‘Community’: The Spray-on Solution

Community is one of those ‘motherhood’ words with great potential for mystification of social issues. This paper examines the way the term has evolved and is currently used in Australia. Special attention is given to the contradiction between the claims to radicalism of much community work and the system preserving effect the term actually lends to programs. To illuminate the process under consideration alternative approaches are briefly considered but recognized as generally unacceptable to official social policy and practice because of the implicit threat to the current distribution of power and resources.     

Multi‐agency information practices in children's services: the metaphorical ‘jigsaw’ and professionals quest for a ‘full’ picture

As there are a number of high‐profile public inquiries into child death tragedies, ‘information sharing’ has now become a moral and political imperative across England and Wales for improving the welfare and protection of children. This paper discusses multi‐agency information practices, at the stage of referral, which were observed and documented in the day‐to‐day practice of child protection work. Drawing on transcribed, professional narrative accounts, a ‘jigsaw’ metaphor is used to describe the process of piecing information together to ascertain a ‘full’ picture of children and families lives. However, these accounts highlight that there is something of a mismatch between the jigsaw, as articulated in the conceptual abstract accounts, and jigsaw practices operating on the ground. It is argued that abstracting professional information practices from situated contexts creates impoverished understandings of these practices. Thus, reported findings in this paper highlight the inherent complexities of jigsaw practices in the ‘everyday’ of child protection work, which challenges objectivist assumptions about a stability of meaning, and further highlight that the ‘endpoint’ of reaching a ‘full’ picture of a child's life is not fixed, nor does it have the same meaning for all professionals, but rather it is a complex process involving sense‐making, translation in context and organizational relevance.     

Pre-School Intervention: A Brief Response to ‘Project Enrichment’

Pre-school intervention programmes for disadvantaged groups are long overdue in Australia, and the Project Enrichment of Childhood Programme reported in the February, 1974, issue is one example. However, the conceptual bases and methods on which such programmes are based are also overdue for critical evaluation. This note is a preliminary response to the Bourke Project and offers a wider and alternative set of references to those which have been published in connection with that programme. It is argued that there is confusion about means and ends in the reports of the Bourke Project, and that results claimed for the criterion tests used in the programme may not be valid with respect to the stated aims of the programme.     

Helping ‘Well’ Families to Change: A Pilot Study

This article describes a time limited, inter-generational project which offered ‘well’ families an opportunity to define priorities and needs and practise changed behaviour within a secure group. The program lasted for twelve weeks and emphasized an educational rather than a treatment bias. Experiential learning techniques were used to teach family dynamics and alternative means of conflict resolution to whole families. In this task, the contracting process came to be an increasingly valuable tool for managing conflict within the group and within each family. Some evidence is cited to show that participation in the group enabled families to change disabling patterns of interaction.     

Social Policy's ‘Greatest Hits’

The ‘age of metrics’ or ‘the metric tide’ in the form of bibliometrics has largely by‐passed Social Policy. This study aims to broaden the focus from the most cited articles in Social Policy journals to discover the most cited works in Social Policy or ‘Social Policy's Greatest Hits’. It finds some 24 works with over 2000 Google Scholar citations, but only nine of these are by social policy writers. In terms of total citations, Gosta Esping‐Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism is the clear leader by a significant margin, with the most cited Social Policy (or Social Administration) writers being Peter Townsend, Richard Titmuss, Ruth Lister and Jane Lewis. In addition to total citations, it presents citations per year, and ‘Social Policy citations’ (i.e. the use made of the work within the discipline of Social Policy). This list is headed by Gosta Esping‐Andersen and Paul Pierson, with the leading social policy writer being Jane Lewis. This article presents a set of the ‘most plausible contenders’ for the works with greatest influence within Social Policy or ‘Social Policy's Greatest Hits’. It is concluded that, even with its flaws, bibliometrics is an important approach to exploring the vast field of Social Policy.     

‘Did you see that,Mom?’: Social Looking in Three‐Year‐Old Boys

This study examined social looking, defined as child‐initiated looking to a caregiver's face, in a sample of three‐year‐old boys and their mothers: 59.6% of boys looked to their mothers at least once over the course of emotion‐eliciting puppet show vignettes. Social looking occurred more often during puppet show events that were child‐focused and positive in valence. Boys’ social looking was related to their concurrent affective state, with more expressions of positive emotion looking associated with more social looks. Patterns of family emotionality predicted children's use of social looking. Specifically, a history of positive family expressiveness was associated with children's less frequent use of social looking, whereas a history of negative family expressiveness was associated with children's more frequent use of social looking.     

‘How come I don’t get asked no questions?’ Researching ‘hard to reach’ children and teenagers

This article discusses two related areas of research practice with children and young people that have received less attention in the literature than they might. The first is working with children and teenagers for whom the traditional, discursive nature of interview‐based research is less accessible. The second is the disinclination of researchers to report on difficulties in the research process. As researchers, we scanned the literature for assistance for some of the problems we encountered, with little reward. In describing everyday problems (and some of our – still developing – solutions) we hope to encourage more dialogue on the uncomfortable realities of the research process, and how we might improve research practice, making it a more fruitful exercise for researchers, and a more enjoyable one for children and teenagers.     

‘Between heaven and hell’: Subjective well‐being of asylum seekers

Nearly 1.4 million asylum seekers arrived in Europe in 2015. With an unprecedented 822% increase in the number of asylum applicants, Finland experienced the largest increase in applicants than any other European country that year. In this study, we investigated asylum seekers’ experienced subjective well‐being (ExSWB) construct in comparison with their evaluated subjective well‐being (EvSWB) construct. A mixed methods approach with convergent design was adopted for the study, which combined quantitative data on asylum seekers’ (n = 181) ExSWB and EvSWB with qualitative data on the elements of ExSWB and EvSWB. The findings point at a limbus phase in asylum seekers’ livelihood transition between the borders for international protection in Finland. The Cantril self‐anchoring striving scale was used by the participants to describe this passage ritual of ambiguity. Furthermore, we also found gender differences related to coping and subjective well‐being, which supports previous findings on asylum seekers’ well‐being. Key Practitioner Message: ? The concept of the limbus phase of the asylum seeker livelihood transition is useful for describing asylum seekers’ experiences while waiting for an asylum decision; ? Asylum seeker SWB is closely related to status dissonance, separation and capitals, causing anxiety, worry and fear, and inflicting cognitive disruption; ? Equal, institutional‐level functions should be organised in the reception centre for easing the anxiety related to the asylum‐seeking process.     

UNEMPLOYED? BOARD THE ENTERPRISE FOR A BRAVE NEW WORLD AND A ‘REAL’ JOB: A CRITIQUE OF THE NEW STRATEGY FOR REDUCING UNEMPLOYMENT

This paper argues that the changes to the delivery of labour exchange assistance to the unemployed, initiated in the 1996 Federal Budget, are unlikely to deliver on the promise of ‘Helping Australians into Real Jobs’. The changes posited by the government are more realistically viewed as a trend to divesting itself of cost intensive functions through the mechanisms of corporatisation and privatisation. Through an analysis of service expectations, the author suggests that the creation of the employment services market will neither build confidence in the Government's strategy to contain unemployment, nor have a positive impact on reducing levels of unemployment. PEPE Ltd, the government owned employment placement enterprise, faces an interesting future as it competes in an open employment services marketplace. It is further suggested that the privatisation trend has serious implications for equitable service delivery to unemployed Australians.     

Anglo‐Australian and non‐Anglophone middle classes: ‘foreign accent’ and social inclusion

Building on the concept of ‘multicultural middle class’, this paper explores social inclusion of professionally educated and employed non‐Anglophone immigrants in Australia. We focus specifically on the perceptions and implications of ‘foreign accent’ in the interaction between two groups of middle‐class Australians: non‐Anglophone immigrants and Anglo‐Australians. ‘Non‐Anglophone immigrants’ are defined as those who arrived in Australia as adults, grew up speaking a language other than English, and therefore usually speak English with a ‘foreign accent’. ‘Anglo‐Australians’ are defined as people born in Australia who grew up in families/households where only English was spoken, therefore speaking with a ‘native Australian’ accent. Through a survey of a targeted sample of respondents, the two groups were asked about their intergroup communication, wider interaction (e.g., intermarriage, friendships and working together) and mutual perceptions. Our findings indicate high levels of agreement between the two groups that Anglophone/non‐Anglophone communication is minimally hindered by comprehension problems due to foreign‐accented speech and cultural differences. Although the positive picture that emerges may reflect specific experiences and attitudes of middle‐class professionals and may not be generalisable, increased contact of the 'multicultural middle class' with its Anglo‐Australian counterpart is likely to be a factor in dissociating foreign accent and negative stereotyping.