Local realities: a frontier perspective on child protection team practice

This article presents a case study of a child protection team in a frontier county in Montana. Narratives from individual and group interviews highlight team members' experiences and the structuring of team practice in their frontier community, the power and challenge of community culture and history, and the interplay of constructions of children and child abuse as key elements that influence and shape team practice. This exploration suggests a framework for rethinking child protection team practice in diverse locations.     

Understanding the Juggling Act: Gendered Preferences and Social Structural Constraints

In this paper we use longitudinal data to test the strength of individual preferences and structural variables as explanations for married women's labor force participation. Data drawn from a subset of the Career Development Study are used to compare gendered preferences measured toward the end of adolescence vs. work and family structural variables as predictors of the actual number of hours married women work for pay. Family structures that push women out of the labor force and pull them into family work prove to be the strongest predictor of married women's employment hours, with work structures (e.g., aspects of good jobs) and the subjective definition of paid work as a career also being substantively important for explaining hours in the labor force. Our findings also indicate that attitudes formed before and during early adolescence do have a weak but statistically significant effect on married women's labor force participation, at least for baby boom women.     

Violence and the costs of caring for a family member with severe mental illness

Drawing on the stress paradigm and using data from the Duke Mental Health Study, this paper investigates the links between violence by and against persons with severe mental illness and their caregivers' financial burden (e.g., number of financial contributions and perceived financial strain). In addition to violence, substance use and medication noncompliance are included in a series of multivariate regression models predicting caregiver financial burden that include measures for disruptive behaviors, personal needs, social supports, and caregiver characteristics. The findings show that violent perpetration and violent victimization increase the number of financial contributions and perceived financial strain. Nonviolent victimization, in contrast, decreases caregiver financial burden. Number of financial contributions and perceived financial strain are greatest when the family member is violent and extremely disruptive or needs assistance with personal care. Neither substance use nor medication noncompliance contributed to caregiver financial burden. Co-residence, female sex, parenthood, and instrumental social support were also associated with financial burden.     

Explaining Condom Use Disparity Among Black and Hispanic Female Adolescents

The study examined condom use among 204 Black and Hispanic female adolescents who attended family planning clinics. Partner attitude, partner communication, parental communication and social support measures were used in a multinomial logistic regression model to predict condom use at last intercourse. The results indicated that adolescents who perceived that their partners had a positive attitude toward condom use were 1.37 times more likely to report condom use compared to those whose partners did not have a positive attitude. Additionally, adolescents who reported communicating with partners about condoms were .37 times more likely to use condoms compared to those who did not communicate with their partners. These findings suggest that increasing condom use among female adolescents will require addressing primarily partner factors. Male partners must also be included in interventions to increase condom use.     

Rethinking professional quality of life for social workers: Inclusion of ecological self-care barriers

ABSTRACT

This study conducted a survey among social workers in a mid-Atlantic state in the U.S. and examined the relationship between self-care behaviors, self-care barriers and compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress (STS) from an ecological perspective. The study found that social workers had a moderate level of compassion satisfaction, low risk of burnout, and low risk of STS. Bachelor-degree social workers had higher levels of burnout and lower levels of compassion satisfaction than others. Multiple regression results showed that self-care behaviors and self-care barriers did not predict compassion satisfaction. Self-care behaviors and self-care barriers were significantly associated with the level of burnout. Self-care barriers significantly contributed to STS, while self-care behaviors did not significantly decrease STS. This study implies that promoting self-care behaviors and decreasing self-care barriers can promote higher levels of professional quality of life. In addition to social workers’ individual-level self-care activities that are often stressed in prior research on STS and burnout, employers, supervisors, family members, and community members play a critical role in promoting a manageable work-life balance for social workers, thereby allowing them to use more self-care behaviors, while reducing barriers to self-care and ultimately reducing risk of burnout and STS.     

New frontiers: Remote sensing in social science research

An expedition is planned for highly detailed remote sensing of the physical and environmental aspects of planet Earth. However, the possibilities of such remote sensing for social and political research have been largely overlooked by sociologists. Remote sensing is a potentially revolutionary instrument with significant methodological and theoretical implications. Changes in the Earth's environment and surface features will be monitored continuously in an objective way. Some of these changes could be used by social scientists as indicators of social and political changes.     

Characteristics of the maximal independent set ZDD

Zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams (ZDDs) are important data structures that are used in a number of combinatorial optimization settings. This paper explores a ZDD characterization for the maximal independent sets of a graph; a necessary and sufficient condition for when nodes in the ZDD can be merged is provided, and vertex orderings of the graph are studied to determine which orderings produce smaller ZDDs. A bound on the width of the maximal independent set ZDD is obtained, relating it to the Fibonacci numbers. Finally, computational results are reported.     

Improving Primary Care for Persons with Disabilities: the nature of expertise

It has been well documented that persons with disabilities (PWDs) have a more vulnerable health status than persons without disabilities; yet, they often receive inadequate primary care within the US health care system. This study explores how PWDs think about the health care they receive, particularly how primary care providers facilitate or hinder quality care for PWDs. The findings from this study expand the concept of expertise in health care, suggesting it goes well beyond technical competence of health care providers. For PWDs, expertise is multi-dimensional, not solely the domain of providers and includes having knowledge and using that knowledge within the context of the provider-patient relationship. PWDs identified three distinct areas of expertise: medical/technical, medical/biographical, and systems. Expertise can be brought to health care encounters by both PWDs and providers, and it can be developed through collaboration during interactions between providers and PWDs.     

School Racial Composition Effects on Avoidance,Separatism, and Integrationist Attitudes of Adolescents*

Support for integration versus separatism and approach versus avoldance reactions among junior and senior high school students was examined in integrated and segregated schools. Two surveys of a panel of black and white students in selected Milwaukee public schools were conducted in the spring of 1974 and the spring of 1975. The approach-avoidance and integration-separatism dimensions emerged from a factor analysis of racial attitude items. Black students in all-black schools scored more on the avoidance end of the approach-avoidance dimension while the black students in the integrated schools scored more on the approach end. The black students in the all-black schools, however, tended to score on the integration end of the integration-separatism dimension while the black students in the integrated schools tended to score on the separatism end. The attitudes of the students in the all-black schools changed towards those in the integrated school during the year between interviews. Reasons for the changes are suggested and partially tested with additional analysis. White students in essentially all-white schools scored on the avoidance and separatism end of the two dimensions. White students in mixed Latin schools were more acceptant of the minority students than the white students in the mixed black schools.     

Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda: Progresa/Oportunidades, Mexico's Conditional Transfer Programme

This article considers some of the changes and continuities in social protection in Latin America through a focus on the ways in which motherhood is positioned as key to the success of the new anti‐poverty programmes that have followed structural reform. It examines a flagship cash transfer programme known as Progresa/Oportunidades (Opportunities) established in Mexico in 1997 and now being widely adopted in the region. Characterized by some commentators as a quintessentially neo‐liberal programme, it is argued that Oportunidades represents a novel combination of earlier maternalist social policy approaches with the conditional, co‐responsibility models associated with the recent approaches to social welfare and poverty relief endorsed by international policy actors. In the first section, the gendered assumptions that have governed Latin American social policy are described; the second outlines social policy provision in Latin America and identifies the key elements of the new approaches to poverty; and the third critically examines the broader implications of the Mexican programme's selective and gendered construction of social need premised, as it is, on re‐traditionalizing gendered roles and responsibilities.