Nonstandard parental employment schedules and father involvement

This study assesses the impact of nonstandard employment schedules (shift work) on parenting among US fathers of young children in dual-earner couples. The outcomes examined include total caregiving, caregiving without the mother present, and the elements of father involvement proposed by Pleck: positive engagement, warmth, and control. Models with latent variables and with lagged dependent variables are estimated using three waves of nationally representative data from the Early Child Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort. The results indicate that employment scheduling mainly shapes the context in which involvement takes place. Compared to dual-earner couples who are each employed during the day, fathers in couples in which at least one parent has a nonstandard schedule tend to care for their children more in the mother's absence. To a more limited extent, they also do more caregiving overall. These effects are most conclusively found when the father works during the day and the mother works during the evening, when the mother works during the day but the father works a night, split, rotating, or other shift, and when both parents have nonstandard schedules. Parental work schedules, however, have little impact on father involvement aside from care.     

城乡差异、就医惯性与老年人卫生服务利用

现有对城乡老年人卫生服务利用不公平的研究多忽略了长期的城乡差异所导致的隐性的农村老年人就医惯性的存在。本研究在控制了收入、医疗保障和就医可及性等因素的条件下，发现就医惯性的存在；并运用集中指数分解法发现，卫生服务的利用存在不公平，偏向于富人，而就医惯性在两种卫生服务利用中的贡献度分别为12%和5%。这种城乡固定差异造成了农村老年人在身体健康、心理健康和自我照料能力上都显著地低于城市老年人。     

An Ecological Understanding of Caregiver Experiences in Palliative Care

Palliative care is specialized health care to improve quality of life for patients with serious illness and their families through prevention and relief of suffering. A Palliative Care Institute was held in western Washington to capture community voices about diverse needs, strengths, and opportunities for improvement of palliative care. Researchers employed qualitative methods to obtain thematic data, provide real-time analysis, and engage in a multivoting technique to reflect stakeholder interest in individual themes and prioritize larger group interests. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems framework was used to explore caregiver experiences. Within the microsystem, caregivers reported difficulties in interactions with medical providers as a key challenge. Within the mesosysytem, interactions between patients and medical providers and the impact on caregivers were explored. Within the exosystem, caregivers reported lack of control over the schedules of personal care staff. Macrosystem influences included impact of local culture on the development of palliative care services. Chronosystem influences include de-medicalization of childbirth and its impact on perceptions of palliative care. Implications include the need for social workers to be proactive in fostering trust and effective communication between care providers and caregivers, and the demand for health care provider training in communication with patients and families.     

Daring to care: the role of culturally relevant care in mentoring Black and Latino male high school students

This study seeks to challenge the uni-dimensional way care in school is written about by highlighting an often overlooked aspect of care – the kind that students do for each other. Data is drawn from focus groups conducted with the youth participants and founder of Umoja Network for Young Men (UMOJA), an all-male, school-based mentoring program for over-aged and under-credited (OA/UC) high school students. The authors draw on theories of culturally relevant pedagogy, care, and critical pedagogy to present the findings and propose a form of culturally relevant care (CRC) that entails warm demanding and building mutual trust. This study highlights the humanizing experiences of the Black and Latino male transfer students and their mentor. This focus on the experiences of young Black and Latino male participants seeks to shift the discourse from one focused on deficits to one that recognizes their agency and capacities for social and academic success.     

Sense of School Membership and Associated Academic and Psychological Outcomes in Post-Institutionalized Adopted High School Students

Research highlights lasting cognitive and academic challenges in youth internationally adopted from institutional care. However, there is a lack of research examining internationally adopted students' sense of membership at school and associated academic and psychological outcomes. The current study measured sense of school membership and academic and psychological outcomes in post-institutionalized internationally adopted high school students (n = 29) compared to adolescents internationally adopted from foster care (n = 28) and non-adopted adolescents (n = 32). Post-institutionalized males had a lower sense of school membership than males adopted from foster care or non-adopted males. Group differences in school membership were mediated by academic achievement and psychological well-being.     

Shit is good: Mental health social work with lives of squalor

This paper investigates the phenomenon of three clients living in squalor, all of whom have severe and enduring mental health problems, and are on the caseload of a mental health social work team. By thinking about the clients both individually and as a group, within a psychoanalytic framework, it attempts to understand their squalor in a new way, with particular regard to the transference and countertransference experienced by the practitioner. By making use of social work literature as well as that concerning organisations and community care, it also discusses the impact these clients make on the wider community around them, and examines some of the dilemmas faced by the practitioner. The implications for social work are serious and far-reaching and these are discussed with regard to long-term intervention as well as professional and personal scrutiny.     

‘More like a daughter than an employee’: the kinning process between migrant care workers,elderly care receivers and their extended families

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the intersections of formal and informal care in the relationships that develop between elderly care receivers and their families and migrant domestic care workers and their families. The domestic migrant care literature has tended to focus on two main ‘hidden costs’ of this ‘care-chain’: the ‘care exploitation’ of paid carers by their employers and the ‘care drain’ impact on the family members left behind by the migrant. In this paper, we employ a care circulation framework to examine the process of becoming kin-like – or ‘kinning’, which remains relatively under-explored and warrants further research. An analysis of this process of kinning helps to highlight how the domestic space of care receiver homes are transformed – through the negotiation of relationships with migrant care workers – into transnational social fields that bring the diaspora worlds of the migrants into the everyday worlds of the locals.     

Testing Wagner's Law in India: A cointegration and causality analysis

The present study empirically analyzes the validity of Wagner's Law for Indian economy. With the use of annual time series data from 1970–71 to 2013–14, all the six versions of Wagner's Law have been analyzed to test the relationship between government expenditure and gross domestic product. Wagner's Law states that the economic growth is the causative factor of the growth of the public expenditure. The study applied the unit root test and cointegration test to find the long-run relationship between government expenditure and gross domestic product. The present study employed the various econometric techniques such as unit root test, cointegration, and causality analysis for empirical analysis. The empirical analysis under study inferred mixed results of Wagner's Law for Indian economy, where four versions, namely Peacock, Gupta, Guffman, and Musgrave, found valid for Indian economy. The study concluded that the Wagner's Law is valid for the Indian economy except the Pryor and Mann Versions of the Wagner's Law.     

Staff Member Reactions to Same-Gender,Resident-to-Resident Sexual Behavior Within Long-Term Care Facilities

The current study assesses ageism and heterosexism relating to older adult sexual activity within long-term care facilities. To assess caregiver reactions, 153 residential care facility staff members read one of three vignettes. Each vignette described a scenario in which a staff member walks in on two residents (male/female, male/male, or female/female) engaging in sexual activity. Although no main effects were discovered for vignette type, exploratory analyses revealed that the facility where participants were employed was significantly related to their ratings of approval. Furthermore, an interaction effect between vignette and facility types was also discovered for caregivers’ approval of sexual activity among residents. Additionally, a strong overall approval rating of older adult sexuality was reported by staff members. The results of this study warrant that further research is necessary regarding older adults’ perception of caregiver bias, as well as further investigation of caregivers’ perceptions of older adults’ sexual activity.