MARITAL AND FAMILY THERAPY CERTIFICATION AND LICENSING EXAMINATIONS: ONE MODEL*

The design of the North Carolina Marital and Family Therapy Certification Examination is outlined by its authors to provide a frame of reference for the development of other licensing and certification instruments. The purpose, procedures, resources, guidelines, content, and normative data of the examination are described. The model is offered to stimulate meaningful dialogue on marital and family therapy licensing and certification instrumentation. Guidelines toward the development of a national marital and family therapy examination are also presented.     

The political participation of social workers: a comparative study

This article reports on a comparative study that examined the political participation of social workers in KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, the state of New South Wales (excluding the Hunter region) in Australia, and New Zealand. Each of these contexts had roughly the same number of social workers, that is, approximately 1,200. It was found that social workers in New Zealand tended to be more politically active than their counterparts in New South Wales and KwaZulu-Natal, and the reasons for this are examined. In the process, New Zealand is presented as a case study of the way in which social work has responded to its political context. Finally, conclusions are drawn as to the engagement of social workers in the policy cycle and of the need for them to become more active politically.     

The Myth of Global Social Work: Double Standards and the Local-Global Divide

The push towards “global standards” in social work is part of a movement to generate uniformity, quality control, and benchmarking for professional education programs. It acts as a powerful vestige of modern institutions and professional associations to prescribe through processes of standardization, formalization, and technical specificity. In social work “global standards” attempt to create a fixed set of minimal requirements to which all professional programs should adhere. Standards are viewed along two dimensions: (i) as a necessity due to the changes and scale of complexity in social work; and (ii) as a vehicle for importing dominant forms of knowledge, values, and skills. Those parties who enthusiastically underwrite attempts to construct “global standards” in fact create a powerful network of allies that undermine local or cultural differences and fail to reconcile them. Global standards in social work undercut indigenous skills and values and negate the expertise of professional judgement. They constitute an unnecessary and politically motivated intrusion in the world of social workers. Ultimately, standards such as these are an illegitimate, impersonal, and voluntary means of regulation. As such, global standards are inherently political because their construction and application formally regulates the local practices in which they become embedded. Over time, they modify the position of social work practitioners and alter relations of accountability to the standards themselves.     

Making Research Count: What Australian Social Work Researchers Think

A central question in the research utilisation literature is what happens to research evidence once it is produced. In social work, this has frequently translated to questions of whether and how social workers use research in practice. Despite these questions, relatively little is known about the ways in which research comes to be used in social work practice. This paper reports on a study of research utilisation in social work, which examined researchers’ perceptions of the factors impacting on research use in social work. The specific focus of this study was on the impact of interaction between researchers and practitioners on research use in practice. The study replicated a scale used in prior studies on knowledge utilisation to collect data from 60 Australian researchers publishing in social work journals, all of whom reported some level of research use by practitioners. Key variables were coproduction, engagement, and research utilisation. Implications for future use of the survey instrument for the measurement and implementation of research use in social work are discussed.     

A Systematic Review of Sexual Dysfunction Measures for Gay Men: How Do Current Measures Measure Up?

The measurement of subjective components of sexual functioning is of increasing importance in clinical research and practice. Differences have been reported in prevalence rates and experiences of sexual difficulties between heterosexual and gay men. The aim of this article is to identify reliable and valid measures of sexual dysfunction suitable for use with gay men. Seven measures were reviewed; details about item development, dimensionality, reliability, and validity are provided. Heteronormative and heterosexist wording were evident throughout. Several areas of concern emerged in relation to psychometric properties (e.g., questionable validity). No psychometrically robust sexual function measure was identified for use with gay populations.     

A National Challenge: The Decline in MSW Admissions Applications

A steep and continuing national decline in MSW admissions applications is influencing decisions, the composition of the MSW applicant pool, student enrollments, and social work education programs. A recently recognized phenomenon, its patterns are consistent with national trends that show a shift in fields of study and choices of career. Factors in the decline include immediate and long-term economic considerations, as well as current lessened interest in social reform and human service. These changes pose such important issues for social work education and for the profession as questions regarding social work education programs and staff, quality of MSW education, and the numbers and qualifications of new MSWs.     

Product limit estimates: a generalized maximum likelihood study

The generalized maximum likelihood estimate (GMLE) assumptions are studied for four product-limit estimates (PLE): Censoring PLE (Kaplan-Meier estimate), truncation PLE, censoring-truncation PLE, and the degenerated PLE - the empirical distribution function. This paper shows that all the PLE's are also the GMLE's even if they are derived from partial likelihoods by natural parameterization techniques. However, a counter example is given to show that Kiefer Wolfowitz's assumption (1956) for consistency of GMLE can hardly be satisfied for un-dominated case.     

Athena's Legacy: Preparing Women for a Mentoring Program

ABSTRACT

A community-based research study conducted in 2004 identified a number of women from disadvantaged communities who sought mentoring in personal, educational, and vocational aspects of their lives. Informed by this earlier research, a program titled Map Your Future was developed, and a pilot mentoring program commenced in 2005. This article describes the group program that was developed to prepare the women for a mentoring relationship, and the research methodology underpinning its development. It concludes with an exploration of the women's experiences of the program.     

结构紧凑操作简便的倒置式荧光显微镜的应用

介绍了来自于首批LumaScoe倒置式荧光显微镜使用者在美国不同研究实验室、教学实验室、病人检查室及家庭客厅等处采集到的不同样品的新近图像。