Capturing Multidimensionality: What does a Human Wellbeing Conceptual Framework Add to the Analysis of Vulnerability?

Much research to date has tended to view vulnerability by discipline or sector, despite the fact that individuals and households experience multiple, interacting and sometimes compound vulnerabilities. However, cross-disciplinary thinking on vulnerability has emerged. At the same time, also emergent is an alternative to traditional thinking on poverty, which shifts the focus away from poverty as a static set of deprivations towards poverty as a dynamic set of interacting material, relational and subjective aspects of life in a human wellbeing perspective. The contribution of this paper is to bring together these two strands of thinking in order to explore the ways in which a human wellbeing conceptual framework might contribute to the analysis of vulnerability in terms of better capturing the multidimensionality of vulnerability.     

Stress in Social Services: Mental Wellbeing, Constraints and Job Satisfaction

Correspondence to Margaret Coffey, Liverpool Hope University College, Room AEW 098, Hope Park, Liverpool L16 9JD, UK. E-mail: coffeym{at}hope.ac.uk Summary The public sector is facing an impending shortage of staff,because young people no longer want to work in it and nearlya third of its workforce is over 50 years of age. Staff workingwithin the public sector report that stress is the biggest singlefactor affecting their decision to leave. This research notereports the findings of a recent study carried out in two socialservice departments in the north-west of England. The primaryaim of the research was to explore work-related stress, usinga ‘problem diagnosis tool’ to understand the stressorsexperienced by social services staff, and to inform the developmentof interventions aimed at reducing and/or eliminating them.This study used in-depth interviewing to develop a questionnaireincorporating a variety of measures to assess potential stressorsand mental well-being. The questionnaire response rate was 33per cent (n = 1234) and the results demonstrated statisticallysignificant differences between staffing grades. Staff workingwith children and families reported the highest levels of absenteeism,poorest well-being, and highest level of organizational constraints.Job satisfaction was low compared with established norms forvarious occupational groups. This grounded research baselineis a crucial step to inform specifically designed and targetedinterventions, which can be effectively evaluated from thisbaseline position.     

Influence Diagnostics for Simultaneous Equations Models

This paper presents influence diagnostics for simultaneous equations models. It proposes residuals, leverage and other influence measures. A missing data method is adopted to minimize the masking effect due to case deletions. The assessment of local influence is also considered. The paper shows how to evaluate the effects that perturbations to the endogenous variables, predetermined variables and case weights may have on the parameter estimates. The diagnostics are illustrated with two examples.     

CARING ABOUT POVERTY

Entry to institutional care is being used as an ineffective and expensive response to child and family poverty in a number of countries. In this paper, the practice of using institutional care for children in poverty is examined, drawing on case studies from three countries–the Republic of Moldova, Bulgaria, and Sri Lanka. Research findings reveal that poverty is a major underlying cause of children being received into institutional care and that such reception into care is a costly, inappropriate, and often harmful response to adverse economic circumstances. We suggest that alternatives to care may be funded from resources currently committed to institutions by developing a policy of gatekeeping. However, alternative strategies must be responsive to local conditions, and all such strategies need to be developed in consultation with children, their families, and communities.     

Validation of a Multi‐Dimensional Measure of Strategy Development Processes

In this paper, we present evidence on the measurement properties of an instrument that assesses six dimensions of organizational strategy development. These dimensions are labelled planning, incrementalism, cultural, political, command and enforced choice. Using data from 5332 managers, results indicate the instrument has acceptable reliability and validity. Exploratory factor analysis confirms its underlying structure. Generally, the sub‐scales have acceptable internal reliability and inter‐rater reliability at the organizational level (n = 770 organizations). Further, using data aggregated at the organizational level, the sub‐scales are judged to have acceptable validity from the pattern of correlations amongst the six dimensions and with other variables.     

'The Tip of the Ice Berg': Children's Complaints and Advocacy in Wales--An Insider View from Complaints Officers

This paper is based on findings of a Welsh Assembly Governmentfunded review of children’s independent advocacy servicesin Wales with reference to their involvement in complaints madeby children, or by their parents or carers on their behalf,about local authority social services. It draws, primarily,upon qualitative interviews with local authority children’scomplaints officers, whose task is to receive complaints orconcerns, field these to appropriate social services staff,maintain oversight of their progression and keep complainantsinformed of developments. The paper describes the challengesthat complaints officers perceive children encounter in movingcomplaints forward, especially in a context where independentadvocacy services are involved and where these services areviewed with some suspicion by social services staff. It suggeststhat complaints officers play a pivotal part in managing thesometimes contested and complex interface between service providerand child and may do so from a position of limited authorityand influence. The role of complaints officers in engaging withcomplainants and their advocates, and with those colleaguesimplicated in complaints, has rarely been the topic of research.This paper provides accounts from these key staff that helpilluminate the tensions and difficulties that can enter thechildren’s complaints process.     

Rural studies: Modernism, postmodernism and the ‘post-rural’

In response to Philo [(1992b), Neglected rural geographies: a review. Journal of Rural Studies8, 193–207), who calls for rural studies to take the study of ‘others’ more seriously, we argue the need to take postmodernism more seriously. The paper focuses upon the production of knowledge about rural areas by academics. In the narrative that we provide here, the ‘rural’ had a strong presence until Pahl's critique of the rural-urban continuum which both diminished the status of the rural and emphasised the role of class in shaping particular spaces. Newby and his colleagues applied class analysis to agriculture, likewise undermining the significance of the rural. Further applications of general social theory, such as the political economy and restructuring approaches, show how modernist rural studies seem to be fighting a losing battle to posit the indispensability of the significance of the urban-rural division as an explanation; articulating and rearticulating the divide within a whole range of processes: economic, social and cultural. Rural social scientists have woven this modernist narrative, but, as Philo shows, one effect has been the neglect of certain social groups, cultures and identities. However, in contrast to Philo, we argue that a rather fundamental reassessment of social scientific approaches to the rural is required if these ‘neglected others’ are to be satisfactorily considered. We believe a ‘sociology of postmodernism’ would offer a more reflexive perspective on the processes which give rise to ‘the rural’. We thus call for an end to the use of universal or global concepts such as ‘rural’ (or the ‘urban’) and for a concern with the way places are ‘made’. This will entail a focus on ‘power’ as certain actors impose ‘their’ rurality on others. We term this the study of the ‘post-rural’.