My Story: Blogs by Four Military Teens,by Sherman,M. D., & Sherman,D. M.

Abstract

GROUP WORK WITH POPULATIONS AT RISK. SECOND EDITION. Reviewed by Geoffrey L. Greif and Paul H. Ephross (Eds.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, 480 pp. reviewed by Barbara Muskat

TRANSFORMING THE LEGACY: COUPLE THERAPY WITH SURVIVORS OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA. Reviewed by Kathryn Basham and Dennis Miehls. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 368 pp. reviewed by Rachel Birnbaum     

Beyond survival: Strengthening community-based support for parents receiving a family service intervention

This paper presents parents' experiences of community support and their recommendations for how their communities, and the services within them, might support their families. Generated through a human-centred design methodology and using a desire-centred framework, the findings suggest that parents receiving a family service require support invoking feelings of intimacy, trust, reciprocity, inclusivity, connection and belonging. Parents' recommendations for community support include addressing material and attitudinal constraints impacting on engagement with services; creating non-judgmental services tailored to their needs but accessed as a last resort; and creating peer-based opportunities to support each other. Parents reflect that moving beyond basic survival of risk and vulnerability to a position where thriving is possible requires purposeful integration of parent's existing and desired community into service interventions. Facilitating deliberate change at the intersection of community and service support is pertinent to current and future social work policy and practice. Wider opportunities for understanding and enabling the needs and aspirations of parents, which are often overlooked because of a focus on addressing risk and vulnerability, are considered.     

Strength and Diversity in Social Work with Groups: Think Group by Cohen,C., Phillips,M., & Hanson,M.

No abstract available for this article.     

Disability Beyond Stigma: Social Interaction, Discrimination, and Activism

This article critiques the assumptions about the nature and meaning of disability advanced in social-psychological writing, suggests the origins of these assumptions, and proposes a return to a Lewinian/minority-group analysis of the situation of people with disabilities. It concludes by placing the articles in this issue of the Journal of Social Issues in context and by presenting questions in need of further exploration.     

Trauma Transformed: An Empowerment Response by Bussey,M. & Wise,J. B. (Eds.)

A group worker needs effective ways to get a group started and to involve its members. The check-in, an exercise to open group sessions, and other go-rounds which give each member a turn to speak, have become popular techniques. This article examines the value, purpose and problems of the check-in and other types of go-rounds and gives guidelines for use in a group. It is possible to perform acts that are techniques without employing groupwork as well as to use these same techniques and be doing goupwork. The techniques are not unique to our field; they are shared by all of the helping professions. The method informs how and when these techniques are to be selected, in what combinations, and with what intents (Klein, 1972).     

Experience,Subjectivity, Selfhood: Beyond a Meadian Sociology of the Self

Sociologists tend to see G. H. Mead's conceptualization of self as fundamentally correct. In this paper, we develop a critique of Mead's notion of the self as constituted through social interactions. Our focus will be on Mead's categorial distinction between the socially constructed self and subjective experience, as well as on the tendency of post-Meadian sociologists to push Mead's position in ever more radical directions. Drawing inspiration from a multifaceted understanding of selfhood that can be found in Husserlian phenomenology, we then propose that the most basic level of selfhood is anchored in irreducible subjective experience.