Independent Mental Health Advocacy: A Model of Social Work Advocacy?

ABSTRACT

Advocacy has received less attention in social work research than other aspects of social work practice. This paper draws attention to two tensions in social work advocacy; between worker-led advocacy and person-led advocacy, and between individual advocacy and system level advocacy. We argue that human-rights-based social workers must choose a person-led approach over a worker-led approach while advocating with both systems and individuals. This argument is made by drawing on findings of an evaluation of Independent Mental Health Advocacy (IMHA) in Victoria, Australia. It is shown that social work training had not prepared social workers for rights-based, person-led advocacy and that social workers in public mental health services were struggling to maintain the rights of people in their services even with assistance from IMHA.

IMPLICATIONS

• Independent Mental Health Advocacy (IMHA) is a model of advocacy influenced by social work theory and delivered in part by social-work-trained advocates.

• Social work training is not preparing social workers for person-led, human-rights-based advocacy.

• Public mental health social workers are struggling to maintain the rights of people in mental health services even with the support of external advocacy services.

     

Making a (False) Impression: The Role of Business Experience in First Impressions of CEO Leadership Ability

Recent studies have demonstrated that judgments of business leaders’ faces predict their organizations’ financial performance. To date, these predictions have been derived exclusively from the impressions of naïve perceivers. Here, we tested how perceivers’ knowledge and experience in business might relate to their judgments of CEOs’ leadership ability from nonverbal facial cues. In Study 1, business students performed similarly to non-business students when rating faces for leadership ability. Business professionals with many years of experience exhibited significantly lower accuracy than professionals without business experience in Study 2, however. Following previous research demonstrating that experience in a particular domain can ironically reduce the accuracy of individuals’ judgments, our findings suggest that perceivers’ experience in executive business management positions may inhibit them from accurately judging leadership ability from nonverbal information. Domain-specific knowledge may therefore impair the accuracy of first impressions.     

Political science: Moral dialogues and our understanding of American politics

This commentary focuses on the connection between Etzioni’s moral dialogues conception and the concepts of social capital, civil society and the ultimate outcome to be anticipated from the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The optimist view that a progressive social movement is in the making is called somewhat into question given the well documented decline in the very institutions and trust-based norms essential for the moral dialogues in question to transpire.     

Conflict and the separateness of peoples: investigating the relationship between multiplicity,inequality and war

ABSTRACT

The discipline-defining claim that anarchy leads inevitably to security-competition and war between states is unsustainable. This article investigates whether the concept of multiplicity can offer a reintegrated account of insecurity in world politics. As highlighted by rational choice approaches, substantive conflicts of interest are a necessary condition for organized violence to be a permanent possibility within, across and between societies. A materialist argument is presented that the most enduring incompatible interests arise from clashes over the rules of economic appropriation and redistribution, and the appropriate boundaries between social groups. Historically, unevenness and the possibility for exploitation have created structural pressures towards simultaneous social stratification and the institutionalization of inter-societal warfare. Because of the central importance of social boundaries for structural inequalities, multiplicity has profound implications for both patterns of organized violence and the fundamental issue in the study of politics: who gets what, when and how.     

An Integrated Scenario Ensemble-Based Framework for Hurricane Evacuation Modeling: Part 1—Decision Support System

This article introduces a new integrated scenario-based evacuation (ISE) framework to support hurricane evacuation decision making. It explicitly captures the dynamics, uncertainty, and human–natural system interactions that are fundamental to the challenge of hurricane evacuation, but have not been fully captured in previous formal evacuation models. The hazard is represented with an ensemble of probabilistic scenarios, population behavior with a dynamic decision model, and traffic with a dynamic user equilibrium model. The components are integrated in a multistage stochastic programming model that minimizes risk and travel times to provide a tree of evacuation order recommendations and an evaluation of the risk and travel time performance for that solution. The ISE framework recommendations offer an advance in the state of the art because they: (1) are based on an integrated hazard assessment (designed to ultimately include inland flooding), (2) explicitly balance the sometimes competing objectives of minimizing risk and minimizing travel time, (3) offer a well-hedged solution that is robust under the range of ways the hurricane might evolve, and (4) leverage the substantial value of increasing information (or decreasing degree of uncertainty) over the course of a hurricane event. A case study for Hurricane Isabel (2003) in eastern North Carolina is presented to demonstrate how the framework is applied, the type of results it can provide, and how it compares to available methods of a single scenario deterministic analysis and a two-stage stochastic program.     

Underprotection of Unpredictable Statistical Lives Compared to Predictable Ones

Existing ethical discussion considers the differences in care for identified versus statistical lives. However, there has been little attention to the different degrees of care that are taken for different kinds of statistical lives. Here we argue that for a given number of statistical lives at stake, there will sometimes be different, and usually greater, care taken to protect predictable statistical lives, in which the number of lives that will be lost can be predicted fairly accurately, than for unpredictable statistical lives, where the lives are at stake because of a low‐probability event, such that most likely no one will be affected by the decision but with low probability some lives will be at stake. One reason for this difference is the statistical challenge of estimating low probabilities, and in particular the tendency of common approaches to underestimate these probabilities. Another is the existence of rational incentives to treat unpredictable risks as if the probabilities were lower than they are. Some of these factors apply outside the pure economic context, to institutions, individuals, and governments. We argue that there is no ethical reason to treat unpredictable statistical lives differently from predictable statistical lives. Moreover, lives that are unpredictable from the perspective of an individual agent may become predictable when aggregated to the level of a societal decision. Underprotection of unpredictable statistical lives is a form of market failure that may need to be corrected by altering regulation, introducing compulsory liability insurance, or other social policies.     

Reexamining the Economic Costs of Marital Disruption for Women

Objective . Changes in labor force participation and returns may have lessened divorce's traditionally severe economic consequences for women. Method . We use recent data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) to analyze the economic well-being of women whose marriages ended between the first and second waves of data collection. Results . Comparing pre- and postmarital median per capita income shows that marital disruption now has much more modest economic consequences for women than in years gone by. A multivariate analysis suggests that their higher postdivorce incomes can be primarily attributed to labor force participation and human capital. Conclusions . These findings suggest better life chances for divorcèes and their children.