The social “R & D” paradigm in child and youth services: Building knowledge convivially

Adaptation of agricultural and industrial research and development models offers new methods for bridging the worlds of research and practice in child and youth services. Social R & D methodologies provide effective means for generating new social technologies because they are product oriented and use a wide array of traditional and nontraditional data sources. This article discusses one social R & D paradigm—Developmental Research and Utilization. Permanency planning and community support systems research are used to illustrate the past and potential application of this methodology to the field of child and youth services.     

Rules in Organizational Context: Narcotics Law Enforcement in Two Settings*

Studies of organizational action tend to isolate actors, structures, and goals as if they were not concretely interdigitated in organizational conduct. In many cases, actors are omitted as relevant units of analysis; goals are stated as abstracted entities unrelated to complex collective processes of defining, clarifying and evaluating goal-attainment, and often rules are not studied as continuously negotiated through and by interaction. Unless a close analysis of how broadly defined rules emerge as narrowly defined procedures sanctioned as reasonable and proper conduct is undertaken, the assumptive nature of the concept “bureaucracy” is left unexamined, operates invisibly, and thus impedes sociological analysis. This paper, based on fieldwork and interviews in three police organizations, identifies the processes by which an abstract organizational goal is defined, deferred to and becomes actionable. The organizational contexts of the two narcotics enforcement units (from which most of the data presented here are derived) embed the rules said to guide the pursuit of major violators of narcotics laws and systematically make certain aspects of the work either visible or obscure. Thus, some members are exposed to negative sanctioning while others experience positive sanctioning. This suggests that since the context of rules, not the rules themselves, nor the rules about the rules (so characteristic of formal organizations), determine the consequential (i.e., actionable) meanings of acts, situated interactions, accounts and shared understandings should be examined in the sociological analysis of organizations.     

The evolution of an abortion counseling service in an adoption agency

As a natural outgrowth of its original function as an adoption agency, the Spence-Chapin Adoption Service moved into abortion counseling. The main concern at the Service was to help the woman make a decision which she considered the right one for herself and the child. The decision to have an abortion is a complicated choice, necessitating counseling for the mother, reputed father, and families involved. Counselors help the woman understand what is involved with an abortion, alternatives to abortion, and how to use contraception so she will not need a future abortion.     

On the asymptotic power and relative efficiency of the frequency X2 test

The asymptotic (Pitman) power of the X² test is investigated for particular classes of alternatives. A simple rule is introduced to identify ‘orthogonal alternatives’, for which the noncentrality parameter can be computed in a very simple way. In the sequel, restricted alternatives are considered and the ARE of the unrestricted test w.r.t. the restricted one is shown to depend only on the numbers of degrees of freedom. The concluding section discusses ‘undetectable alternatives’, i.e. alternatives for which the noncentrality vanishes.     

Adolescent group therapy membership selection

Conclusions Social agency practitiooners can employ adolescent group therapy as an effective treatment mode, as long as a great deal of attention and planning is put into the details of group membership selection. The authors have presented suggestions and guidelines that can be used in overcoming the logistic problems inherent in forming an adolescent therapy group. We feel that proper pregroup planning is just as important in determining group results as is the ongoing group process. Group treatment does not necessarily incease a therapist's productivity or reduce the amount of time spent in therapy, but it does offer a unique experience which has certain qualitative advantages for teenagers experiencing behavioral and relationship problems within and, particularly, outside of the family system.     

The fertility contribution of Mexican immigration to the United States

Crucial to the long-term contribution of immigration to a receiving country's population is the extent to which the immigrants reproduce themselves in subsequent, native-born generations. Using conventional projection methodologies, this fertility contribution may be poorly estimated primarily because of problems in projecting the number of immigrants who are at risk of childbearing. We propose an alternative method that obviates the need to project the number of immigrants by using the full sending-country birth cohort as the risk group to project their receiving-country childbearing. This "sending-country birth cohort" method is found to perform dramatically better than conventional methods when projecting to 1999 from base years both before and after the large increase in inflows of Mexican immigrants to the United States in the late 1980s. Projecting forward from 1999, we estimate a cumulative contribution of Mexican immigrant fertility from the 1980s to 2040 of 36 million births, including 25% to 50% more births after 1995 than are projected using conventional methods.     

Moral imagination in long-term care workers

Our study focused on the cultural construction of dying and death in long-term care facilities. This article centers on direct care workers' perspective of residents' deaths. The data on which this article is based were gathered in a multi-year, multi-site study through formal ethnographic interviews, informal conversations, and on-site observations of residents and staff members. During fieldwork, we noticed an aptitude of direct care workers to deal with residents' deaths, which we named "moral imagination." The term is borrowed from other disciplines to describe a "way of seeing" residents. The case studies presented--that of three direct care workers: a dietary aide, a nurse aide, and an assistant activities director--are suggestive of workers in each category. Our study offers implications for future research concerning direct care workers' value to residents' quality of life. We also propose questions for long-term care facilities about standards of formal caregiving at the end of life.