Fathers in child welfare: What do social work textbooks teach our students?

Research indicates that fathers in the child welfare system provide benefits to children's well-being and positive development, yet child welfare workers often do not engage fathers in services. Previous studies in Canada and the United Kingdom have found that child welfare training perpetuates negative perceptions of fathers. The current study conducted a content analysis of 217 vignettes in the texts used in required classes for students completing a concentration in child welfare classes in nine schools of social work at the public universities in a Southern U.S. state. Coding was completed independently by three researchers with an inter-rater reliability of 79%. Findings indicated that despite men being the perpetrator in 51% of vignettes, women were portrayed in just over half of vignettes (51%) as the sole caregiver responsible for ensuring the child's safety when the abuse occurred. The data were organized into five themes of how men and women were portrayed in the vignettes: Men as Threat, Men as No Different than Women, Men as Irrelevant, Men as Absent, and Women as Default Clients (the first four suggested by Scourfield (2001), and the last by the researchers). Results indicate that the bias against including fathers in child welfare services reported in other studies seems to start at the beginning of students' learning about child welfare work, in their required textbooks. Recommendations include updating child welfare textbooks to better address the role of men and fathers in children's lives, and increasing professors' and field instructors' awareness of the bias against men and fathers in child welfare.     

Judgements about parenting: what do social workers think they are doing?

This paper describes a study that looks at interrelationships between social workers' beliefs about the important elements of parenting to ensure a child's well‐being and their perceptions about what underpins their decision‐making about child care and protection. Q methodology is used to explore the range of views of a group of Scottish social workers. Eight different strands of opinion were revealed, three of which will be discussed in detail. They indicate that there is broad consistency of opinion within factors. That is, there is a link between views about children's needs and decision‐making. However, the different factors also demonstrate that there are clusters of significantly different opinions about priorities in assessing parenting. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What is social about criminal justice social work in Belgium?

This paper is concerned with how ‘social work’ is constructed in policy documents of Belgian criminal justice social work, applied to the Houses of Justice, Department of Offender Guidance (previously called the probation service). We argue that Belgian probation has been indeed under influence of controlling tendencies, however, these are masked in a managerial cloth rather than an open punitive stance. Second, we notice that social work values are interpreted in a very limited and methodical manner, namely with reference to the systems perspective of the Palo Alto school of Gregory Bateson and Paul Watzlawick as the work method for all Belgian probation tasks. Hence, from this analysis, we argue for a more radical debate on the relation between probation and social work.     

Why do working relationships not change? The need for a new approach to disability partnership research and social change

Although researchers, service providers, and clients are determined to improve partnerships within disability services, a lack of partnership persists. Using our research as a case study, we reflect on three limitations of common research methods and social change techniques in this area. We suggest that typical approaches struggle to move beyond taken-for-granted ideas, common-sense solutions, and established ideology in the field of disability. Consequently, they often fail to reveal important barriers to collaboration, identify innovative solutions, or initiate meaningful improvements in partnership. We propose a new approach to partnership research and reform grounded in a pragmatic model of social change and argue that projects based on isolated or simplistic data, majority-rule decision-making, simple and efficient planning, and restricted inside perspectives (where storytelling is limited) must be complemented by observational studies, socio-cultural analyses, and critical investigations. In short, we must understand why working relationships do not change to improve disability services.     

Teaching philosophies and practices in social work education: do the core competencies influence our consciousness?

Assessing the mechanisms by which EPAS core competencies are embodied in classroom teaching is important for comprehensively examining EPAS’ success. This case study of one program presents emergent findings about perceptions of teaching, and the influence of core competencies, derived from interviews conducted with faculty members at a graduate social work program. Participants were asked about their teaching philosophies and practices, and the influence of social work core competencies in framing their philosophies and practices. Four primary themes emerged: (1) engaging students in learning, (2) linking the classroom and field, (3) critical thinking, and (4) core competencies are not evident at a conscious level. Participants described strong ambiguity about how the core competencies consciously influence teaching approaches, while clearly stating goals for interacting with students, integrating field experiences in the classroom, and helping students build critical thinking skills. Implications for social work education are described.     

When do scientists become entrepreneurs? The social structural antecedents of commercial activity in the academic life sciences

The authors examine the conditions prompting university-employed life scientists to become entrepreneurs, defined to occur when a scientist (1) founds a biotechnology company, or (2) joins the scientific advisory board of a new biotechnology firm. This study draws on theories of social influence, socialization, and status dynamics to examine how proximity to colleagues in commercial science influences individuals' propensity to transition to entrepreneurship. To expose the mechanisms at work, this study also assesses how proximity effects change over time as for-profit science diffuses through the academy. Using adjusted proportional hazards models to analyze case-cohort data, the authors find evidence that the orientation toward commercial science of individuals' colleagues and coauthors, as well as a number of other workplace attributes, significantly influences scientists' hazards of transitioning to for-profit science.     

Reciprocity and uncertainty: When do people forgive?

A sizable proportion of individuals act reciprocally. They punish and reward depending on the (un)kindness of those with whom they interact. In this paper, I explore whether individuals still reciprocate intentions when others lack full control over the consequences of their actions. By means of a dictator game with punishment opportunities, I show that unkind intentions are enough to trigger punishments, irrespectively of the outcome. By contrast, accidents are forgiven. To isolate how uncertainty over the result of an action affects the assessment of intentions, I control for other possible departures from self-profit maximization, such as distributional concerns or efficiency maximization. I find that the former also plays a role in respondents’ behavior.     

Presenting welfare reform: poverty porn,telling sad stories or achieving change?

Much is written about the suffering resulting from welfare reform and other cuts for disabled people and others on the receiving end. Usually this is seen as a ‘good thing’. But is it as simple as that? It may not be the same as so-called television poverty porn, but what is the point of constantly recycling welfare reform’s effects? Judging from last May’s general election, doing this does not seem to have had a significant effect on public politics/attitudes. So perhaps we need to look at it more carefully. When might discussion of welfare reform be helpful and when unhelpful? Is not the real task to develop alternatives, rather than hope as the Fabians did, that if we show how awful things are, ‘then something will have to be done’?     

How do social work novices and experts solve professional problems? A micro-analysis of epistemic activities and the use of evidence

Evidence-based practice in social work is an intensely debated topic, with many differing perspectives on how it should be done. However, we know surprisingly little about how social workers actually engage in professional problem-solving and about the knowledge base of those processes. To shed light on this topic of social work expertise, we present a novel model of scientific reasoning and argumentation and investigate how experts and novices differ in the reasoning processes they engage in as they are confronted with social work problems. Vignettes were used to capture reasoning processes, and the corresponding verbal data were then analysed. In this study, 26 probation officers and 22 social work students participated. The findings show that experts differ from novices with respect to both their knowledge bases and the epistemic activities in which they engage. Furthermore, a cluster analysis revealed three common problem-solving strategies: evidence-based solution seeking (15 experts and 15 novices), shared problem-solving (8 experts) and explanation seeking (1 expert and 7 novices). The results indicate the need to improve the practical problem-solving skills of students through situated teaching methods.     

When do severe sanctions enhance compliance? The role of procedural fairness

Building on theoretical notions that severe sanctions (more than mild ones) can communicate that sanctioned behavior is morally unacceptable, we argued that particularly authorities who enact the sanction procedures in a fair manner stimulate compliance with their decisions. This is because such authorities should be considered legitimate to communicate what is morally acceptable and unacceptable. This interactive effect of sanction size and procedural fairness on compliance should thus be mediated by moral evaluations of the authority. A field survey and an experiment revealed support for these predictions. These results thus support a non-instrumental perspective on the effectiveness of sanction severity in increasing compliance with authorities.     

What do we really know about usual care child protective services?

The term “usual care” is often used in clinical research to refer to a comparison or control group that is receiving whatever normal services an organization may provide. In the US child protection system, “usual care” is the practice from the point of screening in a report, to assessment and possible in-home services or a decision to place a child in out of home care. Policy and practice variations across states and counties, as well as changes in policy over time, make research on normative child welfare practice services challenging but necessary. The service delivery mechanism in child protection is understudied, limiting our ability to inform decision-making at the local, state and federal levels. Gaps in knowledge also confound intervention research because a clear understanding of a given service platform is key when interpreting effect sizes against usual care controls. This article overviews what is known about “usual care” in child protective services and seeks to encourage more research in this area by reviewing six key factors related to measuring the impact of usual care from the point of initial report through the provision of services.     

What do we know about employee absence behavior? An interdisciplinary interpretation

The absenteeism literature exhibits three fundamental approaches to research; absence is assumed to be either (1) individual, (2) social, or (3) economic behavior. Although research has been informed by several disciplines, it cannot be said that absence research, in toto, has proceeded on the basis of an interdisciplinary perspective. This paper first identifies the contributions and limitations of each approach. An interdisciplinary interpretation of the literature implies that the explanations provided by these approaches are complementary such that individual, social, and economic forces determine absence behavior in an interdependent fashion. Subsequent gains in our understanding of absence behavior are therefore likely to be contingent upon an interdisciplinary approach to research.     

Talking about emotion: how are conversations about emotion enabled in the context of social work practice education?

It is widely acknowledged that emotion is a potent force in social work practice and practice education which can have a significant impact on both practice and practitioner experience. So too, is the recognition that social work students may face higher levels of stress than their qualified colleagues—social work itself, one of the professions where workers often experience higher levels of emotional demand than do other occupational groups. In terms of professional training courses for students entering the ‘helping professions’, there is a visible theme of heightened student pressure that relates, in some way, to the practicum aspect of their qualifying course. Relatedly, there is a clear consensus that the quality of the student-Practice Educator relationship is a key determinant of student learning and student experience. This article presents the findings of a small-scale qualitative research study, investigating how conversations about emotion are enabled within supervision, from a sample of final year qualifying students (n = 4) and Practice Educators (n = 5). It intends to make a contribution to the literature concerned with the development of good practice in this area, with a particular focus on the facilitative approaches of Practice Educators and the preparation of students for professional practice.     

Where do intra-organizational advice relations come from? The role of informal status and social capital in social exchange

Social status and social capital frameworks are used to derive competing hypotheses about the emergence and structure of advice relations in organizations. Although both approaches build on a social exchange framework, they differ in their behavioral micro-foundations. From a status perspective, advice giving is a means to generate prestige, whereas asking advice decreases one's relative standing. At a structural level these motivations are expected to result in an overrepresentation of non-reciprocal dyads and non-cyclical triadic structures in the advice network, as well as in active advice seekers being unlikely to be approached for advice, especially by active advice givers. From a social capital perspective, advice seeking creates obligations for the advice seeker. At the structural level, this results in an overrepresentation of reciprocal dyads and cyclical triads, and active advice seekers to be unpopular as targets of advice seeking, especially for active advice givers. Analyses of four waves of a longitudinal sociometric study of 57 employees of a Dutch Housing Corporation provide partial support for both approaches. In line with the social capital perspective, we find reciprocal advice relations to be overrepresented at the dyad level. Results at the triad level support the social status arguments, according to which high status individuals will avoid asking advice from low status individuals. The implications for macro-structural properties of intra-organizational advice network are discussed.