The social consequences of the AIDS epidemic: a challenge for the social sciences

The Social Science Research Council is analyzing the social consequences of the AIDS epidemic from the viewpoint of developing society's coping mechanisms and policies. Since neither drugs nor vaccines for AIDS are available, the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine have urged that social service research be directed at the areas of education and policy and also at discrimination against AIDS patients and high-risk minorities, such as homosexuals and intravenous drug users. Education is essential in order to effect behavioral changes among these groups as well as to forestall panic among the public. The AIDS epidemic comes at a time when public health emphasis was shifting from communicable disease to chronic degenerative disorders, and problems, such as the possible need for isolation wards are reappearing. Moreover, the total cost of caring for AIDS sufferers is expected to be between 8 and 16 billion pounds sterling by 1991. As AIDS patients become unemployed, they lose their insurance benefits, and the cost of their care reverts to Medicaid and state revenues. Research needs to be done as to the degree to which voluntary health agencies will be able to help. The AIDS epidemic also affects civil rights. Some federal agencies and the armed forces screen applicants for AIDS seropositivity. The army, which traditionally has recruited from inner city minorities, has found that up to 2% of applicants are HIV seropositive, and foreign governments are beginning to object to the stationing of US soldiers in their countries. Answers must be provided for all of these and other social issues if we are to cope with the social effects of the AIDS epidemic.     

Social welfare and social work: the meaning of poverty programs in Latin America

During the last decade, the concern about poverty has turned into a key issue in the government discourse, and participatory poverty programs have multiplied all over Latin America. Nevertheless, poverty and social unrest keep growing. The objective of this article is to explain this apparent paradox. First there is an analysis of the relationship between structural adjustment, the growth of poverty, and the reorientation of broad social policy away from social rights towards selective and targeted poor relief. In order to illustrate the content and operation of a typical Latin American poverty program, the Mexican National Solidarity Program is examined. The initial question posed is whether this program alleviates poverty and grants a social minimum for the poor in view of the magnitude of poverty, the quantity of resources and their allocation. Next the participatory approach of the program is analyzed in relation to the empowerment of poor groups and communities. Finally, there is a reflection on the place of social work in this program and how the role of the social worker has been transformed.     

The Olmstead decision and the journey toward integration:the evolution of social work responses

The Olmstead decision declared unnecessary institutionalization as discrimination and triggered an expansion of community-based care for all people with disabilities including the elderly, thus accelerating integration. Setting a context for Olmstead and related social work interventions, this paper describes the evolution of definitions of disability and examines how social work has responded to the development of critical social policies aimed at increasing community integration.     

The impact of HIV/AIDS on social security contributions: The case of Zimbabwe

Significant early retirement from work due to HIV/AIDS-related illness is reducing the gainfully employed population and threatening the viability of the statutory social security schemes run by the National Social Security Authority in Zimbabwe. The economy has been in recession for a decade, with high inflation and significant job losses also impacting negatively on contributions to the National Pension and Other Benefits Scheme (NPOBS), and government imposes ceilings on insurable earnings from which contributions are drawn. There are currently no consistent strategies to mitigate attritional effects of these factors on the social security schemes. The aim of this study was to prospectively project the potential impact of HIV/AIDS and imposed ceilings on NPOBS revenue in the presence of high inflation. It was found that HIV/AIDS will reduce projected contributions to the scheme by more than 30 per cent by 2030. Policy strategies to adjust and frequently review levels of growth of imposed ceilings on insurable earnings in line with inflation growth and to invest in HIV/AIDS prevention could be adopted to ameliorate the negative impact of HIV/AIDS and/or ceiling caps on social security contributions in Zimbabwe.     

文学语言:符号形式与符号意义

在文学这一特殊的语义系统内,语言的能指形式不仅传达着直接意指的语义,而且还创造着含蓄意指的审美语义,极大地丰富了人们对于语言的审美感知。文学语言能指形式本身所具有的语义表现功能,便在所指层面的一般语义信息与能指层面的审美语义信息之间形成了语义的张力,从而使语言在文学中获得了“充分的自我在场”。唯其如此,强化并突出能指形式感性的、直觉的特征,是文学语言区别于非文学语言的至关重要的方面,同时也是文学语言形成审美语义的关键所在。     

Mapping social work education in the West Africa region: Movements toward indigenization in 12 countries’ training programs

This article presents the results of a systematic mapping of social work training programs in countries throughout West Africa, a region historically under‐represented in global discussions of the social welfare workforce. The research illuminates how social workers and related professionals are trained to engage in social work practice in a number of West African countries. The research was conducted in two phases. In the initial phase, the research team collected documents from 12 West African countries and conducted phone interviews with relevant individuals. The second phase included field research in five West African countries ? Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal ? where the research team conducted semi‐structured interviews and group discussions with 253 individuals. Framed by indigenization theory, this study describes social service training institutes in West Africa and highlights the varying degrees to which programs have been adapted to indigenous and endogenous realities in the postcolonial era.     

Racial composition of social settings,interracial friendship,and whites’ attitudes toward interracial marriage

This study examines the effect that the racial composition of neighborhoods, workplaces, congregations, and friendships has on whites’ attitudes toward interracial marriage with blacks, Latinos, and Asians. Utilizing survey data drawn from a national probability sample, ordered logit regression models are estimated in order to (1) determine the effect of the racial composition of neighborhoods, workplaces, and congregations on white intermarriage attitudes, net of sociodemographic and ideological controls and (2) test for a mediating effect of interracial friendship. Greater presence of blacks, Latinos, or Asians in neighborhoods and congregations of whites predicts favorable attitudes among whites toward interracial marriage with each respective racial group. A higher proportion of Latinos in the workplace also predicts support for racial exogamy with Latinos. Many of these effects, however, are reduced when interracial friendship is included in models, suggesting that the effect of interracial contact on intermarriage attitudes is mediated by whether or not whites develop interracial friendships within settings of cross-race interaction.     

Rebellion and revenge: the meaning of suicide of women in rural China

The current literature on suicide in China shows that the female suicide rate is extraordinarily higher than the rate for males. Many studies have been conducted on the prevalence and perpetrating factors for suicidal incidents. Few have attempted to understand women's suicide acts. In this article, the ethnographic data are used to explore the special meaning of the suicide act in a Chinese family and its impact on the other family members. Research has shown that suicide may have a different meaning in the Chinese context, especially for women with an inferior status within the family. Suicide is taken as an act of revenge in a moral and spiritual sense. The act of suicide is very powerful; it grants the woman so much power that she may achieve what she could not during her lifetime. The suicide event remains in the collective memory of the relatives and other people who knew the person. Its powerful meaning is related to the memory of the transgressive event of taking one's own life as well as to the collective and personal guilt connected with the event.     

Patterns and meaning of unemployment

This article introduces the special issue. Unemployment in Argentina, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain is placed in the context of global economics. The end of full employment in Sweden was part of an international deinstitutionalization that connected employment closely to economic growth. The immediate causes of the economic decline and mass unemployment in Sweden were a financial crash and neoliberal government policies. The ambiguity of unemployment in the criteria for evaluating the performance of policy-makers and three different cultures among unemployed people are outlined. An overview of what is known about the consequences of unemployment in terms of excess illness and mortality is given.     

The role of social desirability bias and racial/ethnic composition on the relation between education and attitude toward immigration restrictionism

Social scientists note individuals tend to respond favorably to sensitive topics in surveys, but few consider factors triggering these responses. This study uses unique data to examine respondents’ racial/ethnic attitude under direct and indirect modes of elicitation. In particular, the list experiment provides a cloak of anonymity to a random subsample of individuals that allows them to respond truthfully about their racial/ethnic attitudes. By comparing responses between administration modes, this study evaluates whether social desirability pressures mediate, and racial/ethnic composition moderate, the relation between education and racial/ethnic attitudes. Findings indicate an initial positive relation between education and racial/ethnic attitudes, but desirability bias mainly drives this relation. Furthermore, there is some support racial/ethnic composition moderates the influence of social desirability on education.     

Impacts of HIV/AIDS on poor and socially marginalised former commercial plasma donors in rural central China: social work implications

Little is known about the impact of HIV/AIDS on people who acquired the virus through former commercial plasma donations in the mid-1990s in rural Central China. The objective of this study was to examine socioeconomic impacts associated with HIV/AIDS on poor farm workers and their families, with a particular focus on economic hardships and social exclusion. The findings from 30 interviews reveal the profound effects of deteriorating health on labour power loss. The well-being of people living with HIV/AIDS was immensely affected by the loss of income, debts due to health-related expenses and a lack of alternate sources of income. Social exclusion and HIV/AIDS-related stigma remain significant issues in a workplace, funerals, and weddings. This article highlights the economic impacts of HIV/AIDS on China’s rural population and provides recommendations for social workers to mitigate the impacts of social exclusion on vulnerable rural households in China.     

The meaning of nonprofit advocacy: An ordonomic perspective

Orthodox economic theories of the nonprofit sector are focused on its service delivery role but have little to say about nonprofit advocacy. This study explains nonprofit advocacy by building upon the ordonomic approach, a recently developed strand of institutional economics that explores the interdependencies between institutions and ideas. From the ordonomic perspective, the evolution of a modern society occurs through an ongoing realignment between institutions and ideas. The meaning of nonprofit advocacy is shown to be in contributing to this realignment. This leads to a new understanding of the service delivery role of the nonprofit sector. This role is shown to have a compensatory character in that it is intended to maintain a reasonable quality of human life before the time-consuming ideational and institutional adjustments actually take place.     

Is there a field of social work?: Trainees evaluating social problems and social work

My aim was to study the experiences and priorities of two age groups of social work students practicing in client-centered social work. This article is based on the research on rationality and language games in social work. The target groups of the research project as a whole were the actors: the heads and social workers or activists in public social welfare and health care agencies and institutions and in voluntary associations and action groups, and finally, two subsequent classes of students from a school of social work, during their practicing periods. This article concentrates on the trainees. At first, the trainees wrote essays and kept diaries. Secondly, they marked their standings on graphs visualizing different types of information contents and social relation structures. Thirdly, they made their choices of reasons for and solutions to social problems on a problem wheel. The trainees' study, using different data gathering techniques, partly confirms the results of the research of the other actor groups, in which the data were derived using questionnaires and interviews. The trainees' study shows variation in the respondents' priorities within and between specified social problem categories. Qualitatively analyzed, however, the characterizations of social work, both those who currently act in and those aiming to enter this field, resemble one another.