The Political Arithmetic of Poverty

The article continues the examination of the slippery concept of poverty and in particular the precise definition of "relative deprivation". Townsend's attempts to bring up to date the measurement of poverty are subject to renewed critical analysis. Attempts to construct a deprivation index are regarded sceptically and the statistical measurement of poverty and of deprivation are shown to be unsatisfactory and unconvincing.     

Assessing outcomes in an English authority (The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea)

The local authority has used the Looking After Children materials to develop needs-led and outcome-oriented services at both individual and strategic planning levels. A specific study used data from the Assessment and Action Records to identify priority needs and desired outcomes for young people leaving care.     

Assessment of social work students: Standpoint and strong objectivity

The aim of this paper is to consider epistemological issues relating to the assessment of social work students. It will review the development of social work education and in particular the changes that have occurred in assessing the practice of social work students in England and Wales. It explores models of practice assessment. Factors relating to maintaining professional standards, whilst taking into consideration issues of justice, are addressed. It explores the potential benefits of using a second opinion in the assessment of marginal or failing students on practice placement. Assessment is linked to how students may perform as qualified practitioners; this raises issues related both to the nature of objectivity, and standpoint in assessment.     

The South Oaks Gambling Screen: a review with reference to Australian use

The South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS) is a psychometric instrument widely used internationally to assess the presence of pathological gambling. Developed by Lesieur and Blume (1987) in the United States of America (USA) as a self-rated screening instrument, it is based on DSM-III and DSM-III-R criteria. This paper describes the origins and psychometric development of the SOGS and comments critically in relation to its construct validity and cutoff scores. Reference is made to the use of the SOGS in the Australian setting, where historically gambling has been a widely accepted part of the culture, corresponding to one of the highest rates of legalised gambling and gambling expenditure in the world. An alternative approach to the development of an instrument to detect people who have problems in relation to gambling is proposed.     

Aural assault: Obscene telephone calls

Patterns of conversational structure and telephone technology put a call recipient in a position where she or he is vulnerable to abuse by anonymous callers. Obscene telephone callers assault women by manipulating or violating conventions of conversational interaction and recognized categories of social relationships that have established telephone styles associated with them. Women create images of their assailants. These images reveal that they consider callers to be threatening, unpredictable outsiders, socially distant from themselves and the people they know. The opportunity exists for women to blame themselves for being victimized by callers. Call recipients judge whether their handling of a call has significance for their conceptions of themselves as women of good moral character. The treatment of call activity by agencies charged with controlling it as well as the responses of people whom women tell about their experiences create conflict over the definition that these acts are unambiguously wrong. The fact that it is women who are offended by gender-related harassment while the perpetrators are, ordinarily, more socially powerful men is a condition of this conflict.Special thanks to Howard S. Becker and Clinton R. Sanders for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.