Tipping points: what participants found valuable in labour market training programmes for vulnerable groups

Graham JR, Jones ME, Shier M. Tipping points: what participants found valuable in labour market training programmes for vulnerable groups
Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 63–72 © 2009 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. This article is based on face‐to‐face and focus group interviews with 72 people who have experienced ongoing difficulties integrating into Canadian labour markets, and who had completed a labour market training programme. Participants were representative of at least one (and often several) categories that inhibited labour market integration: low socio‐economic status, Aboriginal status, single parenthood, criminal justice history and being disabled. The major finding: respondents associated life skills rather than labour‐market skills with success in overcoming personal barriers to securing and maintaining employment. Life skills involved developing life meaning and interpersonal skills related to personal cognition and behaviours. Valued cognitions identified by participants were gaining a new perspective on life and realising that the past impacts the present. Valued behaviours identified by participants included actions associated with understanding personal characteristics and motivations, and building positive social support and social capital. These insights provide theoretically rich considerations for labour market training programmes and could considerably influence labour market policies and practices, particularly since most training programmes and policies are geared toward human capital (i.e. labour‐market skills) accumulation.     

How and Why Do Social and Sustainable Initiatives Scale? A Systematic Review of the Literature on Social Entrepreneurship and Grassroots Innovation

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Social and sustainable initiatives generally start small and need to scale to create substantial impact. Our systematic...     

The Development of a “Neighborhood in Solidarity” in Switzerland

ABSTRACT

This article presents a case study based on the “Neighborhood in Solidarity” (NS) methodology to illustrate its application in a locality of 8,000 inhabitants in Switzerland. This specific project is proposed to exemplify the global aim of the NS methodology. That aim is to increase the integration of elderly persons in societies in order to improve their quality of life. The case study demonstrates the enhancement of the capacity of the older people to remain actively engaged in their neighborhood. The article focuses on the creation of an autonomous community of empowered older people who can resolve their own problems after a 5-year project. The construction of the local community is presented throughout the six steps of the methodology: (1) preliminary analysis, (2) diagnostic, (3) construction, (4) project design, (5) project implementation, and (6) empowerment and with three degrees of involvement (community, participative, and integrative involvement). Performance and output indicators, quality indicators, and social determinants of health assess the development of the local project. The impacts of the projects which are illustrated in this specific example motivated this publication to inspire practitioners from other countries.     

Towards a Conceptual Framework of Service User Involvement in Social Work Education: Empowerment and Educational Perspectives

A topic that has recently gained widespread attention in social work education is service user involvement (SUI), a term denoting the call to include users of social work services in teaching social work students. Despite the widespread use of the term SUI, this label includes a wide variety of approaches with different aims and scopes. A conceptual framework that distinguishes empowerment from educational perspectives in current SUI approaches is proposed, and a number of elements that should be discussed in each of these perspectives are introduced: theoretical background, role and tasks of the institution, areas of implementation and role of service users, and effects of SUI and their assessment. Implications for further SUI projects and research approaches are discussed.     

The Accuracy of Cross-Validation Results in Forecasting

The widespread use of regression analysis as a business forecasting tool and renewed interest in the use of cross-validation to aid in regression model selection make it essential that decision makers fully understand methods of cross-validation in forecasting, along with the advantages and limitations of such analysis. Only by fully understanding the process can managers accurately interpret the important implications of statistical cross-validation results in their determination of the robustness of regression forecasting models. Through a multiple regression analysis of a large insurance company's customer database, the Herzberg equation for determining the criterion of validity [11] and analysis of samples of different size from the two regions covered by the database, we illustrate the use of statistical cross-validation and test a set of factors hypothesized to be related to the statistical accuracy of validation. We find that increasing sample size will increase reliability. When the magnitude of population model differences is small, validation results are found to be unreliable, and increasing sample size has little or no effect on reliability. In addition, the relative fit of the model for the derivative sample and the validation sample has an impact on validation accuracy, and should be used as an indicator of when further analysis should be undertaken. Furthermore, we find that the probability distribution of the population independent variables has no effect on validation accuracy.     

Striving for a Better Position: Aspirations and the Role of Cultural,Economic, and Social Capital for Irregular Migrants in Belgium1

Drawing upon 120 semi‐structured interviews with irregular migrants in Belgium, this article focuses on their aspirations and the resources needed in order to realize these. It is demonstrated that specific aspirations require specific forms of capital. A typology is constructed, based on three types of aspirations with corresponding resources. First, investment migrants, who aspire to return and invest in upward social mobility in their country of origin, require job competencies (cultural capital) and social leverage (social capital). Second, legalization migrants, who aspire to obtain legal residence, require different forms of capital, depending on the marriage market they are active in. Third, settlement migrants, aiming at residing legally or illegally in the receiving society, require both social support and social leverage (combined social capital). These findings indicate it is important to adopt a contextualized approach studying the mechanisms through which various forms of capital lead to different outcomes for irregular migrants.