An Unfinished Reflexive Journey: Social Work Students' Reflection on their Placement Experiences

The fieldwork placement is recognized as one of the major componentsof social work education and a major determinant of its quality.A key aspect of the learning process in the fieldwork placementis the exposition of practice encounters to the students’critical reflection. Given the importance of the process of‘reflection’ or ‘reflective learning’,a qualitative study based on the reflective logs of social workstudents was conducted to explore the meaning of social workfield education and the learning experiences of social workstudents during their placement. The study findings revealedthat disturbing events experienced by students in their fieldworkwere a catalyst to their reflective process. Meanwhile, theirundue concern with knowledge and skills application within acircumscribed knowledge frame suggests the dominant influenceof scientism and competence-based practice in social work, inwhich learning outcomes and instrumental and technical reasoningare highly emphasized. Discovery of ‘self’ was alsothe major premise in the students’ reflection logs, inwhich a majority of them took their prevailing self-identityas a constant state to be verified in interaction with othersin the fieldwork placement. Reflexivity is manifested in askingfundamental questions about assumptions generated by formaland practice theories; it addresses the multiple interrelationsbetween power and knowledge, and acknowledges the inclusionof self in the process of knowledge creation in social workpractice. Its realization in social work education requiresthe social work educators’ reflexive examination of thedynamics that influence the construction of curriculum, whichin turn construct our prospective social workers.     

Subethnic interpersonal dynamic in diasporic community: a study on Chinese immigrants in Vancouver

ABSTRACT

Ethnicity is a social construct that can be conceptualised as a social classification delineating certain boundaries between an ethnic group and the dominant group. Members of an ethnic group are assumed to share similar cultural characteristics and to be homogenous among themselves. Many studies in ethnic organisations have indicated that subethnicity also exists within an ethnic group, but research on subethnicity is scant. Based on the findings of an exploratory study conducted in Vancouver, Canada, we examined how, at an interpersonal level, place of origin, language, mutual bias and discrimination and transnational politics divide the Chinese diasporic community subethnically. Meanwhile, being Chinese in the Canadian context and willingness to break the subethnic boundaries are noted as counterforces to the subethnic divide. We contend that interpersonal interaction is an imperative dimension for the understanding of the shaping of boundary between different subethnic groups.     

Young People’s Social Engagement: Personal Motivations and Social Networks

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This study focuses on the role of individuals’ social networks and motivations in predicting their intention to...     

‘My Child is Anxious Because We Might Get Deported’: Brief Therapy from MRI with an Immigrant Family in the United States

As we go to press in a COVID-19 world, the topic of anxiety is foremost on our minds. While each situation has to be considered in its own context, how to manage different anxieties has common denominators. There is currently a sharp increase in forced migration around the globe so mental health professionals must develop effective skills, like the ability to adapt services to different contexts and cultures, to manage the needs of immigrant people. Problem-Solving Brief Therapy, as developed at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, is a systemic model of therapy, which aims at promoting change in the complaint the presenting client (the ‘talker’) cares about. The model’s roots in Constructivism foster integrating the clients’ beliefs and values into therapy to allow the therapists to adapt to the clients’ particular needs. This paper is the analysis of a single case where the therapist worked with an immigrant family because their child suffered from severe anxiety related to the parents’ threatened deportation. The paper focuses on premises and strategies that allowed minimising cultural barriers between therapists and family members, thus facilitating a strong therapeutic alliance conducive to improvement.     

Transnationalism over the Life Course

The sociological research on transnational migration has blossomed over the past decade to become one of the most discussed ideas in the sociology of immigration and the discipline more generally. In this review, we draw attention to transnationalism research that includes elements of the life course perspective. We distinguish two ways that the life course approach can be integrated with research on transnationalism: Research that examines the unique transnational aspects of a single life stage, and research that considers transnational trajectories and transitions as individuals move through two or more life stages. We propose that more explicit attention to the life course in transnational research will lead to interesting and enlightening new research directions.     

Estimation Under the Lehmann Regression Model with Interval-Censored Data

We consider the estimation problem under the Lehmann model with interval-censored data, but focus on the computational issues. There are two methods for computing the semi-parametric maximum likelihood estimator (SMLE) under the Lehmann model (or called Cox model): the Newton-Raphson (NR) method and the profile likelihood (PL) method. We show that they often do not get close to the SMLE. We propose several approach to overcome the computational difficulty and apply our method to a breast cancer research data set.     

Integrated services in Australian early childhood education and care: what can we learn from our past?

Recent Australian interest in the integration of early childhood services is largely informed by international research and policy developments, particularly from the United Kingdom. Service integration is widely recognised as an effective means of holistically meeting the needs of children and families and ameliorating disadvantage. What is less well known is that Australia has a history of integrated early childhood services. This paper focuses on three points in 20th century Australia when advocacy for integrated early childhood service provision was evident: post‐World War I when the first Mother and Baby Welfare Clinic was established; during the late 1930s to mid 1940s with the advent of the Lady Gowrie Centres; and in the 1970s when several reports recommended the integration and co‐ordination of early years services. Attending to this history acknowledges this innovative Australian work, and provides potentially valuable, and somewhat cautionary, lessons for contemporary advocacy for integrated early childhood services.     

Perfect aggregation of Bayesian analysis on compositional data

Sufficiency is a widely used concept for reducing the dimensionality of a data set. Collecting data for a sufficient statistic is generally much easier and less expensive than collecting all of the available data. When the posterior distributions of a quantity of interest given the aggregate and disaggregate data are identical, perfect aggregation is said to hold, and in this case the aggregate data is a sufficient statistic for the quantity of interest. In this paper, the conditions for perfect aggregation are shown to depend on the functional form of the prior distribution. When the quantity of interest is the sum of some parameters in a vector having either a generalized Dirichlet or a Liouville distribution for analyzing compositional data, necessary and sufficient conditions for perfect aggregation are also established.     

On a mixture vector autoregressive model

The authors show how to extend univariate mixture autoregressive models to a multivariate time series context. Similar to the univariate case, the multivariate model consists of a mixture of stationary or nonstationary autoregressive components. The authors give the first and second order stationarity conditions for a multivariate case up to order 2. They also derive the second order stationarity condition for the univariate mixture model up to arbitrary order. They describe an EM algorithm for estimation, as well as a diagnostic checking procedure. They study the performance of their method via simulations and include a real application.