Transition From Welfare to Work: Self-Esteem and Self-Efficacy Influence on the Employment Outcome of African American Women

Empirical strength-based research focusing exclusively on African American female welfare recipients and employment outcome is limited. This study examined whether self-esteem and self-efficacy influenced the employment of African American female welfare recipients. Findings indicated that recipients entered the job-readiness program with a significantly high level of self-esteem. Their self-efficacy, however, was positively influenced by the job-readiness program, and once it was completed, the recipient's self-efficacy decreased.     

Till Death Us Do Part? A Critical Analysis of Obligation and Choice for Spousal Caregivers

Research demonstrates a significant number of carers identify obligation or lack of other alternatives as the reasons they undertake informal care. By utilizing critical discourse analysis, this research explores choice for informal caregivers in contemporary Australian social policy. Analysis demonstrates increasing shifts in policy toward choice in consumer-directed care, a feature absent for those who provide care. Familial care is a central pillar of Australian social policy, as it is in many liberal and conservative welfare regimes. Analysis reveals that these core social policies are fundamentally incongruent, with significant implications for individuals and social work practice.     

Antenatal group care in a Midwifery Group Practice—A midwife’ perspective

The following article describes a midwife's experience in the adaption of the CenteringPregnancy model into her own group practice to provide education and support to the women in her care. Using personal experience and feedback from women and midwifery students the author describes not only the process of group care in her work context but the apparent benefits to women, families’, midwifery students and herself. Antenatal group care was so successful for the author that it extended to postnatal group care and student group care, all well attended and sought after groups. This is an exciting and innovative way to provide care for women and families and the author encourages other midwives and group practices to consider how they can adapt and progress similar group care into their own practice.     

Bayesian Additive Regression Trees using Bayesian model averaging

Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) is a statistical sum of trees model. It can be considered a Bayesian version of machine learning tree ensemble methods where the individual trees are the base learners. However, for datasets where the number of variables p is large the algorithm can become inefficient and computationally expensive. Another method which is popular for high-dimensional data is random forests, a machine learning algorithm which grows trees using a greedy search for the best split points. However, its default implementation does not produce probabilistic estimates or predictions. We propose an alternative fitting algorithm for BART called BART-BMA, which uses Bayesian model averaging and a greedy search algorithm to obtain a posterior distribution more efficiently than BART for datasets with large p. BART-BMA incorporates elements of both BART and random forests to offer a model-based algorithm which can deal with high-dimensional data. We have found that BART-BMA can be run in a reasonable time on a standard laptop for the “small n large p” scenario which is common in many areas of bioinformatics. We showcase this method using simulated data and data from two real proteomic experiments, one to distinguish between patients with cardiovascular disease and controls and another to classify aggressive from non-aggressive prostate cancer. We compare our results to their main competitors. Open source code written in R and Rcpp to run BART-BMA can be found at: https://github.com/BelindaHernandez/BART-BMA.git.     

Roman Catholicism and social justice in Canada: a comparative case study*

Un nombre d'études ont essayé d'expliquer la récente emergence de l'église Catholique Romaine comme agent de changement social dans plusieurs parties du monde. La plupart d'entre elles se sont plus particulièrement intéressées au développement d'un nouvel engagement organisationnel pour la justice sociale dans des Églises spécifiques nationales ou régionales. Relativement peu d'entre elles en revanche se sont intéressées aux subtilités du changement organisationnel à un niveau sub-national ou diocésal. Utilisant des données de recherche assembllées dans les diocèses de Victoria et de Toronto, cette étude aide à aborder cette déficience grâce à un examen des facteurs-clefs qui contribuent à une transformation organisationnelle au niveau de l'église locale au Canada. Les résultats de l'étude appuient le développement d'un modèle nouveau quant à la compréhension des variations non-nationales dans l'engagement organisationnel pour le changement, modèle qui prend en compte non seulement l'orientation idéologique de l'évêque local mais aussi sa volonté et sa capacitéà mobiliser des ressources spécifiques plédant la cause de la justice sociale. A number of studies have attempted to explain the recent emergence of the Roman Catholic Church as an agent of social change in many parts of the world. Most of these have focussed upon the development of a new organizational commitment to social justice in specific national or regional Churches. Relatively few, however, have concerned themselves with the subtleties of organizational change at the sub-national or diocesan level. Using field research data collected in the dioceses of Victoria and Toronto, this study helps to address this deficiency through an examination of key factors conducive to organizational transformation at the level of the local Church in Canada. The study's findings support the development of a new model for mapping and understanding sub-national variations in the organizational commitment to change which takes into account not only the local bishop's ideological orientation, but also his willingness and ability to mobilize specific resources in support of the social justice cause.     

Ties That Bind: Public Foundations in Dyadic Partnerships

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Public Ancillary Funds (PubAFs) are grantmaking philanthropic foundations, largely held to be independent. However, some...     

Why Postmodern Theory may be a Problematic Basis for Therapeutic Practice: A Feminist Perspective

Both poststructural and social constructionist thinking are imbued with a masculine bias. First, I demonstrate that Foucault's theory of power and knowledge fails to take into account the female experience of power and the gendered nature of knowledge production. With the support of psychoanalytic theory I also claim that Foucault's theory of the ‘social’, ‘discursive’ production of ‘selves’ omits the contribution of the prelinguistic but no less ‘social’ mother–infant relationship, and in so doing obscures the prelinguistic foundations of emotionality. This poststructural reduction of ‘selves’ to, and subsequent subsuming of emotionality within, the instance of ‘language’, ‘discourse’ or ‘narrative’, is, I claim, replicated in the social constructionist thinking of Gergen and Bruner. Finally, I consider some of the consequences of a therapeutic practice which has its foundations in these two interrelated bodies of thought, suggesting, from a feminist perspective, that a major shortcoming of this narrative practice is its failure to attend to emotionality.     

Addressing Career Success Issues of African Americans in the Workplace: An Undergraduate Business Program Intervention

Career success as measured by the objective, traditional criteria of the composite of high number of promotions, high annual compensation, and high organizational level in corporate America has eluded the majority of African Americans. This article describes an undergraduate business program career success intervention designed to assist African Americans in overcoming the organizational barriers present in corporate America that prevent their upward mobility, examines its effectiveness, and concludes with implications for research and practice in career development and counseling.     

What COVID‐19 could mean for the future of “work from home”: The provocations of three women in the academy

The COVID‐19 pandemic saw academic labor rapidly shift into domestic spaces at the same time as households were “locked down.” In this article, we offer an exploration of our own experiences of working from home as women and mothers in the academy. Inspired by feminist approaches to knowledge production and self‐reflection, we each developed a personal reflective narrative guided by three key questions centered on our experiences of working from home pre‐ and during the COVID‐19 pandemic, and what this may mean for the future of our work. We then collectively analyzed how our personal stories reflected different dimensions of the experience of working from home, and our fears and hopes for the future. We present three distilled themes from our collective experiences here with the aim of entering a dialog with others seeking to live feminist lives during this time, and beyond.