Learning from mistakes in social work

A growing number of cases of professional errors in the realm of health and social services appear on media and raise significant public debate. This article focuses on mistakes in social work and looks at how their negative impacts might be reduced through the lens and framework of reflective practice. Using conclusions from the most relevant literature on this topic and some of the outcomes of recent research, the author describes errors in social work in terms of causes (e.g. lack of time and training, etc.) and results (e.g. damaged relationship with users, failure of action plans, burnout, etc.). Learning occurs when social workers conduct an in-depth reflection, alone or together with colleagues. Since human beings will always err, paradoxically reflection on mistakes (with the consequent drop in the harm produced) and not the reduction of their number is the most powerful factor to improve the quality of health and social services. The culture of blame and punishment is one of the main obstacles to an effective social work animated by the genuine culture of responsibility and ethically driven by the overriding interest of service users.     

A normative justification of compulsory education

Using a household production model of educational choices, we characterise a free-market situation in which some agents (high wagers) fully educate their children and spend a sizable amount of resources on them, while others (low wagers) educate them only partially. The free-market equilibrium is iniquitous, both because the households have different resources and because the children have different access to education. Public policy is thus called for, for vertical as well as horizontal equity purposes. Conventional wisdom has it that both objectives could be achieved using price control instruments, i.e. income taxes and price subsidies. We find instead that income taxes reduce equality of opportunity and that price subsidies cannot remedy this. Quantity controls become necessary: a compulsory education package, financed by a redistributive tax system, achieves both types of equity. Redistributive taxation and compulsory education are therefore best seen as complementary policies.     

Transition to adulthood and recession: a qualitative study

While the transition to adulthood has been broadly examined, less is known about the impact of economic recession on the well-being and psychosocial functioning of young people. The present study used qualitative interviews with 12 college students to understand their experience. Consensual qualitative research was used to analyse data and develop core themes around young people's experiences. Interviews focused on how young people perceived the impact of the economic recession on their social context and on emotional, behavioural, and interpersonal dimensions. Although students showed a proactive attitude in dealing with the crisis, findings highlighted a negative impact on psychological functioning characterized by feelings of instability and helplessness and by difficulties in planning for the future. Other general themes emerged, including disengagement from community participation expressed by feelings of isolation, lack of interest, and distrust. Directions for future research and implications for practice are discussed.     

Exact optimal designs for computer experiments via Kriging metamodelling

Nowadays it is common to reproduce physical systems using mathematical simulation models and, despite the fact that computing resources continue to increase, computer simulations are growing in complexity. This leads to the adoption of surrogate models and one of the most popular methodologies is the well-known Ordinary Kriging, which is a statistical interpolator extensively used to approximate the output of deterministic simulation. This paper deals with the problem of finding suitable experimental plans for the Ordinary Kriging with exponential correlation structure. In particular, we derive exact optimal designs for prediction, estimation and information gain approaches in the one-dimensional case, giving further theoretical justifications for the adoption of the equidistant design. Moreover, we show that in some circumstances several results related to the uncorrelated setup still hold for correlated observations.     

Microcredit,Family Planning Programs,and Contraceptive Behavior: Evidence From a Field Experiment in Ethiopia

The impact of community-based family planning programs and access to credit on contraceptive use, fertility, and family size preferences has not been established conclusively in the literature. We provide additional evidence on the possible effect of such programs by describing the results of a randomized field experiment whose main purpose was to increase the use of contraceptive methods in rural areas of Ethiopia. In the experiment, administrative areas were randomly allocated to one of three intervention groups or to a fourth control group. In the first intervention group, both credit and family planning services were provided and the credit officers also provided information on family planning. Only credit or family planning services, but not both, were provided in the other two intervention groups, while areas in the control group received neither type of service. Using pre- and post-intervention surveys, we find that neither type of program, combined or in isolation, led to an increase in contraceptive use that is significantly greater than that observed in the control group. We conjecture that the lack of impact has much to do with the mismatch between women’s preferred contraceptive method (injectibles) and the contraceptives provided by community-based agents (pills and condoms).     

Reflective practice and learning from mistakes in social work student placement

ABSTRACT

Student placement is a fundamental component of social work education and an important space where to build critically self-reflective practitioners. Students learn from their reflection on their experience and their mistakes are a powerful opportunity to go behind the surface of events and understand the essence of the profession. This article will present some results from the analysis carried out on the reflective writing of a group of social work students who describe and reflect on the most significant mistakes they made in their field practice using a reflective framework developed for errors and failures. The main results of this experience are illustrated with special focus on the impact and on the emotions, the relationships with service users and the assessment of the cases. Students are often so concentrated on looking at their responsibility that they become almost blind to the systems and interactions that contribute to the negative outcomes of their actions. Social work education programs should emphasize the importance of structured reflective habits and promote the culture of responsibility instead of the ‘blame culture’, that is probably the strongest obstacle to learning from mistakes and preventing their repetition in the future.     

Structural learning and estimation of joint causal effects among network-dependent variables

Statistical Methods & Applications - Bayesian networks in the form of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) represent an effective tool for modeling and inferring dependence relations among variables,...