Validation of the Individual and Community Empowerment Inventory: A Measure of Rap Music Engagement among First-Year College Students

Amid robust debates about the impact of music on the lives of young people, empirically validated measures of music engagement are absent. The present study builds on the construction of the Individual and Community Empowerment (ICE) inventory, a measure to capture different types of empowerment and different types of risk potential from rap music engagement. The scientific intent of the scale development and the present validation study was to test the simultaneous presence of empowerment and risk associated with music engagement and its application to the individual and community. A unique sample existed for the present study in comparison to the original, with the bulk of respondents being first-year college students and White. Results of the present study suggest that the ICE inventory is an effective and comparative measure of risk and empowerment. Major findings about the instrument’s utility were replicated, but results were divergent from original research on certain demographic trends with respect to gender, age, and race/ethnicity. Empowering and risky music engagement scale means were higher among male and younger respondents. White respondents had significantly lower mean scores than all other groups on empowerment scales, and African Americans had lower scores on the individual risk scale than other groups. Each result suggests the need for additional research. The validation of the ICE inventory offers promise for helping to collect, organize, and interpret new data on associations between music engagement and desirable health and well-being outcomes.     

Enhancing Empowerment and Leadership Among Homeless Youth in Agency and Community Settings: A Grounded Theory Approach

The purpose of this qualitative study with homeless youth (ages 18–24) was to understand their involvement in decision-making within agency and community settings. Three focus groups with eight, six and six homeless youth were conducted at an urban drop-in center and shelter from June to August 2008. Emergent themes include youth voice and ownership in agency and community programming, emotional safety, power and reciprocal support. Grounded theory is used to interpret findings and develop working hypotheses to guide future studies on empowering homeless youth to assume greater leadership involvement in their own lives, in social service agencies and in their surrounding communities.     

Personal and Community Empowerment for Grandparent Caregivers

This article describes an empowerment training program that the author developed for grandparent caregivers. The program consists of 14 classes that focus on empowering grandparents, within the family and in the community. It strengthens their parenting skills, feelings of competency, and ability to advocate in the community for their own needs. Social workers play important roles as facilitators in the learning process, helping grandparents to recognize their own strengths and capabilities. As grandparents become empowered, they also become strong role models for the children they are raising.     

Ethical challenges of community based participatory research: exploring researchers’ experience

Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) has been proposed as an equitable, empowering partnership approach to collaborative research. International literature about the ethical implications of CBPR suggests a continuing strong interest in the topic. However, there is a notable lack of research that captures the experience of ethical challenges of researchers from different countries who engage in CBPR. The aim of this research was to address this lack of evidence by exploring researchers’ experience of ethical challenges in CBPR at an international level. An innovative data collection method was designed utilising a purpose-built blog. Balancing participant protection and autonomy, partnership tensions, and enduring impacts of the researcher role emerged as the main themes. These findings illustrate the specific conflicts faced by researchers engaged in CBPR. This is largely as a result of the complexities of CBPR coupled with rigid ethics committee review that does not always take into account the more fluid nature of the approach.     

Empowerment in Child Protection Work: Values,Practice and Caveats

The purpose of this paper is to examine the employment of an empowerment framework in the context of child protection work. In order to explore this we offer a definition of empowerment that is based on its three key essential values: self-determination, collaboration and democratic participation, and distributive justice. Following an explanation of these values we identify possibilities and limitations for applying these principles in child protection practice. The discussion centres around necessary and sufficient conditions for the employment of empowerment guidelines, and dilemmas associated with their implementation. Finally, we reflect on the challenges of advancing an empowering agenda in child protection.     

Financial Literacy: Building Economic Empowerment with Survivors of Violence

The purpose of this paper is to outline key constructs including financial literacy, economic self-efficacy, economic self-sufficiency, and economic empowerment, and then present findings from an exploratory study that sought to understand the relationship among these variables in a sample of abused women. The results revealed positive and significant relationships between financial literacy with economic empowerment, economic self-efficacy and economic-self sufficiency. Results also indicated that financial literacy, race, and economic self-sufficiency were significant predictors of economic empowerment. By focusing this research on abused women, it is our intention to raise awareness about the importance of financial literacy curricula with advocates, policy-makers and researchers, so more focus can be given to economically empowering IPV survivors.     

The Collaboration as Empowerment Claim: The Case of Visual Social Research

This article uses the case of visually based collaborative social science research to explore the problem of inequality between researchers and research subjects in social science research. This dilemma is ever present for social scientists researching topics where the research subject represents a group experiencing social exclusion. The paper uses the claim of those social scientists that argue that collaboration between researchers and research subjects can diminish the inequality problem by empowering research subjects. Through this interrogation of the “collaboration as empowerment claim,” as an ideal type construction the paper argues that (i) it pays insufficient attention to the knowledge frameworks and incentive structures around which research projects are carried out and disseminated, (ii) it does not interrogate the fact that the claim of empowerment as outcome is made by those in the researcher role, and (iii) it does not explicitly document the research subject's own assessment of a collaboration/empowerment link. The paper moves beyond the insights drawn from the visual case to point to their implications for other areas in which collaboration research is claimed as a means to empower research subjects and by implication to diminish researcher/research subject inequalities.     

Linking the Academy to the Community Through Internships: A Model of Service Learning,Student Empowerment,and Transformative Education

This paper provides an overview of an internship program designed to empower students and to build collaborative relationships within the local community. The structure of the internship program is designed from a combined service learning, empowerment, and transformative learning perspective. It is set up with a series of empowering activities, including preplanning, initial exploration, siteselection, and contract design. The requirements for the internship course include a commitment to academic education and skill development that are couched within an emancipatory pedagogy. Through transformative learning, students can become empowered citizens. Through university-community partnerships, the potential for ameliorating social problems is strengthened. As we create a new community of learners in the twenty-first century, the role of the university in the community may be strengthened through internship programs.     

Computer Diffusion and Worker Empowerment

Abstract

Much anecdotal material describes various human impacts of computer adoption within the social work profession, however, there is scant research which confirms or challenges these assumptions. This article describes a study which investigates the diffusion of computers into the social work profession in terms of empowerment as an individual outcome for workers. A questionnaire returned by 520 social workers provided data on organizational computer diffusion, organizational centralization, and the Social Worker Empowerment Scale. Workers in organizations where computer diffusion was more advanced, and those in more decentralized decisionmaking environments were found to be more empowered.     

Farm Women and the Empowerment Potential in Value‐Added Agriculture

While the number of women in farming has risen in the United States, less clear is whether increasing participation in agriculture translates into empowerment. Are invisibility and disempowerment lingering expressions of farm women's experience? Using qualitative data drawn from 32 interviews with Michigan value‐added farmers, we examine the extent to which women have been able to experience empowerment, and the ways in which value‐added agriculture specifically fosters an empowering context. We adopt a conceptualization of empowerment from the development scholarship in order to establish a baseline for scrutiny, viewing empowerment as a multidimensional process constituting the “power to” realize one's goals, the opportunity to exercise “power with” others, and the ability to find and nurture “power within” the self. Our findings indicate that value‐added agriculture provides a unique context for women's empowerment. At the same time, the extent to which value added‐agriculture constitutes a venue for women's empowerment is complex, is multifaceted, and requires constant negotiation. It can be organized and performed in such a way as to subvert the empowerment process by confining women to specific social locations that may reproduce oppressive structures.     

Empowerment, Identity and Participatory Research: using social action research to challenge isolation for deaf and hard of hearing people from minority ethnic communities

This paper considers the practice of empowerment within a social action approach, and the importance of an analysis of issues of identity, for an understanding of the experience of individuals and their communities. The discussion is grounded in the experience of conducting a research project on the 'needs of deaf and hard of hearing people from minority ethnic communities', living in the London Borough of Merton. The theme of 'isolation' is taken as a focus for the discussion. It was identified by respondents to be of central importance to an understanding of their experience. The Social Model of Disability and the concept of Deaf Culture are used to explore the complex set of relationships that characterise the day-to-day reality for deaf and hard of hearing people from minority ethnic communities, and recommendations are made to assist researchers and service providers in developing a more empowering practice.     

IN and ICE as a Means to Promote a ‘New Personhood’ in Europe

Intercultural negotiation (IN) and intercultural education (ICE) are two emerging perspectives which break away from traditional regional and national identity concepts. The underlying philosophy is to view the European person as one who is capable of dealing with diversity (of both a social and cultural nature), and to focus socialization and (school) education on the enhancement of individual capacities to cope with intercultural communication and negotiation, and with differences in learning styles and socialization. The dichotomy “Us — Them” is overcome and supplanted by an intercultural ‘common ground’ of diversity within which the person develops his/her profile. In this paper some approaches to IN and ICE are brought into focus and analysed. The aim of the paper is to highlight how IN and ICE could become vehicles for personhood development after the nationalistic era in Europe.     

Focusing on Empowerment: facilitating self-help in young people with arthritis through a disability organisation

Young people with arthritis face a number of disabling barriers when negotiating their way through contemporary society. A national disability organisation, Young Arthritis Care YAC , has established a Contact network, whereby young people with arthritis provide support to similar others in the community. To improve the service, YAC initiated Contact Training Courses in the fields of advocacy and counselling. An appropriate research methodology was required that enabled the efficacy of this training to be examined in a disability framework. Focus group technique was selected as a research methodology set within an emancipatory paradigm that can in itself be an empowering experience for participants. Results illustrated that focus group technique enabled young people with arthritis to freely articulate their views concerning the efficacy of training set within the framework of self-help.     

Impact of Empowerment Training on the Professional Work of Family Peer Advocates

A pilot study using a prospective design examined the impact of a collaboratively developed training model, called the Parent Empowerment Program (PEP), for professionally-employed family peer advocates who work with caregivers of children with mental health needs. This training used a combination of didactic, practice exercises, and group discussion. It targeted specific mental health knowledge content and collaborative skills to facilitate the work of family peer advocates in empowering caregivers. Co-delivered by a family peer advocate and clinician, the training consisted of a 40-hour face-to-face training, followed by six monthly face-to-face booster sessions. A total of 15 advocates participated in assessments conducted at baseline and post-training. This group of experienced family peer advocates showed no significant increase in knowledge about mental health content, but post-training assessments indicated increased collaborative skills and mental health services self-efficacy. This initial evaluation has implications for expanding training and support for the emergent workforce of professionally-employed family peer advocates in children's mental health.     

The Relationship of Technology to Workers’ Alienation

During much of the twentieth century, research on the effects of technology on work exemplified one of two themes. One, grounded in Marx, Mills, and Braverman, pointed to the destructive impacts of technology on employees summarized here by the term alienation. The alternative theme, seen in Blauner, Woodward, and Trist, argued that the technologies of production did not necessarily lead to adverse impacts on employees. We test these themes with data from a survey completed in 1972–73 of a representative sample of 1,455 employed Americans, both white-collar and blue-collar, from various industries. Results indicate some qualified support for Blauner’s predictions. The technological type of job has a statistically significant impact on the dependent variables, but the impact is moderate. However, personal characteristics and contextual factors have more powerful effects. Findings from the survey are updated with data on shifts in occupational structure and in attitudes and shifts in technology throughout the economy.     

Philanthropists,Professionals and Feminists: Refugee NGOs and the Empowerment of Syrian Women in Gaziantep,Turkey

The diversification of gender‐based priorities and the necessities of refugees have led refugee NGOs to launch activities specifically for women, or urged women‐only NGOs to take action particularly for refugee women in Turkey. Drawing upon a qualitative research in Gaziantep in Turkey, which host a large population of Syrian refugees, this study seeks to answer the question “How effective are NGOs in empowering Syrian refugee women in Turkey?” It is argued that NGOs working in the provision of assistance to refugees cannot be treated as a homogeneous group in terms of the degree and form of their influences on the empowerment of refugee women, and the individual NGO’s standpoints may shape their effects. Data from interviews with NGO representatives and Syrian women who have received support from NGOs indicate that the NGOs’ perceptions of women’s issues and their contribution to the empowerment of women are closely linked to their type.     

The Third Shift? Gender and Empowerment in a Women’s Ecotourism Cooperative

Ecotourism is lauded as a path toward sustainable development and women’s empowerment in rural areas around the world, but little is known about how gendered expectations shape its processes and outcomes. This paper employs an in-depth qualitative case study of a female-only ecotourism cooperative in rural Mexico to investigate how local gender dynamics influence women’s opportunities to benefit from ecotourism development. Findings show that women’s family and work commitments prevent their ability to devote the resources and energy necessary to make the cooperative successful. In this context, women are first expected to be wives and mothers, and to fulfill the substantial daily expectations associated with those roles. In addition, most women work outside the home. This leaves little time or energy for a “third shift” as ecotourism entrepreneurs running their own cooperative. Women put their own interests and goals on the back burner, because of the demands of the first two shifts. If ecotourism is to empower women, localized gender structures must be understood and addressed. Overlooking these challenges can mean that ecotourism projects, even those specifically aimed at empowering women, may only further burden women and reinforce gender models that perpetuate inequality.     

Care Provision,Empowerment, and Market Forces: The Art of Establishing Legitimacy for Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs)

Using Suchman’s taxonomy, the generation of legitimacy in relation to both external parties/stakeholders and employees by four Swedish work integration social enterprises (WISEs) was investigated. Data were collected through focus group and individual interviews. When operating in fiercely competitive markets, a pragmatic exchange legitimacy was mainly used. When selling complex products, such as investigations of work capacity, normative, and cognitive forms of legitimacy were common. As regards internal relations, normative legitimacy established though robust internal procedures was of importance. In addition, relational legitimacy when dealing with clients, funders, and employees emerged as important. The study indicates that WISEs tend to imitate profit-generating organizations in generating legitimacy. Although short-term resource-generation can be facilitated, the replication of for-profit practices can create a tension with the concurrent aim of being an innovative and empowering enterprise for people who otherwise would be excluded from the labor market.     

Beyond Risk Factors

SUMMARY

This article provides an overview of important themes in European research regarding sexual behavior and the risk for HIV infection. There is a growing critique of HIV prevention among European theorists which focuses on four themes: (1) That current models over-emphasize the role of rational decision-making in sexual behavior; (2) That the [individual is viewed as the unit of research and intervention; (3) That the person is assumed to be static, having qualities which remain unchanged over time; and, (4) That the social/ cultural context of human interaction is ignored in relation to sexual behavior. To counteract these perceived deficiencies, it is proposed that future research and practice incorporate the following elements: sexual behavior as being primarily an interaction between persons as opposed to a decision of individuals; the effects of time on sexual decision-making; the cultural context and its influence on sexuality; the subjective experience of love as relates to sex; the role of power in determining sexual interaction; and the symbolic meaning of sexual acts.     

“They give you back that dignity”: understanding the intangible resources that make a transitional house a home for homeless families

Approximately 33% of the homeless population in 2017 were families with children. Researchers have argued for interventions and services to employ an ecological perspective to mitigate some of the unintentional harm inherent in existing programs designed to serve homeless families. This paper utilized a case study of a transitional housing program to (1) determine how well the program met recommendations informed by the ecological perspective and (2) explore underlying themes across recommendations. Past and current residents of a transitional housing program participated in semi-structured interviews as part of a program evaluation. Interviews were deductively and inductively coded to meet aims 1 and 2, respectively. Residents identified several aspects of the program that met the ecological perspective recommendations including culturally-responsive services, trauma-based services, and social and community connections. Major underlying themes spanning across recommendations included interpersonal resources (caring, sense of belonging), empowerment resources (advocacy, family preservation), impact on family (family life, positive youth development), and communication. This case study, through the analysis of residents’ perspectives, highlights the important role of transitional housing programs in providing a supportive, empathetic, empowering, and home-like environment that gives residents “back that dignity” so they are emotionally and physically prepared to successfully transition to permanent housing.