Working with the whole family: What case files tell us about social work practices

Practice theories to support child protection social work in the United Kingdom, as in the United States and Australia, are being squeezed out by a focus on performance targets and procedural timescales. This study examines an innovative programme designed to reverse this trend initiated by an English local government authority. The programme aimed to embed systemic family practice in situations where children are deemed to be at risk of harm. The findings, derived from an analysis of a case file sample, indicate that the social worker interaction with family members is predicated on who is living with the child in conjunction with the risk status of the case file. Conversely, practitioner interactions with family members are divorced from family structure and the lived experiences of kin relationships. This study concludes by examining why, despite training in systemic family practice, it was problematic for social workers to integrate it into their encounters with families.     

Finding the right connections: Peer support within a community‐based mental health service

Gray M., Davies K., Butcher L. Finding the right connections: Peer support within a community‐based mental health service This article reports on a qualitative study that examined the organisational enablers and barriers to implementing peer support work in an Australian, rural, community‐based mental health service. Interviews with 19 peer and non‐peer staff were conducted to identify attitudes towards peer support and whether there were organisational values, practices and strategies that might support the implementation of peer support. The findings revealed that peer support workers were valued for their ability to build trusting connections with clients and to accept client choice in a non‐judgemental way. However, peer support workers tended to ‘fill service gaps’ within intensive, administrative case‐management environments. These findings highlight the importance of an organisational‐wide approach to integrating peer support, where the responsibilities for adopting new ways of working fall to all staff, not just the peer support workers themselves. Key Practitioner Message: ? Practitioners placed high value on the peer support workers on their teams due to their unique personalised engagement with clients; ? The roles of peer support workers were poorly understood by team members; ? Organisational integration of peer support principles could improve the way all staff engage with clients to reflect a recovery orientation.     

“God Is Like a Drug…”: Explaining Interaction Ritual Chains in American Megachurches

Megachurches have been criticized as superficial sources of entertainment that do not produce significant feelings of belonging, moral responsibility, or spirituality. This article challenges popular criticisms of megachurches and, drawing on interaction ritual theory, proposes that megachurches are successful interaction ritual venues and powerful purveyors of emotional religious experience. We predict that these interaction rituals produce positive emotional energy, membership symbols that are charged with emotional significance, feelings of morality, and a heightened sense of spirituality. From a census of 1,250 known megachurches in America, 12 were selected that closely represent the national megachurch profile. At each church, focus groups were conducted and attendees participated in a survey. We combine these data sources to provide a more comprehensive picture of the megachurch interaction ritual. The combined qualitative and quantitative results provide strong support for our predictions.     

Social Research and the Privacy and Participation of Children: Reflections on Researching Australian Children's Playlore

Social research into the daily activities of children is important if we are to understand how children perceive themselves in relationship to their world. Ethically managed social research that allows children to speak as informed and competent subjects is thus vital. However, research regulatory bodies may be more concerned with protecting the privacy of children than facilitating their participation in research projects. In a context where publicly funded researchers are encouraged to make their data available for reuse, the bureaucratisation of the consent and ethics processes may impinge on the conduct and benefits, and the future accessibility, of the research itself. Reflecting on the findings of the Childhood, Tradition and Change research on playlore in Australian primary schools, we argue for a more balanced approach from regulatory authorities between protection and participation in relation to low‐risk social research with children.     

CORPORATE TAX GAMES WITH CROSS‐BORDER EXTERNALITIES FROM PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE

We construct a model of corporate tax competition in which governments also use public infrastructure investment to attract foreign direct investment, thus enhancing their tax bases. In doing so, we allow for cross‐border infrastructural externalities. Depending on the externality, governments are shown to strategically over‐ or underinvest in infrastructure. We also examine how tax cooperation influences investment in infrastructure and find that welfare may be lower under tax cooperation than under tax competition; this is the case when infrastructure is very effective in raising the tax base and generates a large negative cross‐border externality. (JEL F23, H40)     

Adolescents’ Perspectives on Personal and Societal Responsibility for Childhood Obesity — The Study of Beliefs through ‘Serious’ Game (PlayDecide)

The dominant approaches to public health policy on childhood obesity are based on the neoliberal emphasis of personal choice and individual responsibility. We study adolescents’ (N = 81) beliefs about responsibility for childhood obesity as a public health issue, through an innovative participatory method, PlayDecide, organised in two countries: the UK and Spain. There is no evidence of a blanket rejection of individual responsibility, rather, a call for renegotiation of the values that inform adolescents’ food choices. The findings suggest the need to broaden the framing of obesity‐related policy to go beyond the nutritional paradigm and include other values that signal health.     

Estimation of the linear mixed integrated Ornstein–Uhlenbeck model

The linear mixed model with an added integrated Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (IOU) process (linear mixed IOU model) allows for serial correlation and estimation of the degree of derivative tracking. It is rarely used, partly due to the lack of available software. We implemented the linear mixed IOU model in Stata and using simulations we assessed the feasibility of fitting the model by restricted maximum likelihood when applied to balanced and unbalanced data. We compared different (1) optimization algorithms, (2) parameterizations of the IOU process, (3) data structures and (4) random-effects structures. Fitting the model was practical and feasible when applied to large and moderately sized balanced datasets (20,000 and 500 observations), and large unbalanced datasets with (non-informative) dropout and intermittent missingness. Analysis of a real dataset showed that the linear mixed IOU model was a better fit to the data than the standard linear mixed model (i.e. independent within-subject errors with constant variance).