The nature and culture of social work with children and families in long‐term casework: Findings from a qualitative longitudinal study

Social work in the United Kingdom is preoccupied with what social workers cannot do due to having limited time to spend with service users. Yet remarkably little research has examined what social workers actually do, especially in long‐term relationships. This paper draws from an ethnographic study of two social work departments in England that spent 15 months observing practice and organizational life. Our findings show that social work some of the time has a significant amount of involvement with some service users and the dominant view that relationship‐based practice is rarely achieved is in need of some revision. However, families at one research site received a much more substantial, reliable overall service due to the additional input of family support workers and having a stable workforce who had their own desks and were co‐located with managers in small team offices. This generated a much more supportive, reflective culture for social workers and service users than at the second site, a large open plan “hot‐desking” office. Drawing on relational, systemic, and complexity theories, the paper shows how the nature of what social workers do and culture of practice are shaped by the interaction between available services, office designs, and practitioners', managers', and service users' experiences of relating together.     

Moving beyond the nature-based solutions discourse: introducing nature-based thinking

Urban Ecosystems - Suites of concepts and approaches have been launched during recent years to promote urban nature and greener cities. However, it is doubtable whether tinkering within the current...     

‘Birds of a Feather Flock Together’: The Impact of Choice of Spouse on Family Labor Income Inequality

Abstract. This paper analyzes to what extent the rise in women's labor force participation has led to ‘flocking together’, i.e. whether women with high labor income tend to be married to men with high labor income, or vice versa. Based on the decomposition of the Gini coefficient and a related index for the extent of ‘flocking together’ applied to labor income data for Norway for the period 1973–97, we find a tendency for ‘flocking together’ for all married couples, and married couples with two labor incomes.     

Human–environment interactions in South Florida's Everglades region: Systems of ecological degradation and restoration

This chapter examines the societal drivers of environmental change in South Florida's Everglades region during the past 150 years. This historical geography is developed through the use of a conceptual framework constructed to facilitate the analysis of human–environment interactions and nature–society systems of ecological degradation and restoration at the regional scale. The framework is composed of four basic interlinked components: interaction mechanisms (e.g., land use, direct resource utilization, pollution and external inputs, resource competition), feedback mechanisms (e.g., basic needs, quality of life, environmental ethics), control systems (e.g., governmental regimes, legal institutions, resource management), and the societal context (e.g., population and demographic patterns, social structure and organization, technology, economic conditions, societal values). A primary objective of this chapter is to determine the presence and importance of each of these components during the process of environmental change over the period of study—1845 to 1995.Data for the analysis are drawn from primary and secondary sources on the environmental, social, economic, and political history of South Florida. The results indicate that although elements of each component were present throughout the entire period, different elements of each component play more significant roles at differing moments. The shifts in importance are used to define four periods of environmental change within the region. The periods are the following: (1) frontier settlement (1845–1900), focused on basic needs acquisition and direct utilization of the resource base; (2) drainage and land conversion (1900–1930), focused on population and economic growth, land use change, and increased resource management and competition; (3) flood control and consolidation (1930–1950), focused on inputs from external sources and infusion of advanced technology, the development of governance and social structures, and increased concern for quality of life; (4) postwar boom, flood control, and water supply (1950–1970), focused on accelerated land use change, increased pollution, and further heightened concern for local quality of life; and (5) period of limits (1970–1995), focused on pollution and resource competition concerns, a developing regional environmental ethic and amenity values, and environmental preservation governance strategies.Taken together, the five periods represent the differing nature–society systems through which South Florida's regional ecosystem was degraded and which is now entering a phase of restoration.     

Spatial modelling of gene frequencies in the presence of undetectable alleles

Bayesian hierarchical models are developed to estimate the frequencies of the alleles at the HLA-C locus in the presence of non-identifiable alleles and possible spatial correlations in a large but sparse, spatially defined database from Papua New Guinea. Bayesian model selection methods are applied to investigate the effects of altitude and language on the genetic diversity of HLA-C alleles. The general model includes fixed altitudinal effects, random language effects and random spatially structured location effects. Conditional autoregressive priors are used to incorporate the geographical structure of the map, and Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation methods are applied for estimation and inference. The results show that HLA-C allele frequencies are explained more by linguistic than altitudinal differences, indicating that genetic diversity at this locus in Papua New Guinea probably tracks population movements and is less influenced by natural selection than is variation at HLA-A and HLA-B.     

Work, employment and mental health in Europe

In May 2004 the World Health Organization (WHO European Region) called a consultation meeting of its Collaborating Centres in Occupational Health to discuss mental health in the workplace. The meeting took place in Copenhagen. This paper presents an interpretation of the discussion that took place and the thinking that developed as a result. It was argued that increased interest and research and improved practice in the area of occupational mental health are required to promote good mental health in the European population. A framework of risk management and prevention based on sound evidence and good understanding could provide the basis for the translation of existing research knowledge into effective practice.     

Recent developments in exponential random graph (p*) models for social networks

This article reviews new specifications for exponential random graph models proposed by Snijders et al. [Snijders, T.A.B., Pattison, P., Robins, G.L., Handcock, M., 2006. New specifications for exponential random graph models. Sociological Methodology] and demonstrates their improvement over homogeneous Markov random graph models in fitting empirical network data. Not only do the new specifications show improvements in goodness of fit for various data sets, but they also help to avoid the problem of near-degeneracy that often afflicts the fitting of Markov random graph models in practice, particularly to network data exhibiting high levels of transitivity. The inclusion of a new higher order transitivity statistic allows estimation of parameters of exponential graph models for many (but not all) cases where it is impossible to estimate parameters of homogeneous Markov graph models. The new specifications were used to model a large number of classical small-scale network data sets and showed a dramatically better performance than Markov graph models. We also review three current programs for obtaining maximum likelihood estimates of model parameters and we compare these Monte Carlo maximum likelihood estimates with less accurate pseudo-likelihood estimates. Finally, we discuss whether homogeneous Markov random graph models may be superseded by the new specifications, and how additional elaborations may further improve model performance.