Transformations in social work: From help towards social inclusion to the management of exclusion

The debate about the forms of increasing social exclusion in the developed western industrialized nations is the starting-point of this paper. This is followed by a discussion of the possible and likely consequences of social exclusion for social work theory and practice. It is suggested that on the social-theoretical basis of Luhmanns Systems Theory, social work can be investigated as the practice of averting exclusion, facilitating inclusion, and the management of exclusion in functionally differentiated societies. Against this background it is argued that social work as a form of secondary protection, both theoretically and practically, has to be related to the modes of inclusion and exclusion of social systems and organizations. In order to provide a theoretical clarification of the social tasks and opportunities of social work it is therefore necessary to conduct a precise analysis of the structures, forms, and processes of social inclusion and exclusion. At present it seems likely that, because of general societal developments, the increasing extent of exclusion and the intensification of exclusionary effects will lead to a situation in which social work will be restricted to the function of the management of exclusion.     

Pseudo-bayes estimation of multinomial proportions

In the simultaneous estimation of multinomial proportions, two estimators are developed which incorporate prior means and a prior parameter which reflects the accuracy of the prior means. These estimators possess substantially smaller risk than the standard estimator in a region of the parameter space and are much more robust than the conjugate Bayes estimator with respect to parameter values far from the prior mean. When vague prior information is available, these estimators and confidence regions derived from them appear to be attractive alternatives to the procedures based on the standard estimator.     

Long- and short-term affective states in happiness: Model,paradigm and experimental evidence

The present paper evaluates relevant findings on long- and short-term affective states in subjective well-being and argues for a componential model that combines the two into the more general concept of happiness. Two age parameters, one for long-term and one for short-term affect are added to the simple model to account for age changes in happiness. Measures of long- and short-term affect are presented, as is a paradigm for separating the components. Support for the simple model is provided by an experimental investigation with 64 college students who were exposed to positive and/or negative mood induction. As expected, the induction had substantially greater effect on short- than on long-term affect measures, particularly the negative induction procedure. These findings are consistent with predictions. However, multiple age cohorts will have to be assessed within a longitudinal framework to obtain values for the age parameters.     

Import competition and job displacement: A case study of Korean manufacturing industries

This paper investigates the impact of import competition on job displacement in Korean manufacturing industries. Using a regression model for the period of 1993–2003, the empirical results show that import competition raises the job displacement rate in the Korean manufacturing sector but the elasticity is negligible in its magnitude. Worker characteristics, such as gender, age, job tenure, and education level, proved to be significant in determining the displacement rate. Characteristics of displaced workers in high import-competing industries are also investigated based on the survey data. Workers who lost their jobs in these sectors were slightly older, less educated, and had longer job tenure than the workers in the other groups.     

A bayesian test for a two-way contingency table using independence priors

One method of testing for independence in a two-way table is based on the Bayes factor, the ratio of the likelihoods under the independence hypothesis H and the alternative hypothesis H. The main difficulty in this approach is the specification of prior distributions on the composite hypotheses H and H. A new Bayesian test statistic is constructed by using a prior distribution on H that is concentrated about the “independence surface” H. Approximations are proposed which simplify the computation of the test statistic. The values of the Bayes factor are compared with values of statistics proposed by Gunel and Dickey (1974), Good and Crook (1987), and Spiegelhalter and Smith (1982) for a number of two-way tables. This investigation suggests a strong relationship between the new statistic and the p-value.     

Single Parenthood and Children’s Reading Performance in Asia

Using the data from Program for International Student Assessment, I examine the gap in reading performance between 15‐year‐old students in single‐parent and intact families in 5 Asian countries in comparison to the United States. The ordinary least square regression analyses show negligible disadvantages of students with a single parent in Hong Kong and Korea, once students’ demographic characteristics and socioeconomic background are held constant. Students in single‐parent families in Indonesia and Thailand outperform their peers in intact families. The negative effect of single parenthood remains significant in Japan, even after parent‐child communication is controlled. Interpreting the weak effect of single parenthood in the Asian countries, I consider extended family systems and the relatively high proportion of widowhood among causes of single parenthood.     

Grenzen der Geschichte?

The article follows Tony Becher’s suggestion, that scientific disciplines metaphorically spoken may be looked at as different tribes of different habits occupying different territories. The articles reviews then some possibilities to determine a border between the field of historical research and sociology by different methods, different theories, different research objects e. g. past vs. present and so on. The academic field of history is described as a field importing theories, methods and objects from other academic fields, many of them from sociology. The last decades’ processes of innovation and redefinition within the field of historical research diminished cognitive differences between history and sociology so significantly that — this is the main argument of the article — more or less only the borders produced by institutions remained. Nevertheless these kind of borders have major effects all of them responsible for maintaining different disciplinary identities.