Network analysis using the method of path lists: testing the weak ties hypothesis

A central contribution of network analysis is the recognition of the value of considering various sociological units of analysis; e.g. individuals, ties, connected triples of individuals. The ‘path list’ approach is based upon developing data files corresponding with each relevant unit of analysis, stating hypotheses in terms of particular units of analysis, and testing those hypotheses using the relevant data files. Data files are constructed from initial lists of ties using three basic file manipulation operations: (a) concatenating, (b) aggregating, and (c) matching; then, hypotheses are tested by examining associations among the variables in these files. This paper specifically shows how Granovetter's ‘weak ties hypothesis’ can be tested using the method of path lists. An appendix includes SPSS programs to implement the method of path lists for this task; other computer packages can also be used to implement the path list approach.     

Developing the field of youth organizing and advocacy: what foundations can do

For more than a decade, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund has seeded many San Francisco Bay Area youth organizing and advocacy programs. Now that the field is maturing, argues the fund's vice president of programs, foundations have a critical programmatic and capacity-building role to play. The author offers analysis and strategies for integrating youth development grant making across foundation interest areas. The programs described illustrate the diversity of youth organizing and advocacy programs that could be supported by funders, whether or not any particular philanthropic institution has a grant-making focus on youth development or youth organizing. The article ends with an in-depth portrait of the self-reported needs of youth organizing and advocacy programs and concrete strategies for foundations seeking to more effectively enable youth organizing and advocacy to play an important role in bringing about a more vibrant, diverse, and effective democratic culture.     

EVALUATING ALTERNATIVE JOB CREATION STRATEGIES

This paper examines the costs of job creation under a wide range of programs that the government has at its disposal. The framework chosen for the analysis is a standard neo-classical model which allows for pockets of unemployment (created by structural imperfections in the operation of the labor market) but not cyclical unemployment. A general conclusion that emerges from the analysis is that job creation programs which are tightly targeted at disadvantaged workers (the structurally unemployed) are much less costly methods of creating additional employment than are untargeted programs.     

Union wages, rents, and skills in health care labor markets

We examine the effect of unions on the earnings of health care workers, with emphasis on the measurement and sources of union wage premiums. Using data constructed from the 1973 though 1994 Current Population Surveys, standard union premium estimates are found to be substantially lower among workers in health care than in other sectors of the economy, and to be smaller among higher skill than among lower skill occupational groups. Longitudinal analysis of workers switching union status, which controls for worker-specific skills, indicates a small impact of unions on earnings within both high and low skilled health care occupations. Evidence is found for small, but significant, union threat effects in health care labor markets. It has been argued that recent legal changes in bargaining unit determination should enhance union organizing and bargaining power. Although we cannot rule this out, such effects are not readily apparent in our data. The authors appreciate the assistance of David Macpherson, who helped develop the CPS data files used in the paper.     

Building Solidarity Through Difference: A Practice Model for Critical Multicultural Organizing

ABSTRACT

Building solidarity is perhaps the most crucial, yet under-theorized, process in organizing for social change. Traditional models of union and neighborhood-based organizing associate solidarity with commonality, as opposed to difference. However, this traditional organizing model is being forced to adapt to an increasingly multicultural context, presenting a need for rethinking past practices and creating new frameworks for multicultural organizing. Theoretical work on the topic has been relatively detached from action on the ground, with few efforts to translate it into community organizing practice. This article develops a practice model for critical multicultural organizing drawing on a five-year qualitative, participatory evaluation of youth participation in grassroots community organizations. As well as offering insight into the efforts of young people to organize around neighborhood issues in largely low-income and racially diverse communities of color, the cases highlight inclusive practices that will help any organization become more sustainable and effective.     

Field research and word processor files: A technical note

Doing field research means storing and sorting great volumes of fieldnotes. A micro word processor (WP) can reduce all of this paper to a few disks. The process of setting up files, marking subfiles, listing files in a directory, and calling up files in old and new arrangements requires some knowledge of WP limits and techniques. This note outlines the process, the limits, and the questions one must ask about how to run a specific WP system in order to use it fully. The note ends with two cautions. The cost of computer supplies may deter unfunded workers, especially those with access to free typing materials or labor. More crucial, planning for files may tempt an over-hasty researcher to define theory categories prematurely.     

Rebuilding Community Organizing Education in Social Work

Although the campaign and election of Barack Obama as the nation's first President with a background in community organizing (CO) has boosted the visibility and popularity of the field, graduate social work programs have not taken full advantage of the opportunity. This article, therefore, presents a three-fold argument regarding the future of CO education. There is an increasing demand and need for trained organizers and community organizing education. This historical moment holds significant potential for CO education in social work. Graduate schools of social work with CO programs should broaden their outreach to attract potential students and activists to careers as social change agents.     

What Difference Does Difference Make? Position and Privilege in the Field

Feminist standpoint theorists contend that the researcher's positionality affects all aspects of the research process—from the articulation of a research question to the analysis and presentation of the data. They argue that this influence becomes problematic when researchers occupying privileged positions in society elect to study those who are marginalized on the basis of race, class, and gender. In this article, we examine and compare the backstages of two distinct, cross-racial, ethnographic projects in order to understand how and to what extent the researcher's positionality shapes the structure and substance of the research study. We discover that the influence of racial privilege (and other components of researcher identity) on the research process is subtle and complex. It is apparent in the assumptions and narratives the researcher uses to make sense of her experiences in the field as well as in the relationship between the researcher and her respondents. We consider the implications of this in terms of the integrity of the ethnographies we produced, as well as for feminist research more generally.     

Addressing the Issue of Psychiatric Disability in Social Work Interns: The Need for a Problem-Solving Framework

Abstract

This article examines the issues that arise when field instructors encounter social work interns with psychiatric problems. The authors discuss how legal decisions and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provide the organizing framework for developing appropriate policies for addressing these situations. Findings from a survey that asked 61 field instructors about their experiences with such students and their knowledge of ADA guidelines provide additional information for policy development. Based on the survey and the legal guidelines, the authors present a problem-solving framework and recommendations to guide academic programs toward an approach that protects the rights of all parties involved.     

Computerizing protective services intake expertise: Preliminary research

Decision making at child welfare intake has been the subject of considerable investigation for the last thirty years. Previous reserach on the dynamics of abuse and neglect resulted in complexity and inconsistency to the extent that research moved away from determining the relevant information for creating a more structured decision making process. Recent developments in knowledge engineering and computerized expert systems provide new tools for examining protective services intake decision making. These tools are appropriate for organizing the vast amount of information workers use during decision making, extracting decisions from that information, and presenting the decisions and their supporting logic. This research examines existing expertise with a small sample of child welfare experts to determine the feasibility of developing an expert system for supporting intake decisions.     

Addressing Barriers to University-Community Collaboration

Abstract

University-community partnerships, and COPC programs in particular, offer important opportunities for traditionally segregated groups to work together in collaborative relationships. The challenge of bringing people who possess distinct differences in background and social power together is a long-standing issue. Class, status, and organizational differences may impede collaboration. This article discusses the history of COPC as social policy and reviews an evaluation report of successful community-university partnerships. Drawing from the community organizing literature in sociology and social work, this article suggests community organizing methods that address structural obstacles to collaborative work. Especially in COPC programs characterized by multiple interactions, it is the community based organization (CBO) which has greatest facility to equalize the playing field between disparate groups. The role of community organizers in CBOs is to acknowledge and disrupt the structural inequalities inherent in these relationships. The community organizer must resist the role of expert or buffer between the community and university and instead strive toward authentic collaboration.     

Power to People with Disabilities: empowerment issues in employment programming

A view of empowerment that focuses exclusively or primarily on increasing the personal or individual power of people with disabilities violates the spirit of the disability rights movement which is a political movement organizing for social change. A view of empowerment more in keeping with the political organizing and protest that generated interest in empowerment focuses on the acquisition of social forms of power, especially power with which is an egalitarian social power based in individuals acting together as equal partners. An understanding of the importance of power with as a basis for empowerment is useful in developing empowering and effective employment programs for people with severe disabilities. Examples of employment programs based in power with are described including self-managed work crews, and businesses owned and operated co-operatively by people with disabilities.     

Challenging Misconceptions about Organizing Women into Unions

In many countries, women are the fastest growing group of unionized workers. As unions scramble to restore their flagging membership, women become central to the process of union membership renewal. Yet survey data collected from union organizers in Canada show that unions are only partially meeting women’s demand for union representation, in large part because of gender bias in union organizing practices. To develop this argument, this article offers data analysis that challenges four popular misconceptions about women and unions which contribute to gender bias in union organizing practices. These misconceptions are: women are less likely to support unions than men; high rates of unionization in the public sector rather than women themselves explain the high rates of union growth amongst women; small workplaces are a particular barrier to organizing women and women are more passive and avoid conflict, therefore reducing their likelihood of withstanding a hostile organizing drive. Having challenged these misconceptions, the article concludes with a discussion of the many ways in which union organizing practices are gender biased. Issues discussed range from the limited number of women hired as organizers to the tendency of unions to target small male‐dominated workplaces for organizing, over women‐dominated workplaces, in spite of the latter’s greater likelihood of success.     

Innovative Organizing Practices

ABSTRACT

The work requirements in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) set the stage for unprecedented expansion of workfare programs across the nation. Shortly after the PRWORA passed, the Los Angeles chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) began a union-style organizing drive of the 25,000 General Relief (GR) recipients in Los Angeles County's workfare program. Over the past four years the de facto union, in coalition with over 75 allied community, labor, and clergy organizations, won numerous substantive progressive policy changes in the workfare program. In a case study format, this paper describes the following innovative organizing practices and how they contributed to the workfare policy changes: (a) combining labor and community organizing strategies, (b) combining conflict tactics with direct service, and (c) developing leadership from the General Relief constituency.     

What can we learn about unintended consequences from a textual analysis of monitoring reports and evaluations for U.S. foreign assistance programs?

In recent years, articles in Evaluation and Program Planning have noted the importance of evaluating programs’ unintended consequences, and the need to increase our knowledge in that area. To that end, this paper considers the information that can be obtained about the unintended consequences of foreign assistance programs through an automated textual analysis and review of publicly-available monitoring reports and evaluations. Automated full text searches for terms synonymous with ‘unintended consequences’ were conducted of more than 1,300 monitoring reports and evaluations downloaded from a publicly-available database of foreign assistance programs. The reports identified by the automated searches were screened and analyzed to determine which had considered and/or reported about such consequences. Positive and negative consequences were identified, as were the assistance sectors and recipient countries. While this study makes available more information on the unintended consequences of foreign assistance programs, it also emphasizes the need for greater research in this area, and outlines how a future research project of this nature might obtain more data.     

Making Connections: Community Organizing,Empowerment Planning,and Participatory Research in Participatory Evaluation

This article shows the intersections of participatory research, popular education, empowerment planning, and community organizing with participatory evaluation. It argues that a truly successful participatory evaluation involves participants in guiding and even conducting the research, doing a process of self- and program study, creating plans for change, and organizing themselves for implementing these plans. Next, the chapter shows how these elements played out in a participatory evaluation of a community organizing training and technical assistance project in Toledo, Ohio. The first year of the project was facilitated by participatory evaluation that helped identify early successes and problems so participants could make programmatic changes early in the process. The telling of the story also develops practices of participatory evaluation, including planning the evaluation, doing the research and adapting it to changing conditions, uncovering creative tensions, participatory validity checking, and linking the process to planning and action. The chapter concludes with some lessons for participatory evaluation practice.     

Problem gambling and property offences: an analysis of court files

This article outlines some of the major findings regarding criminogenic problem gambling in Crofts' (2002) analysis of New South Wales Local and District Court files. The article details firstly the advantages and disadvantages of relying upon court files as a source of information on gambling related crime. The article then outlines the personal characteristics of the subjects in the study, the relationship of gambling to the commission of their offences and judicial responses. The study provided qualitative information on when people are likely to seek treatment for problem gambling and also highlighted problem gambling as a significant motivation for employee theft. The study also suggests that the reasons for problem gambling may impact upon offending patterns.     

Evaluating health services research capacity building programs: Implications for health services and human resource development

Evaluation of research capacity building programs presents challenges, including defining “research capacity building” and measuring it. The present study evaluates infrastructure capacity-building strategies and barriers and facilitators of two federally funded health-related research capacity building programs within the United States. We developed a conceptual framework and abstracted 223 data elements from existing project files. We administered questionnaires to 17 principal investigators and conducted 2-h interviews of 15 principal investigators. Finally, we conducted one-and-a-half-day site visits with five projects. We aggregated data and analysis results across the two programs. Impacts and strategies were also analyzed as to whether host institutions had little or no existing research infrastructure (“seed projects”) or had well-developed research infrastructure (“fertilizer projects”). Projects were associated with increases in publication and presentation rates by Principal Investigators and staff, increases in research funding, changes in organizational research culture, and positive impacts on the community. Project characteristics and activities associated with each of these outcomes were identified. It was also noted that the correlations between these outcomes were small and non-significant.     

The Coming Home Program

Abstract

This paper describes barriers and opportunities to creating affordable assisted living facilities for older persons eligible for Medicaid services. This information is based on the practical experiences of the Coming Home Program, a project of NCB Development Corporation (NCBDC) with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Begun in 1992, this national program has contributed to the creation and adoption of state policies including regulations, implementation of state programs, creation of development and operational feasibility analysis tools, and the identification and structuring of financing sources. It has also fostered and supported public-private partnerships that have resulted in 31 operational affordable assisted living demonstration projects with another 73 in development.

The paper explains the need for affordable assisted living, Coming Home's definition of affordable assisted living, and the structure of the Coming Home Program. Four case studies are presented that summarize the goals and outcomes of the Coming Home Programs in Arkansas, Florida, Washington, and Vermont. The paper's conclusions provide lessons learned during the program's first twelve years and their implication for state policies and programs.