Preparing social workers for ecosocial work practice and community building

ABSTRACT

In the context of the global ecological crisis, the profession of social work is increasingly shifting to embrace an ecosocial lens, recognizing the centrality of the ecological environment for human existence and the inextricable linkages of wellbeing for people and planet. Social work educators are contributing to this shift as leaders in the transformation of their home institutions and communities. We present examples within two models of education for ecosocial work, the infusion model and the integration model. Exemplars are based on the authors’ expertise and contributions to ecosocial work education, community building, and ecosocial change, both locally and globally.     

Ethical issues in tracking cellular telephones at an event

Early in 2007, the CSIR conducted an experiment to track the cellular telephones of a small group of people as they moved to and from an event, to test the viability of using such tracking to provide the participants with useful traffic information. This project raised a number of ethical issues, which prompted this paper and which we discuss here. These include:

• the ethics of modelling data, including the treatment of research participants;

• privacy and surveillance issues related to tracking the movement of people;

• the risks inherent in being tracked vs the benefits of being tracked; and

• the ethics related to sending messages to drivers.

We have reviewed the literature on ethics and used the results to assemble a check list of relevant ethical issues, adding a few of our own (i.e. a deontological ethics approach), against which the conduct of this research project was assessed. We also provide an overview of the experiment and the results obtained.     

Functional Elements in Infants' Speech Processing: The Role of Determiners in the Syntactic Categorization of Lexical Elements

How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words. Evidence from the head‐turn preference paradigm shows that, although 12‐ to 13‐month‐olds cannot do this, 14‐ to 16‐month‐olds are able to use a determiner to categorize a following novel word as a noun. In contrast, no categorization effect was found for a novel word following a subject pronoun. To understand this difference we analyzed adult child‐directed speech. This analysis showed that there are in fact stronger co‐occurrence relations between determiners and nouns than between subject pronouns and verbs. Thus, in German determiners may be more reliable cues to the syntactic category of an adjacent novel word than are subject pronouns. We propose that the capacity to syntactically categorize novel words, demonstrated here for the first time in children this young, mediates between the recognition of the specific morphosyntactic frame in which a novel word appears and the word‐to‐world mapping that is needed to build up a semantic representation for the novel word.     

Influences of Race and Family Environment on Child Hyperactivity and Antisocial Behavior

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, latent growth curve modeling was used to examine relationships between trajectories of child hyperactivity and antisocial behavior symptoms for African Americans (n= 680), European Americans (n= 1195), and Hispanics (n= 432). A systematic examination of predictors of, and interrelationships between, these trajectories was tested based on two distinct models of family influences in the development of child behavior problems. Overall, child hyperactivity mediated the effects of family environment on child antisocial behavior, but with key racial differences. The results indicate the importance of conceptualizing patterns of family interaction as adaptive responses to the environment, rather than individual developmental interactions.     

How Dynamic Capabilities Affect the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Operating Routines under High and Low Levels of Environmental Dynamism

In analysing data on the purchasing routines of 200 small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), this study underscores the overall importance of dynamic capabilities as a way to understand differences in operating‐routine performance. The results suggest that dynamic capabilities have different performance effects in high‐dynamic and low‐dynamic environments. Dynamic capabilities enhance the effectiveness of operating routines under both high and low levels of environmental dynamism. Yet, when analysing the efficiency of operating routines, taking into account the costs of increased effectiveness, dynamic capabilities appear to pay off only under high levels of environmental dynamism.     

An Asymptotic Linear Representation for the Breslow Estimator

We provide an asymptotic linear representation for the Breslow estimator of the baseline cumulative hazard function in the Cox model. Our representation consists of an average of independent random variables and a term involving the difference between the maximum partial likelihood estimator and the underlying regression parameter. The order of the remainder term is arbitrarily close to n ^?1.     

Accelerated life testing models for nonhomogeneous Poisson processes

In this paper an axiomatic approach is used to construct accelerated life testing (ALT) models for Nonhomogeneous Poisson Processes (NHPPs). First, the models of random lifetime variables and Nonhomogeneous Poisson Processes used for modeling non-repairable and repairable systems are compared. Then, an axiomatic approach for the construction of ALT models for NHPPs is given. Particular models are considered that can be constructed by this method.     

The Politics of Investment and Growth in Egypt: Experimenting with a New Approach

‘Improve the investment climate!’ is the dominant advice for governments wishing to achieve substantial increases in productive private investment. However, national‐level investment‐climate approaches have been criticised for not paying adequate attention to context and feasibility. This article experiments with a new approach which focuses on sectors and on relationships between policy‐makers and investors, and shows how their common interest helped to overcome obstacles to investment and growth in Egypt. Such public‐private relationships can be abused but they have provided effective transitional arrangements for enhancing investment and inducing a new growth dynamic.