An examination of student and provider perceptions of voluntary sector social work placements in Northern Ireland

Practice based learning in Northern Ireland is a core element of social work education and comprising 50% of the degree programme for undergraduate and postgraduate students. This article presents evidence about the perceptions of practice learning from voluntary sector/non-government organisation (NGO) placement providers and final year social work students on social work degree programmes in Northern Ireland in 2011. It draws on data from 121 respondents from189 final year students and focus group interviews with voluntary sector providers offering 16% (85) of the total placements available to students. The agencies who participated in the research study provide a total of 55 PLOs to social work students, and are therefore fairly representative in terms of voluntary sector (NGO) provision. The article locates these data in the context of practice learning pedagogy and the changes introduced by the Regional Strategy for Practice Learning Provision in Northern Ireland 2010–2015. Several themes emerged including; induction, support and guidance, practice educator/student relationship, professional identity and confidence in risk assessment and decision-making. Social work educators, placement providers and employers must be cognisant of newly qualified social workers’ needs in terms of consolidating knowledge within the formative stages of their professional development.     

“Infiltrators” or Refugees? An Analysis of Israel's Policy Towards African Asylum-Seekers

This article adopts a genealogical approach in examining Israeli immigration policy by focusing on the situation confronting African asylum seekers who have been forced back into Egypt, detained and deported but who have not had their asylum claims properly assessed. Based on immigration policies formulated at the time of Israeli independence, whose principle objective was to secure a Jewish majority state, we argue that Israel's treatment of African asylum seekers as ‘infiltrators’/economic migrants stems from an insistence on maintaining immigration as a sovereign issue formally isolated from other policy domains. Such an approach is not only in violation of Israel's commitment to the Refugee Convention, it directly contributes to policies which are ineffective and unduly harsh.     

Public and private photographs of refugees: the problem of representation

In 1948 Manivald Sein made a series of photographs as he crossed the Atlantic Ocean, illegally, on board the Walnut. He was one of 347 passengers, mostly Estonian refugees, who escaped Soviet occupation near the end of Second World War and who were again fleeing Stalin's wrath after living in Sweden for four years. This article will examine the various ways photographs taken by refugees in transit not only give a voice to their experience, but more importantly, allow outsiders to see them as complex human beings, which in turn provides a powerful counterpoint to prevailing stereotypes.     

Materials receiving capacity and inventory management

This paper analyses the optimal level of materials receiving capacity for a manufacturer that receives deliveries from many suppliers. Inventory levels and inventory carrying costs depend on the frequency of deliveries and thus, on the materials receiving capacity. An analytic model that captures the tradeoff between inventory costs and materials receiving costs is presented and discussed. The receiving cost is modeled as increasing in discrete jumps of varying sizes whenever materials receiving resources are added. Practical issues in implementing the model are highlighted and methods to reduce the marginal materials receiving cost are discussed. The paper also discusses connections to the JIT approach for production environments where materials receiving is heavily automated.     

Social compromise and social metrics

In the context of constitutional design, a committee of citizens' representatives proposes (social choice) axioms. The outcome should not necessarily be the aggregation rule, or rules, satisfying each of the axioms. Alternative procedures are recommended for aggregating a set of axioms into a single summary axiom. The summary axiom generates a single social decision function when a social metric is applied.     

Challenging the one-size-fits-all myth: findings and solutions from a statewide focus group of rural social workers

Of America's counties, 76% are rural, comprising 83% of U.S. land and 25% of the American population. Yet most child welfare programs are designed to fit the needs of urban and suburban families. This article reviews the unique needs and assets of rural children and families in Texas. It presents recommendations from a focus group for overcoming the inappropriate transfer of urban models to rural communities.     

Contextual assessment of couples therapy: the Clinical Discourse Q-Sets

This article describes a method for creating highly contextual assessments of couples therapy interaction using concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). According to SFL, talk in interaction serves three primary functions: to mediate social relations, to negotiate representations of reality, and to organize and structure the event as coherent. These concepts are operationalized using observational q-methodology. The Clinical Discourse Q-Sets (CDQS) include three separate q-sets for use by trained observers in rating 12-min segments of couples therapy conversation. Each q-set captures one aspect of the communication process as defined by Systemic Functional theory. Good-to-high reliabilities for the q-set profiles over various (n = 16) couples therapy episodes were found. Preliminary evidence for the conceptual structure and clinical validity of the system was found.     

Opportunity theory and adolescent school-based victimization

While school-based adolescent victimization has received a great deal of public attention, there exist relatively few theoretically driven studies aimed at explaining this phenomenon. We address this paucity by providing a test of a criminal-opportunity model of school-based victimization using data on over 3,000 students from 40 different Kentucky middle and high schools. The effects of opportunity-related concepts are estimated for both violent and property victimization, and comparisons are made for each victimization type across middle- and high-school student subsamples. Findings suggest that criminal opportunity theory is relevant to the understanding of school-based victimization. In particular, indicators of exposure to crime and target antagonism appear to be robust predictors. Further, there appears to be substantial generalizability in the effects of opportunity-related variables across violent versus property victimization as well as across middle-school versus high-school contexts.     

The Question of Rural Masculinities*

Abstract By way of introduction to this special issue on rural masculinities, we provide an overview of masculinity studies, emphasizing the influential work of Robert W. Connell on hegemonic masculinity. We go on to distinguish between two main avenues of rural inquiry in masculinity studies: studies of the masculine in the rural and studies of the rural in the masculine, or what we also term the masculine rural and the rural masculine. We apply this distinction to the six contributions to this special issue, showing how most of the papers maintain a kind of dialogue between the two. We conclude by arguing that studies of rural masculinities are a contribution rather than an alternative to feminist scholarship in the rural social sciences, and that the topic of rural masculinities provides rural scholarship with opportunities for conducting research in other disciplines.