BSW students and interviewing: physiological,psychological, and pedagogical perspectives from Canada

The acquisition of interviewing skills is a hallmark of social work education; however, few studies have examined the experience of learning these skills from the students’ perspective. This qualitative study undertaken in Ontario, Canada, examined Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) students’ perceptions of interviewing. Individual interviews were conducted with second-year BSW students (n = 17) following their completion of an interviewing course. The following six themes emerged as to how students perceived learning interviewing skills: 1) emotional responses; 2) physiological responses; 3) psychological responses; 4) coping strategies; 5) the need for constructive criticism; and 6) the role of the course instructor. The study suggests that instructors normalize the presence of negative emotions and provide more structure and instructions for giving and receiving feedback when using role-plays.     

Change and Inertia in the New York State Medicaid Personal Care Services Program: An Institutional Case Study

This study analyzes how competing logics (belief systems) of stakeholders have influenced patterns of change and inertia in the development of the New York Medicaid Personal Care Services (PCS) program. A case-study methodology was used to collect documents, statistics, and interview data from four key stakeholder groups: state and city officials, PCS agencies, a labor union, and consumer advocates covering the period 1999 to 2005. The New York PCS program is one of the oldest, largest, and most stable programs in the United States. Its early unionization of workers resulted in relatively generous wages and benefits and made New York number one nationally in PCS spending per capita. In spite of wide support from stakeholder groups, the overall number of participants has gradually declined since 1999. A consumer-directed model of personal care developed in 1995 challenged the status quo and has grown steadily. Resistance by public officials, agency providers, and union representatives to the consumer-directed model has resulted in a small program that is often targeted toward individuals labeled “difficult to serve.” Dominant stakeholders in New York have ensured a stable personal care program that has resisted change and led to program inertia.     

‘The politics of free speech’

The present article addresses the support and supervisional relations of Palestinian Israeli single mothers vis-à-vis their families and communities. It links the theoretical discussion on intersectional analysis with power relations and gender. In this article I focus on the importance of employing analytical models that take into consideration the internal variance within this social category of ‘Palestinian Israeli single mothers' which emerge due to the contradictory social trends typifying Palestinian society in Israel today – models that examine the implications of the complexity of women's lives in discrete locations, the changes society is undergoing, together with processes of discrimination and the strengthening of conservative trends. The article is based on data gathered during in-depth, semi-structured interviews that were conducted and analyzed with a commitment to the principles of feminist research.     

“The First Mark of Pain”: Toward a child-centered methodological reorientation of social theory,race and corporal punishment in American life

The current white supremacist racial order in America fundamentally relies on fear and pain to shape the subjectivities of Black people in childhood. This violence is most visible when enacted by police officers against unarmed Black youth. A less visible yet more pernicious form of racist violence against Black children is exercised by community proxies such as Black teachers and parents. Annual government reports reveal that Black children are more likely to be injured or killed by their parents than by police. In this paper we inquire as to why, despite the many Black writers who have described parental violence as an intergenerational re-enactment of the violence of slavery, and despite decades of research on the harms of hitting children, social theorists have not analyzed how Black parents can serve as proxies for white supremacist violence. We argue that Black parenting culture has in many ways internalized the white supremacist view that corporal punishment is required to instill the discipline necessary to spare Black youth from police violence and incarceration. We conclude that until social scientists foreground the voices of Black youth in their studies, rather than adults, our ability to understand and confront the reproduction of white supremacist violence will be impeded. We argue that the physical punishment of children in Black families is an aspect of the legacy or “afterlife” of slavery. We contend that this omission persists because Black youth voices are absent from social analysis on the issue of physical punishment, existing only in clinical studies divorced from macro-sociological analysis, and we discuss how this omission occurred as a matter of scholarly history.     

A computer program for the design of group testing experiments

This paper describes a computer program GTEST for designing group testing experiments for classifying each member of a population of items as “good” or “defective”. The outcome of a test on a group of items is either “negative” (if all items in the group are good) or “positive” (if at least one of the items is defective, but it is not known which). GTEST is based on a Bayesian approach. At each stage, it attempts to maximize (nearly) the expected reduction in the “entropy”, which is a quantitative measure of the amount of uncertainty about the state of the items. The user controls the procedure through specification of the prior probabilities of being defective, restrictions on the construction of the test group, and priorities that are assigned to the items. The nominal prior probabilities can be modified adaptively, to reduce the sensitivity of the procedure to the proportion of defectives in the population.     

The influence of probabilities on the response mode bias in utility elicitation

The response mode bias, in which subjects exhibit different risk attitudes when assessing certainty equivalents versus indifference probabilities, is a well-known phenomenon in the assessment of utility functions. In this empirical study, we develop and apply a cardinal measure of risk attitudes to analyze not only the existence, but also the strength of this phenomenon. Since probability levels involved in decision problems are already known to have a strong impact on behavior, we use this approach to study the impact of probabilities on the extent of the response mode bias. We find that the direction in which probabilities influence measured risk aversion is the opposite in the certainty equivalence (CE) method versus in the probability equivalence (PE) method. Utilizing the CE elicitation approach leads to an increase of risk seeking for gambles involving high probabilities. For the PE method, subjects tend to behave risk averse with gambles of high probabilities. This behavior is reversed in the gain domain. This “tailwhip” effect is consistently replicated in several experiments, involving both loss and gain domains of lotteries.     

Violence,life aspirations and displacement trajectories in civil war

Drawing on qualitative data from the civil wars in Syria and Libya since 2011, this paper seeks to build a better understanding of immobility and of displacement trajectories within conflict countries and towards neighbouring countries. The paper shows that different types of violent experiences—personal threats, generalized violence, an increasing hopelessness relating to the absence of violence in the future—trigger different exit movements across internal and external borders. Second, the analysis demonstrates that migration decisions in civil war contexts are complex processes with people balancing between strategies of how to avoid violence with strategies of how to realize broader life aspirations related to family, love, work and political change. Life aspirations often play a more important role once people move out of a situation of immediate danger and in later phases of trajectories and influence (im)mobility patterns in three different directions: stay, move (on) or return. Life aspirations, especially related to political change, outweigh perceptions of violence in some cases. Financial vulnerability can force people to stay in or return to violent contexts.     

Differentiating Contemporary Racial Prejudice from Old-Fashioned Racial Prejudice

The present study addresses the distinction between contemporary and old-fashioned prejudice using survey data from a national sample (n = 600) of self-identified whites living in the United States and interviewed by telephone in 2001. First, we examine associations among indicators of contemporary and old-fashioned prejudice. Consistent with the literature, contemporary and old-fashioned prejudice indicators represent two distinct but correlated common factors. Second, we examine whether belief in genetic race differences uniformly predicts both types of prejudice. As might be expected, belief in genetic race differences predicts old-fashioned prejudice but contrary to recent theorizing, it also predicts contemporary prejudice.