The authors assessed the association of early and later family structure instability with events in the transition to adulthood up to age 24 using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 8,841).They found that early and later family instability are associated with low rates of college completion, early union formation and childbearing, and an early entry into the labor force. The associations are explained by family structure, delinquency, and academic performance in adolescence.     

A Rapid Review of Sexual Wellbeing Definitions and Measures: Should We Now Include Sexual Wellbeing Freedom?

An increasing number of studies refer to sexual wellbeing and/or seek to measure it, and the term appears across various policy documents, including sexual health frameworks in the UK. We conducted a rapid review to determine how sexual wellbeing has been defined, qualitatively explored and quantitatively measured. Eligible studies selected for inclusion from OVID Medline, PsychInfo, PubMed, Embase, CINAHL were: in English language, published after 2007, were peer-reviewed full articles, focused on sexual wellbeing (or proxies for, e.g. satisfaction, function), and quantitatively or qualitatively assessed sexual wellbeing. We included studies with participants aged 16–65. Given study heterogeneity, our synthesis and findings are reported using a narrative approach. We identified 162 papers, of which 10 offered a definition of sexual wellbeing. Drawing upon a socio-ecological model, we categorised the 59 dimensions we identified from studies under three main domains: cognitive-affect (31 dimensions); inter-personal (22 dimensions); and socio-cultural (6 dimensions). Only 11 papers were categorised under the socio-cultural domain, commonly focusing on gender inequalities or stigma. We discuss the importance of conceptualising sexual wellbeing as individually experienced but socially and structurally influenced, including assessing sexual wellbeing freedom: a person’s freedom to achieve sexual wellbeing, or their real opportunities and liberties.     

Losing Ann: Countertransference Aspects of Altering the Frame with a Long Term Patient Facing Atypical Dementia

This paper chronicles the journey of a long term, suicidally depressed patient’s struggle of growth and survival, only to be struck down by a form of Dementia: Lewy Body Disorder. Focus of the paper highlights the myriad complications and struggles that developed in the countertransference as therapist, patient, family, and medical caregivers, try to ascertain: What is psychological and regressive? What is neuro-degenerative? How can the therapist cope with this confusion while maintaining the frame? The paper highlights how the frame as we know it, is altered to meet the medical and psychological crisis presented and how that alteration impacts the treatment and the therapist’s changing perception of what the work is about.     

Starting to assess anti-racist practice in the DipSW

This paper reports on a small study financed by CCETSW's Welsh Committee and commissioned by its Anti-Racism Sub-Committee. It concerns an attempt to help practice teachers in a sample of all-white or predominantly white placements to assess students' awareness of anti-racist practice in accordance with DipSW requirements through the use of assignments provided by the programme. The study evaluates this process through the responses of students and practice teachers and concludes that, with appropriate support, this approach can make a useful contribution to learning, assessment and consciousness raising.     

Mapping vulnerability to climate change-related hazards: children at risk in a US–Mexico border metropolis

There are significant human impacts associated with climate change. This paper introduces a model for identifying small area risks associated with children’s vulnerability to climate change-related hazard exposures, which is transferable to other regions and adaptable to varied population and exposure scenarios. The cross-national El Paso-Ciudad Juárez (US-Mexico) metropolis serves as the study area for model implementation, which involves mapping social vulnerability, hazard exposure, and cumulative climate change-related risks. This study addresses two limitations of extant fine-scale climate change vulnerability mapping studies. First, rather than focusing on one exposure variable, it assesses the combined risks of multiple exposures (extreme heat, peak ozone, and floods) and, thus, offers a model for mapping neighborhood-level cumulative climate change exposure risks. Second, it provides a model for small area spatial analyses of climate change vulnerability within low-/middle-income countries and in contexts where climate change risks (and appropriate responses) are cross-national in scope.     

Expanding the Role of Long-Term Care Social Workers: Assessment and Intervention Related to Urinary Incontinence

Urinary incontinence (UI) is a common and stigmatizing problem faced by long-term care (LTC) residents. It is typically addressed by medical professionals, with social work rarely involved. The purpose of this article is to illustrate how social workers can address the psychosocial implications of UI while working with residents and their family members as part of an interdisciplinary team. Using a case example and the NASW objectives for LTC, recommendations on how the role of the LTC social workers can be expanded to better address both the needs of residents, families, and the larger LTC system are provided.     

Inference of Signs of Interaction Effects in Simultaneous Games With Incomplete Information

This paper studies the inference of interaction effects in discrete simultaneous games with incomplete information. We propose a test for the signs of state‐dependent interaction effects that does not require parametric specifications of players' payoffs, the distributions of their private signals, or the equilibrium selection mechanism. The test relies on the commonly invoked assumption that players' private signals are independent conditional on observed states. The procedure is valid in (but does not rely on) the presence of multiple equilibria in the data‐generating process (DGP). As a by‐product, we propose a formal test for multiple equilibria in the DGP. We also implement the test using data on radio programming of commercial breaks in the United States, and infer stations' incentives to synchronize their commercial breaks. Our results support the earlier finding by Sweeting (2009) that stations have stronger incentives to coordinate and air commercials at the same time during rush hours and in smaller markets.     

Power in families,communication, and fertility decision-making

Decisions on family size and fertility regulation are made within the household, and yet little research has focused on the effects of power relationships within families on demographic decisions. To clarify the situation, the paper presents an original framework, linking bases of power between husbands and wives, resulting communication processes, and decision-making outcomes. The framework is applied to decision-making regarding contraceptive use or abortion, which can be a passive decision, a unilateral decision made openly or surreptitiously by one partner, or a joint decision between husband and wife, depending upon the particular power relationship pre-dominating in the family: coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, expert, or informational power. To illustrate the utility and viability of this framework, available data from fertility surveys and anthropological studies conducted in Latin America are reviewed and analyzed, as well as policy implications for the design of family planning delivery programs.The author wishes to thank Kurt W. Back, Mead T. Cain, Michele G. Shedlin, Joanne Spicehandler, and J. Mayone Stycos for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, and Luis de la Macorra for his permission to cite data collected by PROFAM-PIACT de México. Requests for reprints should be directed to Paula E. Hollerbach, The Population Council, Center for Policy Studies, One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, New York 10017.