Prevalence,people and processes: a consideration of the implications of Lord Laming's progress report on the protection of children in England

Media coverage of the death of Baby P revived national concerns about the standard of child safeguarding practice in England following the implementation of widespread structural changes in response to the Victoria Climbié Inquiry chaired by Lord Laming in 2003. This paper discusses the recommendations of Lord Laming's recent Progress Report. It questions whether the scale of the challenge in improving child protection is fully recognised and considers briefly the culture of social care in the UK and the barriers to effective reform. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performing Beauty: Dove's “Real Beauty” Campaign

Dove, a popular beauty brand, impressed some in the advertising world with its unique “Campaign for Real Beauty” and made others cringe. But little is known about how real women respond. “Real” beauty according to Dove means various shapes and sizes—flaws and all—and is the key to rebranding, rebuilding women's self‐esteem, and redefining beauty standards. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with sixteen Canadian women and guided by social semiotics and dramaturgy, I examine Dove's presentation of beauty and women's reactions to it from a “beauty as performance” frame. This study examines processes of interpretation and finds that expressing beauty, the self, and a public image inextricably requires elements of performance.     

Perceived facilitators and barriers to saving among low-income youth

Asset-based social welfare programs focus on helping low- to moderate-income citizens to accumulate wealth in the form of homeownership, savings, small businesses, and higher education. Individual development accounts, savings accounts in which account holders’ deposits are matched, are a vehicle often used in these programs. In a national demonstration of individual development accounts for children (children's savings accounts), low-income youth were interviewed to learn what helped them to save and what made it difficult to save. We describe the young people's perceptions of these factors, and conclude with implications for policy and program design.     

Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized approach to linguistic landscape1

In Washington DC's newly gentrified Chinatown, recent commercial establishments, primarily non‐Chinese owned chains, use Chinese‐language signs as design features targeted towards people who neither read nor have ethnic ties to Chinese. Using this neighborhood as a case study, we advocate a contextualized, historicized and spatialized perspective on linguistic landscape which highlights that landscapes are not simply physical spaces but are instead ideologically charged constructions. Drawing from cultural geography and urban studies, we analyze how written language interacts with other features of the built environment to construct commodified urban places. Taking a contextually informed, qualitative approach, we link micro‐level analysis of individual Chinese‐language signs to the specific local socio‐geographic processes of spatial commodification. Such a qualitative approach to linguistic landscape, which emphasizes the importance of sociohistorical context, and which includes analysis of signage use, function, and history, leads to a greater understanding of the larger sociopolitical meanings of linguistic landscapes.     

Care of the Elderly—A Project,a Protest,a Survey and a Plan

Rehousing of elderly people in Australia has generally not been preceded by research into the kind of assistance that is necessary. An example is given of how an attempt was made to discover the needs of the elderly disabled in a small country community. Assessment by observation of people at home revealed the need for assistance for them to stay where they were. Home Care organized from the district hospital is often a more appropriate answer to this problem than the building of expensive and unnecessary institutions.     

Hierarchical linear modeling as an example for measuring change over time in a leadership development evaluation context

One of the difficulties in evaluating leadership development is measuring whether and how people change over the time period of the leadership development initiative. Even when change over time is an inherent part of the design and evaluation of leadership development, events may occur outside of the control of evaluators that limit the effectiveness of adequately and accurately assessing change over time. With data from a leadership development initiative designed to account for change over time, this article suggests hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) as a multilevel methodological technique to assess change over time in a leadership development context. This article will use real change over time data from a leadership development initiative and discuss the logic and rationale of HLM. We use HLM as an example of a multilevel methodological tool to investigate typical change over time questions in leadership development evaluation.     

Formalizing the Unformalized: Practitioners' Communication of Knowledge in Practice

Correspondence to Dr Jennifer Osmond, School of Human Services, Logan Campus, Griffith University, University Drive, Meadowbrook, Queensland 4131, Australia. E-mail: j.osmond{at}griffith.edu.au Summary Despite considerable debate in the literature, social work continuesto invest considerable analytical and empirical energy on understanding,recognizing and critiquing the nature and form of its knowledgebase. Although such contributions have advanced the discussion,what is largely absent but essential to this debate is an understandingof how practitioners actually express what they know. This paperfocuses specifically on this issue and in so doing, advancesone template for working with practice language. From a qualitative,multi-method research methodology, it was found that participants'communication of their knowledge was not always formal and labelled.Knowing could be expressed via examples, stories, metaphor,as well as understandings that resembled existing theoreticalknowledge or that which had been reformulated and synthesizedin practice. The paper emphasizes the necessity to recognizethis diversity in knowledge communication, so as to accuratelyand responsibly map actual practice knowledge, but in doingso, also raises the issue of addressing limitations that suchrecognition brings. The issue of competent and clear practicearticulation is a topic to which the profession should giveserious attention. The inability of practitioners to explicitlyarticulate the basis of practice behaviour places them at aconsiderable disadvantage in a competitive labour market.     

Uncertainty and the Second Space: Modern Birth Timing and the Dilemma of Education

This paper focuses on the relationship between experiential and statistical uncertainties in the timing of births in Cameroon (Central Africa). Most theories of fertility level and change emphasize the emergence of parity-specific control, treating desired family size as both central, and stable across the life course. By contrast, this paper argues for a theory of reproduction that emphasizes process, social context, and contingency. The paper concentrates on the second birth interval, showing that it is longer and more variable among educated than among uneducated women. The paper argues that this difference is due to the specific forms of uncertainty associated with education in contemporary Cameroon.