Solving Current Social Challenges: Engaging Undergraduates in Policy Practice

This article explores an innovation in teaching policy practice at the undergraduate level. It analyzes an experiential learning model that uses current social challenges as a compelling way to generate student learning about policy practice. Over the course of the semester, students examine antecedents, current issues, and potential solutions to a contemporary social issue through a series of assignments that build knowledge and skills and link the topic to larger social policy concerns. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence from seven semesters, the article explores benefits and challenges of this approach to teaching, and derives lessons for social work education.     

Achtsamkeit lernen im Offenen Dialog

Dialogue in the sense of David Bohm invites individuals and groups to consider together their ways of thinking and learning. By exploring mental models, which usually hinder reaching deeper agreement, this kind of dialogue opens new grounds and is, at the latest, since Peter Senge’;s management-bestseller “The fifth discipline” (1990), considered to be a basic process for team learning in groups and organisations. The article refers to university projects on ‘open dialogue’ with students at the universities of Oldenburg and Bochum between 2001–2003. Characteristics of “open dialogue” are represented as ways of attentiveness learning. Students practical reports are used to work out recommendations based upon “open dialogue” for the development of central deep ecology and human competences.     

Reshaping Clinical Practice for the New Millennium

In the new millennium, oppression will continue to affect social workers’ clients. This article discusses training clinical practitioners to address oppression. Drawing on poststructural, postmodern, feminist, and social constructivist theories, the article argues that to challenge oppression, clinical practice must address the dialectical relationship between private troubles and public issues while transforming professional relationships that disempower clients. The article describes a second-year MSW clinical practice sequence taught from feminist, poststructuralist, postmodern, and social constructionist perspectives, where students learn to assess the impacts of oppression, discover clients’ strengths, and respond in personal, social, and political contexts.     

Exploring the essence of enabling child participation within child protection services

The chances that children have to participate in child protection services are largely contingent upon the attitudes and skills of case managers. They have a crucial role in ensuring that a child's voice is being listened to and acknowledged in often sensitive dialogues. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate what case managers need to facilitate child participation. By handing case managers a participation toolbox developed by children and through the use of reflexive monitoring in action, we elaborated on the barriers faced in practice. The results show that the intention to facilitate child participation is quickly overruled by often subconscious thoughts and beliefs, stemming from the complex interplay of child image, protection, and participation. Case managers need to be aware of this interplay and how this unknowingly steers their actions. Therefore, iterative reflection should be facilitated within organizations for an actual change in their daily practice and to amplify the role of children in the decision‐making processes within child protection services.     

Pitch and Communicative Intent in Mother's Speech: Adjustments for Age and Sex in the First Year

This study investigated pitch and communicative intent in mothers' infant‐directed speech spoken to their infants at birth, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. Audio recordings of mothers (6 with female, and 6 with male infants) talking to another adult and to their infant at 5 ages were low‐pass filtered and rated by 60 adults on 5 scales (Positive or Negative Affect, Express Affection, Encourage Attention, Comfort or Soothe, and Direct Behavior). Mean fundamental frequency (F₀) and pitch range of utterances were also measured. Utterances associated with positive affect tend to peak at 6 and 12 months, whereas more directive utterances peaked at 9 months. Mean F₀ followed the age trend for affective utterances, and pitch range followed the trend for directive utterances. The results suggest mother speech patterns reflect, complement, and perhaps facilitate infant development.     

Global Human Rights and State Sovereignty: State Ratification of International Human Rights Treaties, 1965–20011

This research seeks to understand the factors that lead nation‐states to ratify international human rights treaties in the contemporary world, despite their potential cost for state sovereignty. We argue that normative pressure from international society, along with historical contingencies during the Cold War, encouraged many states to ratify these treaties. We present an event‐history analysis of ratification of seven key international human rights treaties in 164 countries in the period between 1965 and 2001. The results lend support to the world society argument as well as to our historical argument and also specify that normative pressure and imitation have been important factors shaping states’ decisions to ratify international human rights treaties.     

Institutional Shaping of Interagency Working: Managing Tensions between Collaborative Working and Client Confidentiality

Tensions between imperatives for sharing of information aboutclients, patients, and offenders and those for confidentialityand privacy have become a prominent but unresolved issue inBritish public policy in the context of greater pressures towardinteragency collaboration. This article analyses empirical datafrom a major Economic and Social Research Council–fundedresearch project designed to provide the first systematic evidenceabout the ways in which local partnerships working in sensitivepolicy fields in England and Scotland attempt to strike settlementsbetween sharing and confidentiality and discusses the impactof national government's attempts to increase formal regulationof their information-sharing practices. To do this, the projecthas developed a methodology to operationalize neo-Durkheimianinstitutional theory and demonstrates that theory in this traditionhas the power to identify and explain patterns of information-sharingstyles adopted in local collaborative working. The overall conclusionis that the stronger assertion of formal regulation by nationalgovernment may well be leading to the greater prominence ofhierarchical institutional forms but it may also be associatedwith the counterassertion of other institutional forms, too,and in ways that may reinforce problems that greater regulationis intended to address. In particular, we show that neitherdoes increased formal regulation always lead frontline staffto be more confident about local information-sharing practicesnor should it lead observers to be more confident that data-sharingpractices will be more transparent or consistent from localityto locality.     

The Value of Premarital Education

Premarital education programs have been designed with the aim of helping prospective spouses examine and evaluate their relationship prior to marriage. It is widely considered as preventative skills training and assumes that exposing couples to the skills to improve their relationship will help them deal with interpersonal difficulties as they arise. Skills commonly included in the programs involve communication, negotiation, problem-solving and decision making. There are a number of problems identified with the current status of premarital education programs including the atheoretical nature of most programs, the lack of specific goals in the program format, and poor evaluation procedures which are used to examine effectiveness. Overall it is concluded that although the concept of preparation for marriage is a good one, the current value of these programs is limited. A personal account of one premarital education program is also provided.     

The complexity of roles in community action projects: The example of the evaluation of ‘alternatives’

Evaluation of community interventions is a special form of evaluation involving many roles that are key to accomplishing both the intervention and the accompanying research. The present paper describes the roles involved in the evaluation of a community intervention (‘Alternatives’) aimed at safer use of alcohol and depressant medications by seniors.The three core roles were the community developer who provided leadership in the implementation of the project, the researcher/evaluator, and the community committee that sanctioned and facilitated the project. Other roles on the project included: the project coordinator, the nurse-interviewers who collected the survey data for the evaluation, volunteers from seniors groups, local health service providers, the media, the funders, and others on the project team who provided specific technical expertise.The paper describes the competing interests among these roles as well as conflicts that arose and how these conflicts were handled. Although specific roles are described, the types of roles and the potential for competing interests and conflict are generally relevant to community level evaluations.