‘Providing a Link with the Real World’: Learning from the Student Experience of Service User and Carer Involvement in Social Work Education

Social work has long placed an emphasis on involving users and carers in the education of practitioners, an emphasis driven by service users and carers themselves, the value base of social work, and by policy and legislation from successive governments and regulatory bodies. Recent changes in regulation and professional standards in social work suggest a continuing commitment to service user and carer involvement. This paper argues that in order to ensure a sustainable commitment, there needs to be greater evidence of the value and purpose of such involvement. Whilst there is a considerable body of literature on this issue in social work education, little focus is on any impact on current and future practice of social work students. The paper discusses a research project addressing this issue from the perspective of social work students. Findings suggest that the involvement of service users and carers in their training was perceived by students as overwhelmingly positive, should be enhanced and that they believed that these experiences were taken forward in their practice. The paper also identifies key points that could inform best educational practice.     

Community college web sites as tools for fostering dialogue

This research brief reports the results of an analysis of community college Web sites as places for fostering dialogic relationships with key publics. Our research suggests that community colleges have created easy to use, information sites that appeal to a variety of publics. With a more attention to the dialogic potential of the Internet, community colleges can better adapt to the needs of their various publics.     

Depression in the Profession: Social Workers' Experiences and Perceptions

This study reports the findings of interviews with fifty socialworkers who volunteered to describe their personal experiencesof depression in the workplace. The findings confirm the literatureon the stresses of social work and provide an account of theways in which the social workers sought to reconcile their mentalhealth needs with their role as professionals. The study suggeststhe potential for those working at all levels in social workagencies to support social workers who are experiencing depression.At a time of shortages in the profession in the UK, and of effortsto enable those with mental health problems to remain in orreturn to work, the experiences of those social workers interviewedillustrate the managerial, training and human resource imperativesto provide more supportive workplaces.     

Taxonomy of mediated crisis responses

This paper examines how organizations integrate the Internet into crisis communication. The findings of a 7-year longitudinal study provide a taxonomy explaining how mediated communication creates new possibilities for crisis response. We translate the study findings into suggestions for how public relations managers can integrate new communication media into their mix of communication tactics in crisis and risk management.     

Discounting and the evaluation of lifesaving programs

The evaluation of lifesaving programs whose benefits extend into the future involves two discounting issues. The intragenerational discounting problem is how to express, in age-j dollars, reductions in an individual's conditional probability of dying at some future age k. Having discounted future lifesaving benefits to the beginning of each individual's life, one is faced with the problem of discounting these benefits to the present—the intergenerational discounting problem. We discuss both problems from the perspectives of cost-benefit and costeffectiveness analyses. These principles are then applied to lifesaving programs that involve a latency period.The authors are, respectively, Associate Professor of Economics, Univesity of Maryland and Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future; and Senior Fellow and Vice President, Resources for the Future. We thank the National Science Foundation for their support under grant DIR-8711083.     

HIV seroprevalence and clinical characteristics of severe inpatient mentally Ill homeless

Two related studies were carried out at a state psychiatric center unit designed for the long-term hospitalization of homeless mentally ill people removed from the streets of New York City and taken to hospitals for psychiatric treatment. The first study, a chart review of 102 patients, documented high rates of severe psychiatric illness, alcohol and other substance use, and untreated medical problems. Patient histories showed significant social disadvantages, including high rates of criminal activity and inability to complete high school or establish long-term relationships. Our second study anonymously tested 87 patients between the ages of 18 and 59 for the presence of HIV antibodies. An overall seroprevalence rate of 5.8% is reported. Men and women in this population are likely to have similar rates of HIV infection. Being young, and Black, or Hispanic appears to be associated with increased risk. This disenfranchised population urgently needs a broad array of social, medical, and psychiatric services. Assertive community outreach programs are necessary to assure delivery of services to this population.     

Agreement Between Mothers and Fathers on the Identification of Infant Communicative Acts: Use of a Randomization Procedure

The extent to which mothers and fathers agree on what they identify as their infant's communicative acts was investigated. Nineteen infants (6 at 6 months, 7 at 9 months, and 6 at 12 months) and their parents participated. A randomization procedure controlled for the frequencies and durations of the communicative acts identified by the parents, and the procedure produced a distribution of 10,000 “chance” agreement values for each parent pair with which their observed level of agreement was compared. The results indicated that, generally, parents could identify their infant's communicative acts consistently, and that observed levels of agreement between parents were significantly higher than would be expected by chance. Differences between mothers and fathers on their identification of communicative acts are considered in terms of the emergence of the infant's intention to communicate.     

Trauma adapted family connections: reducing developmental and complex trauma symptomatology to prevent child abuse and neglect

Families living in urban poverty, enduring chronic and complex traumatic stress, and having difficulty meeting their children's basic needs have significant child maltreatment risk factors. There is a paucity of family focused, trauma-informed evidence-based interventions aimed to alleviate trauma symptomatology, strengthen family functioning, and prevent child abuse and neglect. Trauma Adapted Family Connections (TA-FC) is a manualized trauma-focused practice rooted in the principles of Family Connections (FC), an evidence supported preventive intervention developed to address the glaring gap in services for this specific, growing, and underserved population. This paper describes the science based development of TA-FC, its phases and essential components, which are based on theories of attachment, neglect, trauma, and family interaction within a comprehensive community-based family focused intervention framework.