Presence and competences of social workers in Spanish educational centres. Laws vs. reality. A research approach

ABSTRACT

In Spain, School Social Work has had an uneven, non-linear record, with periods of stagnation. This situation still takes place nowadays, partly due to the lack of regulation of their competences and functions, and, above all, due to the fact that the figure of the social worker is not well settled in educational centres yet. The purpose of this article is to find out whether the figure of the social worker has been correctly incorporated into the educational system, as well as to assess the regulation of their competences and functions for the best development of their professional duties. The base of this article is the information obtained from a national ad hoc research, using as data collection technique a structured and self-administered online questionnaire designed by the author and distributed to social workers through 36 professional associations, thanks to the coordination with the Social Work National Council in Spain. Finally, a sample of 146 cases has been obtained. The conclusions show an approximation to the current actual reality of the professional exercise of social workers within the Spanish educational system and, in particular, to the strengths and weaknesses for an effective exercise of their competences and skills according to regulations which include and protect their professional activity.     

Weak Monotonicity Characterizes Deterministic Dominant‐Strategy Implementation

We characterize dominant‐strategy incentive compatibility with multidimensional types. A deterministic social choice function is dominant‐strategy incentive compatible if and only if it is weakly monotone (W‐Mon). The W‐Mon requirement is the following: If changing one agent's type (while keeping the types of other agents fixed) changes the outcome under the social choice function, then the resulting difference in utilities of the new and original outcomes evaluated at the new type of this agent must be no less than this difference in utilities evaluated at the original type of this agent.     

Book reviews

This article examines nationalist impulses toward a familiar, traditional heteronormativity through the language and imagery of a sample of tabloid newspapers in Britain during the Falklands War in 1982. In doing so, it asks how tabloid representation of the war created a particular and normative version of ‘Britishness’, central to which was the English woman, whose body became the site for a specific coalescing of race, gender and sexuality; a fixed notion of whiteness and normative heterosexuality located in the particular, unstable cultural space of a struggling ‘post-colonial’ Britain.     

Motherhood and Earnings: Wage Variability by Major Occupational Category and Earnings Level

Prior research has indicated that women with children earn less than their childless counterparts. In addition, recent research has found that the motherhood wage penalty may be most severe for low-income earners. Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979), we test two hypotheses. First, are there occupational differences in the motherhood wage penalty? Second, are there occupational differences in the relative wage penalty experienced by low and high wage mothers? Our results indicated that mothers in sales occupations are penalized at a significantly higher rate than mothers in non-sales occupations, while mothers in blue-collar occupations were penalized the least. Furthermore, the wage cost of motherhood was greatest amongst the highest earners in sales occupations.     

Mistreatment and Self-Reported Emotional Symptoms: Results From the National Elder Mistreatment Study

Many community-residing older adults in the United States report past year mistreatment; however, little is known about mental health correlates of abuse. This study investigated whether a recent history of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse is associated with self-reported emotional symptoms (e.g., anxiety, depression) among a representative sample of older adults. Results demonstrated that each abuse type increased likelihood of reporting emotional symptoms; when other known correlates were controlled, only emotional abuse remained a significant predictor. Additional study of mistreatment-related correlates of depression and anxiety is needed, with a focus on the often overlooked category of emotional mistreatment.     

CYBERNETICS AND AMERICAN YOUTH SUBCULTURE

Similar shifts can be seen in the use of cybernetic modelling across a wide variety of scientific disciplines. This article will categorize these shifts in terms of three historical phases: (1) modern cybernetics, focused on digital hierarchical systems, which reached its high point in the late 1960s; (2) transitional postmodern cybernetics, focused on analogue decentralized systems, which started in the late 1970s; and (3) stable postmodern cybernetics, based on a synthesis between the analogue/digital and centralized/decentralized oppositions, which started in the late 1980s. While the shifts themselves can be explained by internalist narratives, the ways in which youth subculture closely parallels these changes suggests that there are causal links between cybernetics and popular culture which work in both directions.