Death and Growth:

No abstract available for this article.     

Introduction: Welfare Reform: Preliminary Research and Unanswered Questions

This article summarizes the 1996 welfare reform act and introduces a set of key questions that remain unanswered as initial results concerning the effects of welfare reform are being analyzed and discussed by policymakers andresearchers. We introduce the collection of articles presented in this issue of the Journal of Social Issues, which are devoted to the topic of welfare reform and its potential ramifications for the well-being of families. The articles are grouped into three broad areas that represent major topics of interest to researchers, policy analysts, and others concerned with how welfare reform affects the lives of women and families: the politics of welfare reform, barriers to employment, and the impact of welfare reform on family life.     

Poverty: Consensus and Alternatives

Summary The purpose of this article is to examine the published viewsof two leading politicians who can claim to speak for theirparties. From their discussion of poverty and social deprivation(and the terms will be used interchangeably) an attempt willbe made to emonstrate that their policies or proposals reston similar assumptions about society and a similar model ofpoverty. Their consensus of approach will mean that no alternativepolicies are being seriously mooted within the party politicalsystem. Their assumptions will be examined critically and thesuggestion made that an approach deriving from an alternativemodel is required to counter poverty.     

Alcohol and the Elderly:

This paper provides an overview of what is currently known about elderly alcohol use and abuse. It identifies areas of social work practice that need to be improved to meet the needs of elderly problem drinkers, and makes recommendations regarding identification, treatment, and coordination of services for this population.     

The Child and Suffering:

No abstract available for this article.     

Urbanization: Present and Future

The first symposium in our country on the social problems of cities was held this year at the Institute of the International Workers' Movement of the USSR Academy of Sciences on the theme "Urbanization and the Working Class in the Face of the Scientific and Technical Revolution." The symposium was sponsored by the Scientific Council on Applied Social Research Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences and by the Institute. Approximately 250 persons, to whom a number of papers were presented for discussion, participated in the symposium. These papers discussed theoretical and methodological problems of urbanization, the findings of urbanization studies in the USSR, in capitalist countries, and in developing countries.     

Patients' Wants and Needs:

No abstract available for this article.     

Cancer Patients and Radiotherapy:

No abstract available for this article.     

Editorial: Loss and renewal

The authors review the literature that calls for the incorporation of relational theory into social work practice. Two strands of relational theory are important to developing a relational social work perspective: the psychoanalytic and the feminist. Based on a feminist understanding of relationality, Dorothy Smith has provided an alternative sociological perspective that can inform social work practice on the macro level, which she has termed institutional ethnography. In looking at ways that relational theory can inform macro practice in social work we can begin to formulate a more general relational perspective—beyond the clinical—in social work.