Perspectives on determinants of social welfare: commentary

In this commentary we discuss and elaborate on a number of topics that have been raised in the articles in this issue. The first topic treated is causality. All scientists are aware of the difficulties of making causal inferences in non-experimental settings, and in many cases arguments are forwarded that support the causal interpretation of the reported relationships. Questions of bi-directional causality, nonlinear relationships and the importance of omitted variables are discussed, as is the supporting evidence that in some cases comes from experimental studies. The second topic is the level of analysis employed in the empirical analyses and the difficulty of interpreting findings at a different level of aggregation than the level applied in these analyses. In this context, the importance of applying a person-orientation is pointed out to ensure that the findings are interpretable at the level of the single individual. Even in individual-level analyses, this can be problematic if one relies on group statistics produced within a variable-oriented framework. The third topic concerns how to handle interactions and nonlinear relationships. The fourth topic concerns the importance of improving measurements so that a good correspondence is achieved between them and the theoretical conceptualisations. The fifth and last topic is concerned with the argument that different ways of investigating the generalisability of the results to different populations should be tried.     

Laziness or liberation? Labor market policies and workers' attitudes toward employment flexibility

This study examined the relationship between labor market policies and employees' willingness to make concessions in order to avoid unemployment. In contrast to previous work that analyzed the behavior of employers and the unemployed, we examined how labor market policies influence employees' flexibility. Multilevel modeling techniques were applied to a data set that was created by combining individual‐level data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) with country‐level information from the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development. The main findings of our analyses were that dismissal protection and unemployment benefits do make a difference to employees' willingness to make concessions, and that the relationships between the willingness to make concessions and labor market policies are nonlinear. Substantively, these nonlinear relationships suggest that employees' willingness to be flexible is negatively associated with both “too much” and “too little” social protection.     

Causality in Contemporary American Sociology: An Empirical Assessment and Critique

Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that (1) “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making causal claims, (2) research methods affect but do not determine causal usage, and (3) the use of explicit causal language and the concept of “mechanisms” to make causal claims is limited. Instead, we find that metaphors and metaphoric reasoning are fundamental for causal claims‐making in the discipline. On this basis, we define three dominant causal types used in sociology today, which we label the Probabilistic, Initiating and Conditioning types. We theorize this outcome as demonstrating the primary role that cognitive models play in providing inference‐rich metaphors that allow sociologists to map causal relationships on to empirical processes.     

Does social capital determine health? Empirical evidence from MENA countries

Using data from the World Value Survey (2010–2012) for 18 MENA countries, this paper investigates the causal relationship between social capital and health by applying simultaneous-equations based on structural modeling and IVs regression. Our main findings corroborate the hypothesis of reverse causality between social capital and health i.e. bidirectional causality running from social capital to health and from health to social capital is identified. Furthermore, our empirical findings show that individual-level social capital appears more salient in determining health, while community-level social capital seems less relevant in explaining health differences between individuals. Overall, the present study makes evident that high levels of social capital (i.e. high levels of social participation and high levels of trust) and high individual-level socioeconomic factors (i.e. high levels of income and high levels of education) may generate better health outcomes that policymakers must take into account to improve individual and community health.     

Social workers' views on community involvement in child protection work in Italy

Involvement of the community is a topic that is gaining increasing importance in the debate on child protection social work. However, the empirical findings that help to understand the factors which enable social workers to involve community actors successfully are still scarce. The article presents the results of an empirical pilot study carried out on a sample of 24 child protection social workers employed in four public agencies in Italy. The results of the research highlight the complexity of the factors that influence the ability of social workers to involve the community in schemes involving children and their families and the importance of constructing a community‐based approach that directly involves local‐level institutions and policy programmes.     

Financial development and economic growth: The Egyptian experience

This paper examines the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth in Egypt during the period 1960–2001 within a trivariate vector autoregressive (VAR) framework (investment being the additional variable). We employ four different measures of financial development and apply Granger causality tests using the cointegration and vector error-correction (VEC) methodology. Our results strongly support the view that financial development and economic growth are mutually causal, that is, causality is bi-directional. Furthermore, we find that financial development causes economic growth through both increasing resources for investment and enhancing efficiency. These findings suggest the need to accelerate the financial reforms that the Egyptian government launched in 1991 and to improve the efficiency of the financial system to stimulate saving/investment and, consequently, long-term economic growth.     

Does Radical Partisan Politics Affect National Income Distributions? Congressional Polarization and Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–2008*

Recent research indicates that political polarization in Congress and income inequality share a closely linked positive association. But virtually no studies examine the direction of influence between these variables as it is assumed that income inequality causes political polarization. The major purpose of this investigation is to examine the temporal causal ordering of these variables. Methods. This study constructs a time series national‐level data set with information for the years 1913 to 2008. Vector autoregression and granger causality tests are utilized to explore the temporal causal ordering of congressional polarization and the income share of the top 0.1, 1.0, 5.0, and 10.0 percent of earners in the United States. Autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity regressions are also employed to assess the strength of the association between congressional polarization and top incomes net of relevant control variables. Results. The findings indicate that the past values of congressional polarization are better predictors of top income shares than vice versa. The results also demonstrate that polarization in the House of Representatives produces a more consistent and robust connection with top incomes than polarization in the Senate. Lastly, congressional polarization only produces robust associations with the income share of the top 0.1 and 1.0 percent of earners but not for the top 5.0 and 10.0 percent. Conclusion. While the Senate possesses more powerful negative agenda control procedures to stifle the legislative processes vis‐à‐vis the House, it is polarization in the latter that returns the more robust associations with income inequality.     

Punitive welfare reform and claimant mental health: The impact of benefit sanctions on anxiety and depression

Internationally, policymakers assume that sanctioning claimants of unemployment benefits will engender both improved employment outcomes and wider positive effects. A growing evidence‐base challenges these expectations, though additional insight is needed from large‐scale longitudinal research. This article contributes by conducting a quantitative investigation into the mental health impacts of benefit sanctions. To do so, it focuses on a recent period in UK sanctions policy in which rates of sanctions varied markedly and their length was substantially increased. Using quarterly panel data for local authorities in England (Q3 2010–Q4 2014) and fixed effects models that control for important confounders, the analysis provides robust evidence that Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) sanctions lead to increases in self‐reported anxiety and depression. Evidence of this adverse impact is particularly clear following the increase in the length of sanctions in October 2012. The results have important implications for contemporary social security policy, which is underpinned by a similarly punitive sanctions regime. Whilst additional individual‐level research is needed to fully consider the causal relationships in operation, the findings support a precautionary approach that should seek to minimise the harm associated with sanctions. This implies taking steps to reduce both the severity and frequency of applied sanctions.     

社会网络对生活满意度的影响研究——基于京、沪、粤三地的分析

本研究以2008年和2009年在北京市、上海市和广东省进行的“中国家庭追踪调查”的数据为基础，运用多层线性模型和协方差模型探讨了社会网络对生活满意度的影响程度。研究表明，拜年网中朋友的比例、邻里互动频率和非正式社会参与都对生活满意度有积极影响，生活满意度与拜年网规模之间则呈现出“∩”型的相关关系。协方差分析结果表明，社会网络规模的扩大、朋友比例的上升和非正式社会参与频率的增加都有助于提高个人的生活满意度，但邻里互动频率的变化对个人生活满意度的提升作用还有待进一步的研究。     

‘If kids don't feel safe they don't do anything’: young people's views on seeking and receiving help from Children's Social Care Services in England

This paper presents findings from qualitative interviews with 24 young people (11–17 years) who have been referred to Children's Social Care Services in England. The paper explores young people's experiences of help seeking and their experiences of receiving help for maltreatment through statutory agencies. A central finding is the importance of relationships for young people when seeking and receiving help. It is through trusting relationships with professionals that young people are most likely to disclose maltreatment and/or engage with services. The paper concludes that young people's expectations and needs are not always met by the current safeguarding system and that the system needs to become more child‐centred if it is to address the concerns maltreated young people have consistently voiced through research.     

社会资本与地位获得——简单与复杂的因果机制和因果联结

传统观点强调所动员的社会资本独立于行动者个人资本带来地位回报的因果机制,是一种基于简单因果关系类型的理论建构。基于复杂因果关系视角,本文强调总体社会对社会位置的社会必要性效率约束,所动员的社会资本带来地位回报的过程,是以行动者自身人力资本为条件的复杂因果机制。观察社会资本与地位获得复杂因果关系的研究假设,应着重审视社会资本与人力资本复合结果与地位获得之间的正向关联性。
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Interventions to improve supervised contact visits between children in out of home care and their parents: a systematic review

Although the importance of contact between children in care and their parents, when safe, is accepted, there is limited research about supervised face‐to‐face contact. There is no literature that has systematically critiqued how supervised contact can be best delivered. The aim of this systematic review was to evaluate the evidence for interventions aimed at improving the quality of contact visits between parents and their children who are in out‐of‐home care. Twelve studies were included in this review. Each study was graded and assigned scores according to the presence or absence of each of seven criteria. The studies demonstrated key similarities in the types of interventions provided, although delivery varied across group, individual and educational interventions. Parents reported improved capacity to manage their emotions and parents' satisfaction with the programmes was high. Although there was a lack of large scale, methodologically rigorous studies with long‐term follow‐up, some promising findings were identified: the literature indicates individual family support and group programmes have the potential to improve parent–child relationships and the quality of contact visits. This review suggests that future studies build on current evidence by addressing their methodological limitations and evaluating interventions that can be tailored to meet the needs of individual families.     

Practices of activation in frontline interactions: Coercion,persuasion, and the role of trust in activation policies in Germany

Following Michael Lipsky's well‐known argument that policy is made in the daily encounters between street‐level bureaucracy and citizens, a growing body of research emphasizes that actors and organizations delivering social and labor‐market policy play a crucial role in welfare‐state politics. Using qualitative data collected at three local employment agencies in Germany, this article explores worker‐client relations as a crucial mechanism through which activation policies are translated into practice. The analysis investigates how caseworkers define their role and their relationships with clients. The findings show that it is essential for caseworkers to achieve client compliance. In such a context, building relationships of trust is a strategic instrument in overcoming possible barriers to co‐operation in the caseworker‐client interaction. Caseworkers develop strategies to create the impression of trustworthiness and to motivate both unemployed clients and employers to become trust‐givers in the caseworker‐client relation. While research has often stressed the dichotomy between disciplining and enabling elements of activation policies, our explorative study shows that persuasion and trust‐building are a further important dimension of the frontline delivery of activation policies. These strategies reflect the importance of emotional aspects of frontline work.     

Moving towards hybridity in causal explanation: The example of citizen participation

The puzzle of causal explanation is a core issue for social science. Searches for causal patterns can be overly mechanistic, seen for example in the desire for the magic bullet in policy, or the lionising of the celebrity policy interventions of the moment. Emphasis in policy interventions on transferable practice is often dismissed as naive for failing to recognise the importance of context, contingency, and complexity. However, a focus on highly context‐specific narratives, drawn from single cases, can be equally problematic and exacerbate rather than help the problem of reification of knowledge. This paper makes a reflective theoretical contribution to the debate on the need to tackle the dilemma of contingency versus certainty in causal explanation in the social sciences. It attempts to address this issue through the lens of a specific concrete puzzle of explanation; that of citizen participation in policy. Citizen participation is a salient policy topic, which demands a thorough understanding of causation. Using extended empirical examples of citizen participation in policy serves to highlight the intractability of different traditions of causal explanation and grounds the need for greater compatibility in approaches. The paper then offers two propositions centring on the notions of transdisciplinarity and hybridity in research practices and methodologies. It concludes with a discussion of more and less desirable forms of hybridity.     

A Social Relations Analysis of Children's Trust in Their Peers across the Early Years of School

Two hundred and five (103 female and 102 male) children enrolled in school years 1 and 2 in the UK (mean age 6 years 1 month at Time 1) were tested twice over a 1‐year period. The children reported the promise keeping and secret keeping behaviours of classmates (all peers and same‐gender peers) and provided friendship nominations (Time 2 only). Round robin social relations analyses for all peers and same‐gender peers revealed: (1) perceiver variance, demonstrating consistent individual differences in trust beliefs in peers; (2) target variance, demonstrating consistent individual differences in eliciting trust from peers; and, (3) dyadic reciprocity, demonstrating reciprocal trust between individuals. Replicability across measures, stability, and cross‐measure stability of these effects were found for all peers only. As hypothesized, the perceiver and target effects of trust were associated with the number of friendships. The findings support the conclusion that young children demonstrate multiple components of trust in dyadic relationships, which are associated with their social relationships.     

Housing and the business cycle in South Africa

This paper examines the housing-output growth nexus in South Africa by accounting for the time variation in the causal link with a bootstrapped rolling Granger non-causality test. We use quarterly data on real gross domestic product, real house prices, real gross fixed capital formation and number of building plans passed. Our data span 1971Q2–2012Q2. Using full sample bootstrap Granger causality tests, we find a uni-directional causality from output to number of building plans passed; a uni-directional causality from real house price to output and a bi-directional causal link between residential investment and output. However, using parameter stability tests, we show that estimated VARs are unstable, thus full-sample Granger causality inference may be invalid. Hence, we use a bootstrap rolling window estimation to evaluate Granger causality between the housing variables and the growth rate. In general, we find that the causality from housing to output and, vice versa, differ across different sample periods due to structural changes. Specifically speaking, house price is found to have the strongest causal relationship with output compared to residential investment and number of building plans passed, with real house price showing predictive ability in all but one downward phase of the business cycle during this period.     

Narrative skills predict peer adjustment across elementary school years

The importance of peer adjustment in middle childhood coincides with developing social cognitive and discursive skills that include the ability to make personal narrative accounts. Authoring personal stories promotes attention to the sequence of events, the causal connections between events, the moral significance of what has happened, and the motives that drive human action: these skills may be critical for the establishment and maintenance of satisfying peer relationships during elementary school. This study extended previous research by considering whether narrative skills in written stories about peer interactions predicted peer adjustment. As part of an ongoing longitudinal study, 92 children wrote narratives about peer experiences and completed surveys on measures of peer adjustment for two school years. Cross‐lagged panel models indicated that chronological and thematic coherence and reports of moral concerns in narratives in the first year of the study contributed to lower peer disliking in the subsequent academic year. Reports of motives in Year 1 narratives contributed to lower levels of loneliness and peer victimization in Year 2. Writing personal narratives that are coherent and attentive to moral concerns and motives may be especially beneficial for children who have difficulty connecting with peers. We discuss implications for classroom practices.     

图形的逻辑力量：因果图的概念及其应用

本文旨在系统性地引介因果图方法,一种社会科学领域新近发展起来的探究因果推断的非参数估计工具。首先对因果图的基本概念和构型进行介绍,讨论变量之间不同“通路”对应的开启和阻断规则及因果推断中的三种偏差来源,即混淆偏差、过度控制偏差、内生性选择偏差。在此基础上,本文将因果图框架与现有定量社会科学研究中基于回归模型的因果推断方法思路进行融合,结合实际案例使用因果图阐释包括遗漏变量、样本选择、自选择及联立性在内的四种内生性问题,并对多元回归与匹配、代理变量、实验、工具变量、面板模型等因果推断方法的运行机制进行了图形化。最后,本文使用因果图厘清一些关于因果推断的不准确理解。     

Recognizing and addressing child neglect in affluent families

This paper explores how social workers intervene with affluent parents when there are child protection concerns about neglect. Based on data gathered from a small‐scale exploratory qualitative study with 30 practitioners from 12 local authorities across England, this study examined three overarching questions: (a) How do social workers identify risk factors for vulnerable children in affluent circumstances? (b) Which factors inhibit or enable social workers' engagement with resistant affluent parents when there are child protection concerns? (c) What kind of skills, knowledge, and experience is necessary for social workers to effectively assert their professional authority with affluent parents when there are concerns about abuse and neglect? The findings revealed that indicators of neglect can be difficult to identify and challenging to respond to when parents are affluent. Results indicate that social workers have to navigate complex power relationships with parents who are able to use their class privileges to resist their interventions. The paper concludes with a discussion of social workers' skills and capacities for engaging highly‐resistant affluent parents in the child protection system.     

Lone Parents and Welfare‐to‐Work in England: A Spatial Analysis of Outcomes and Drivers

Mirroring changes across nations of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development, recent UK governments have redrawn lone parents' entitlement to social assistance benefits ever tighter around participation in the labour market. A radical shift since 2008 has been the gradual transfer of most non‐employed lone parents into the ‘activating’ Jobseekers' Allowance (JSA) regime. The enhanced conditionality requirements of this JSA regime have been justified by both paternalistic and contractualist arguments but, however justified, are built on the premise that behavioural factors drive lone parent employment outcomes, a view made increasingly forcefully under the current Coalition government. This article uses up‐to‐date administrative data at local authority level across England to provide a geographical perspective into the sub‐national changes in lone parent employment outcomes since the transfer to JSA from 2008, as well as the relevant importance of the alternative structural and behavioural accounts to these outcomes. The findings suggest that the JSA transfer has increased lone parent employment, that structural rather than behavioural drivers are more relevant causal factors and that there is good reason to be concerned about the effect of the reforms on the well‐being of lone parents and their children.