Merger as a Strategic Response to Government Contracting Pressures

This article describes the planning, decision-making, implementation, and evaluation phases of a recent, successful merger of five small social service agencies in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The merger was undertaken as a conscious strategy to enable the newly formed Arbor Circle Corporation to cope more effectively with environmental uncertainty, especially in regard to government contracting. The successes and the struggles encountered in the merger are instructive for other nonprofits that may be contemplating this kind of organizational restructuring as well as those interested in the impact of contracting on the government-nonprofit relationship.     

Evaluation of Embedded Intelligent Real‐time Systems*

Over the past two decades, questions have surfaced about the effectiveness and contribution of intelligent systems to decision makers in a variety of settings. This paper focuses on the evaluation challenges associated with intelligent real‐time software systems that are embedded in larger host systems. With the proliferation of such systems in operational settings such as aerospace, medical, manufacturing, and transportation systems, increased attention to evaluations of such systems, and to resulting software safety, is warranted. This paper describes one such evaluation and proposes a set of evaluation criteria for embedded intelligent real‐time systems (EIRTS). Implications of the evaluation and the evaluation criteria are discussed.     

Unmet mental health and substance abuse treatment needs of sexual minority elders

In a survey exploring the reliability and validity of a screening tool, we explored the substance abuse and mental health issues among 371 elders; 74 were sexual minorities. Analyses by age group indicated that elders 55-64 years had significantly more problems with substance abuse, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts compared to those 65 and older. Bisexuals reported significantly greater problems with depression, anxiety, and suicidality than either heterosexual or lesbian or gay elders. Mental health and substance abuse treatment utilization was low among all elders with problems. Implications for assessment, access to care, and group-specific services delivery are discussed.     

Pushing the Boundaries of the Social Work Practicum: Rethinking Sites and Supervision Toward Radical Practice

This article challenges the profession's accreditation requirement that social work field placements must have a social worker as supervisor. The author argues that the profession's stated commitment to social and economic justice can best be served if the profession broadens the definition of what constitutes good social work practicum supervision. With support from schools of social work, people in our communities from different disciplines and backgrounds engaged in progressive justice work, can provide social work students with valuable experiences and in turn enrich the social work curriculum.     

Standing at the Door: Reflections on the Daughters of the Second Wave

Although there are many similarities between the young women Susie Orbach describes and their counterparts in the northeastern United States, there are also complexities and multiplicities in their behavior and expression of aggression, their experience of themselves and of each other, that require us to reach beyond a comfortable intergenerational grasp. These daughters of women who came of age in the feminist movement are members of their own quite globalized youth culture with its own construction of “girls” in an era when aggression is everywhere more explicit and relationships with parents have been shaped by economic and social changes. We do not really know how concepts, like merged attachment, that were so critical to our liberation and coming of age, are relevant to the experience of these young women. It is a question to explore in a cultural context that is more familiar to them than it is to us, their parents.     

An Evaluation of the Scholarly Productivity of Doctoral Graduates

Scholarly publication is becoming increasingly important in social work. Not only does publication reflect the knowledge development effort of the profession, but it apparently positively affects the careers of the authors. In the current study, the authors evaluated the scholarly productivity of 284 randomly selected doctoral graduates from 30 social work programs. The authors accumulated and aggregated for each program counts of publications appearing in the Source Index of the Social Sciences Citation Index.Findings indicated that the level of article productivity among doctoral graduates was normative. In addition, the productivity of doctoral program faculty was found to be related to the productivity of the program’s doctoral graduates. The authors suggest that perhaps productive faculty provide positive role models to their students; this mentoring relationship contributes to graduate productivity outcomes.     

Three Types of Memory for Childhood Sexual Abuse: Relationships to Characteristics of Abuse and Psychological Symptoms∗

ABSTRACT

Data from a clinical sample (N?=?88) reporting childhood sexual abuse was compared by types of memory, abuse characteristics, and psychological symptoms. Three types of memory were identified from a questionnaire (“Always” n?=?27 [31%], “Recovered” n?=?41 [46%], and “Both” n?=?20 [23%]). When compared with narrative reports from a subset (n?=?30) of the sample, the lines between “Always,” “Recovered,” and “Both” types of memory were ambiguous. Consistency across reports, however, was 83%. Memories classified as either “Recovered” or “Both” were associated with earlier age-at-onset and more severe psychological symptoms compared to those who “Always” remembered CSA. No significant differences were found between the “Both” and “Recovered” groups.     

Interdisciplinary Community Collaboration: Perspectives of Community Practitioners on Successful Strategies

ABSTRACT

Six focus groups were convened to collect data on successful interdisciplinary community collaboration (ICC) strategies. Participants came from a variety of disciplines but shared the common identification of having worked in similar communities. Participant assignment to one of six groups was designed to insure diversity by gender and race or ethnicity. They discussed four questions received in advance. Prior consented tape-recorded sessions were transcribed and reviewed by group facilitators using a process of member checking. Data analysis utilized the qualitative methodology known as grounded theory. Results indicate that organizers must have (1) a knowledge base of strategic planning, management, and administration, (2) an intra- or interpersonal skills set, and (3) well-defined values and attributes. The Practice implications are that further research is needed to more fully explore the complexity of ICC work.