Rhetoric and Reality in European Co-operation with Third Countries: A Case Study

This case study illustrates the reality of trying to achieve the European Commission objective of fruitful international research co-operation with Third Countries. The process of responding to an EC research call, preparing a proposal and negotiating a contract are explored with areas of general applicability being highlighted. The case study is drawn from the Avicenne Initiative in the area of health systems research. The difficulties and inequality of access to information, administrative research support and resourcing are explored as both issues for individuals and institutions and also as part of the difficulties of developing south-north or east-west research partnerships. The backstage of research is explored in order to highlight issues of discourse, practice and procedure which, if tackled, could provide a more level playing field for researchers from a wide range of institutions and countries.     

A Mutual Aid Group Program for Women Who Use Violence

This article presents the development of a group program for women who use violence. A review of the North American literature and research into Quebec practices led the authors to adopt an intersectional feminist analysis of women’s violence and to choose the mutual aid group model. The program’s main objective is to help women find alternatives to the use of violence by working on three main themes: (1) violence, (2) socialization, and (3) life conditions. The program also aims to increase women’s empowerment through concrete experiences of group solidarity, such as by helping one another. Challenges that were encountered in its development and that are anticipated in its evaluation are discussed.     

The Theory and Practice of Welfare Partnerships: The Case of the Cultural Sector

Partnership working in the welfare state has moved from the margins to the mainstream in terms of achieving policy objectives. Drawing on interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical developments in the field, this article presents a framework for analyzing welfare partnerships that give precedence to the issues of trust and interdependence. This article presents findings from a study of local authority museum services in Scotland, England and Wales to test this framework. A series of case studies revealed that partnerships have been driven by a number of factors including policy, power, funding and people. Partnerships could gain services credibility, but trust and interdependence were compromised by conflictual and unequal relationships. Partnerships were often short term, lacked ongoing maintenance plans and limited by their type of funding. The article proposes that further analysis of the level of individual agency at ground level be considered when thinking about partnerships in the cultural sector.     

Balancing Research and Action: Reflections on an Action Research Project in a Social Services Department

The relationships between social research, policy development and implementation are complex. External researchers are frequently employed by agencies to research their activities, with the expectation that the results will lead to organizational development. In some research traditions this takes place after the presentation of a final report. In the action research approach the two are integrated and action is a part of the inquiry process. Frequently, however, despite the best intentions of the commissioners and researchers, little action ensues. Influential factors, including issues arising from changes of key research personnel, shifts in organizational staff and roles, multiple agendas, and issues in presenting findings, dissemination and feedback dilemmas, are explored, using a case study of the introduction of care management in one local authority social services department. Finally, the usefulness of this type of research by an outsider in a context of very rapid change is assessed.     

How Can You Pull Yourself up by Your Bootstraps, if You Don't Have Boots? Work-Appropriate Clothing for Poor Women

Clothing plays a role in impression formation and may affect poor women's ability to obtain a good job. Style of dress affects perceptions of, expectations for, and responses to job applicants. Clothing worn by a job applicant is a sign of status, power, and ability and may determine success on the interview and/or on the job. Most poor women lack the financial resources necessary to enhance their outward appearance as an impression management technique. A number of programs have been designed to help poor women obtain job-appropriate clothing, but these programs are limited in scope. This study reports on a convenience sample of women (N =10) from a state program that provides clothing to women entering the job market. Comprehensive services that take into account the multiple challenges faced by poor women entering the workforce have yet to be developed. Recommendations for corporate and individual action are provided.     

A Qualitative Evaluation of a Conditional Cash Transfer Program in Turkey: The Beneficiaries’ and Key Informants’ Perspectives

ABSTRACT

Since the 2001 economic crisis, conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have been provided to poor families in Turkey to improve education and health outcomes of children. Under the framework of CCT programs, grants provide an incentive for poor households to use available basic social services. The aim of this study is to explore beneficiaries’ perspectives in relation to a CCT program in Turkey. The in-depth study design entailed semistructured qualitative interviews with beneficiary households and key informants. A total of 397 in-depth interviews were conducted. Analysis results suggest that the CCT program not only positively affected health and educational outcomes, but also contributed to the empowerment of women and improved the self-esteem and self-confidence of beneficiary children. Recommendations for future research are made including the need for an impact evaluation analysis that employs quantitative research methods designed to improve the provision and quality of the basic social services.     

Linking the university and the social agency in collaborative evaluation research: principles and examples

This paper presents an analysis of components of successful social work evaluation research practice. Among the key obstacles to successful evaluations of social work intervention are the impoverished knowledge base on which many social work interventions are based, the isolation of researchers and practitioners in the conduct of evaluations, and during research implementation failure to cope with the changing field context. To remedy this situation social work needs to invest in university and social agency partnerships focussed on knowledge building for the profession. In such partnerships the traditional roles of the researcher and the practitioner are altered so that shared responsibility for knowledge development is possible. In addition, to deal with changing field contexts the research team needs to be continuously engaged in problem solving and redesign. An initial example of such a partnership is described together with a case study illustrating implementation of a multi-site field experiment evaluation.     

Research and the State: Dilemmas of Feminist Practice

Governments are increasingly protective of the information they gather. This creates a dilemma for feminist researchers retained as consultants, who recognise that those who provide information to researchers have a stake in its use. The current emphasis on crisis management rather than redistributive goals and social rights, poses further problems for researchers who challenge this emphasis by government, and question the bureaucratic forms which maintain women in dependent situations. A suppressed report on women, disability and rehabilitation in Australia is used as a case study.     

Synthesizing Research and Practice: Using the Action Research Approach in Health Care Settings

The traditional dichotomy between research and practice invariably results in having to make difficult choices between the two, or trying to balance them in some way in order to keep both academic and corporate 'sponsors' happy. The real challenge is not so much balancing the two as achieving a closer fusion and synthesis between them. The action research model offers one such way forward in this regard, being better placed than either the 'applied research' model or the 'consultancy' model to realize the synergies and complementarities between research and practice. Action research is a mutual learning process within which people work together to discover what the issues are, why they exist, and how they might be addressed. Over time there is a blurring of the traditional roles of practitioner and researcher, the former becoming 'researching practitioners', the latter 'practising researchers'. The different phases of the action research model are illustrated using data from NHS case studies and relevant literature. Although the focus is upon how an organizational anthropologist would use the model, the suggestion is that it commends itself to a much broader constituency of social scientists and qualitative researchers working in the social and public policy arenas, and hence merits further investigation by all of these.     

Agency-Family Partnerships

This paper describes a research and demonstration project in which partnerships are formed between agency social workers and family members of elderly clients. While the social worker retains responsibility for counseling and provision of support to the elderly client, the family member is taught by the social worker to assume responsibility for the case management of services provided to his/her elderly relative. Practice issues which have emerged during the first year of this three-year project include: the generalizability of findings in light of the special characteristics of agency clients, the definition of the agency-family partnership, confidentiality in the context of this partnership, exceptions to family involvement, clients without families, and our experiences with research-practice collaboration. Each of these issues is discussed in this paper.     

农村资金互助社的融资困境及其法律对策研究——兼评《农村资金互助社管理暂行规定》

农村资金互助社伴随着农业发展资金融通的需要应运而生,拓宽了农业发展资金来源的渠道,完善了我国农村金融体系,使民间金融走向正规金融的发展路径,但是其自身却因资金融通渠道不畅通而遭遇发展的困境。克服这一困境,在法律法规以及政策的保障下为农村资金互助社的发展寻找更加广泛的融资渠道,是目前急需解决的问题,也是解决"三农"问题,为"三农"发展提供资金支持的需要。     

Does partnership funding improve coordination and collaboration among early childhood services? – Experiences from the Communities for Children programme

Partnerships among service providers are an important aspect of human service delivery, including in the early childhood and family service sector. There is extensive international literature on factors contributing to partnerships – also termed service coordination, collaboration or integration – but little evidence of partnership outcomes exists where partnerships are a funded and mandatory component of large‐scale programmes. This paper reports findings from an evaluation of the Australian Government's Communities for Children (CfC) programme. Under CfC, partnerships were mandated and funded, and the evaluation findings show that the programme resulted in an increased number of agencies working together to support families with young children (0–5 years) and that working relationships between agencies improved. The effectiveness of these partnerships depended on funding for partnership activities and on organisational and practical factors.     

The Effectiveness of Social Work in an Alternative School for High School Dropouts

A Graduate School of Social Work and a Private Alternative School collaborated to develop an educational treatment program for high school dropout youth. The treatment program incorporated a mutual aid framework which was administered in the context of a multi-component treatment program. The treatment program is described in some detail including a Social Group Work approach for intervening with the youth. The outcomes of participants were evaluated utilizing several pretest to post-test measures of behavioral and academic functioning. An external criteria for success was also used. T-test analysis of pretest to post-test changes showed statistically significant progress on several measures. Analysis of the external criteria indicated a 73% success rate.     

Campus–Community Partnerships: The Terms of Engagement

The emergence of service–learning in higher education and the renewed emphasis on community involvement presents colleges and universities with opportunities to develop campus–community partnerships for the common good. These partnerships can leverage both campus and community resources to address critical issues in local communities. Campus–community partnerships are a series of interpersonal relationships between (a) campus administrators, faculty, staff, and students and (b) community leaders, agency personnel, and members of communities. The phases of relationships (i.e., initiation, development, maintenance, dissolution) and the dynamics of relationships (i.e., exchanges, equity, distribution of power) are explored to provide service–learning instructors and campus personnel with a clearer understanding of how to develop healthy campus–community partnerships.     

Gender and the credit rationing of small businesses

Rapid small business ownership growth rates among women have motivated research on issues related to gender and small business performance. The importance of credit access for the success of small businesses, as well as evidence that women have less access to credit than male business owners, has led researchers to explore the reasons for this. In this paper, we estimate a model of credit rationing by gender of the business owner. Our results are consistent with previous studies that find higher loan denial rates and lower loan application rates among women compared with men. Testing the robustness of the results we find that women seem to be rationing themselves in the credit market rather than being discriminated against by banks. Reasons for this self-rationing behavior are an important topic for further research.     

Practice Wisdom Meets Evidence-Based Practice: Building Capacity in Agencies

Agencies have a need to develop and evaluate therapeutic practices that show efficacy in treating specific client problems. University-agency collaborations combine the wisdom of practitioners with research skills that appraise evidence of efficacy, operationalize concepts and skills, and identify and implement evaluation methods. This article discusses the processes involved as practitioners and administrators collaborated with university researchers to transform a well-established mutual aid (MA) model of group work into an evidence-based model that showed efficacy in preventing substance use with adolescent populations. A case study will include the phases of the collaboration including relationship building, reviews of similar programs, identification of appropriate evaluation measures, development of a curricular-based manual and analysis and interpretation of the data for use in applying for funding. Implications for agency practice that respond to current demands in social services will be discussed.     

The Politics of Partnership in Tropical Public Health: Researching Tuberculosis Control in India

In today's globalizing world the nature of relationships between the North and South is changing to account for the closing gap in capacity to carry out research of international standard. The development of a lexicon sophisticated enough to address adequately these changing relationships, however, lags behind and is not supported by the current recourse to the jargon of 'partnership'. In this paper we explore the difficulties of negotiating a productive path through the dynamics of power and control that characterize international research collaborations. We call attention to this issue through recounting the story of the development of two quite different, but related, international research relationships in which we have been involved. We suggest that there is an important difference between those aspects of the relationship that respond to institutional needs and agendas and those aspects that relate more directly to the human relationships upon which the work in the field actually depends. We set out this difference in a tentative framework, where the relationship between researchers is labelled 'partnership' and the institutional relationship 'collaboration'. It is hoped that, by its inclusion in a journal on social policy, this paper may also stimulate discussion on the extent to which these issues are particular to international relationships or are, indeed, generalizable to national-level partnerships and collaborations within the UK and Europe.     

Increasing Poverty in Japan: Social Policy and Public Assistance Program

Until quite recently, the problem of poverty was largely “invisible” in Japan, since the poverty rate was relatively low and issues surrounding poverty received little attention. However, the recent financial and economic crisis caused such an increase in the poverty rate that it could no longer be ignored. When the government announced a poverty rate for the first time in 2009 (15.7% for the year 2007), the nation was shocked. Poverty is now widely discussed and “visible” in Japan, and Japanese policy makers have been forced to formulate and implement strategies to help the poor. The contribution of changing international and national economic and social conditions to increased poverty, including population changes in Japan, is also noted. This paper aims to provide an overview of the poverty situation and the nature of social policy that addresses poverty. It describes in particular the national public assistance program, which is a major public income‐support program and is considered as the ‘last safety net’ available for the poor in Japan. In conclusion, the paper explores the key problems faced by the program and discusses the challenges associated with tackling a dramatic increase in poverty.     

A Psychology of Immigration

The discipline of psychology has much to contribute to our understanding of immigrants and the process of immigration. A framework is proposed that lays out two complementary domains of psychological research, both rooted in contextual factors, and both leading to policy and program development. The first (acculturation) stems from research in anthropology and is now a central part of cross- cultural psychology; the second (intergroup relations) stems from sociology and is now a core feature of social psychology. Both domains are concerned with two fundamental issues that face immigrants and the society of settlement: maintenance of group characteristics and contact between groups. The intersection of these issues creates an intercultural space, within which members of both groups develop their cultural boundaries and social relationships. A case is made for the benefits of integration as a strategy for immigrants and for multiculturalism as a policy for the larger society. The articles in this issue are then discussed in relation to these conceptual frameworks and empirical findings.