Promoting public health through community engagement: Embracing the journey

ABSTRACT

This case study recounts and analyzes the journey that graduate students, enrolled in an experiential, interdisciplinary health promotions course, took with a diverse, urban, Black, Midwest community. Community members, faculty, and graduate students in social work and public health were fellow travelers on this voyage into uncharted territory. A major goal of the journey was to teach students how to recognize community strengths and to facilitate the community in using those strengths. The learner’s stance is used as the guiding principle for this reflective journey that generated serendipitous benefits and challenges. The article concludes with recommendations for interdisciplinary education and curriculum development.     

Imag(in)ing Women's Agency

The use of images is central to Amnesty International's 2004 campaign ‘Stop Violence against Women’. Looking at how Amnesty International uses images to show women's agency reveals a conflation of the terms sex and gender. Despite its best efforts, Amnesty International's goal of empowering women ultimately remains out of reach because it fails to read violence against women in a gendered context. Through interviews and analyses of the images, this article claims that Amnesty International's concept of agency is trapped in a heterosexist, masculinist grammar that perpetuates non-agential articulations of women in human rights discourse. This article offers an alternative reading of gender and agency that contextualizes violence, opening up spaces in human rights discourse to begin to look at what causes individuals to resort to violence and at how violence may be perpetrated because of the presence of particular genders.     

Is program structure related to stigma and community acceptance of justice-involved adolescents?

Objective

The aim of the study is to examine the impact of diversion program characteristics on social stigma of delinquent adolescents in Jordan.

Method

A street survey of adults was conducted in Amman, Jordan. Respondents were randomly assigned to read one of four vignettes involving a delinquent adolescent who participated successfully in one of four types of juvenile justice interventions: detention center placement; diversion with counseling; diversion with counseling plus victim apology and restitution; and diversion with counseling plus family-based apology and restitution. Respondents reported their willingness to accept the adolescent as a member of their child's school, as a friend of their child, as a spouse for their child, and as a future employee. Seventy seven percent of adults approached participated (N = 137).

Results

Respondents reported greater willingness to accept the adolescent when he participated in any of the three diversion programs compared to the detention center condition (β = .80, p < .05). However, there were no differences among the diversion program types (i.e., counseling only, counseling plus individual restorative justice, counseling plus tribal restorative justice) in acceptance levels. Regardless of intervention type, the perception that the adolescent had ‘learned his lesson’ was associated with greater acceptance and with heightened expectations of future success.

Conclusion

Intervention characteristics can influence public stigma in the Middle East. For justice involved youths, interventions that increase perceptions that youth have learned their lesson is a crucial ingredient to stigma reduction efforts. Social work interventions with delinquent adolescents and their families need to incorporate stigma management strategies that convey lesson-learning as a key intervention outcome.     

Peripheries,suburbanisms and change in sub-Saharan African cities

The ‘revisionist’ view of South African history has an advantage in understanding the role of values in terms of class structures, as opposed to liberal orthodoxy that sees ‘race’ as an autonomous variable: a view that is both static and unhistorical. The problem of explaining these values, however remains for class analysis can be accused of economic determinism. Pluralism may, therefore, be of use as a supplement to class analysis by interpreting values in a subjective sense. Class becomes only one of a number of forms of political consciousness (i.e. religious, ‘tribal’ or ethnic) and the analysis shifts to a market of competing political ideologies. This view is explored empirically by the example of the rise of a segregationist ideology in South Africa in the twentieth century.     

Using an Online Support Site to Extend the Learning to a Graduate Field Practicum in the United States

An online support site was constructed for graduate social work students at San Diego State University in California during their first‐year field practicum. A study was conducted to explore and describe the attitudes of these students toward the usefulness of the site's online features. Students participated in the site through the Blackboard Software Platform by adding discussion threads to asynchronous forums on an online discussion board, receiving information through online announcements, accessing field‐related materials through the site, and engaging in an online network. The most useful forum was related to the learning plan that students were required to complete in planning and organizing their field practicum experience. Students reported that the most useful feature of the site was the ability to access timely information through the online announcements from the Field Education Program.     

Preparing social work students to work in culturally diverse settings

Social workers have been in the forefront of the debate surrounding multiculturalism and are delineating guidelines on how to appreciate, work with, and embrace cultural diversity. This paper presents a structured format for presenting multicultural material into a BSW field seminar course based on a three-point paradigm. It focuses on allowing the students to develop an awareness of their cultural identity while at the same time attempting to increase their awareness of other cultural and ethnic customs and values.     

Selling social work education (2) credit when credit is due: A “three year” framework for social work education

Three year training courses are the ultimate goal for social work education. But changes in the funding of higher education will require more aggressive marketing strategies. It is necessary to consider alternatives to the full-time model beyond the conventional part-time approach. Three schemes for credit exemption are described. Educational opportunity with potential appropriate for social work education exists outside formal course provision. A proposal is made for the incorporation of agency inservice training provision and part-time adult education study into basic qualifying courses, adapting existing precedents and extending the programme provider model. It is suggested that although political obstruction will prevent an early move to a three year model, some of the mechanisms proposed could be incorporated into current planning to safeguard intellectual standards.     

Some aspects of mating and fertility in the West Indies

This paper deals with certain problems in fertility analysis in the West Indies that have their origin in two characteristics of the populations involved: the diversity of family forms and the imbalance between the sexes. Considerations of the main features of these family types, in terms of a fourfold classification as well as in terms of the threefold classification adopted at recent censuses (single, common law and married), show that many techniques relied on in the study of fertility among European populations are inapplicable to West Indian populations.

The limited data available permit only rough estimates of the rates of formation of different types of unions: but these emphasise that formal marriage usually takes place late in the childbearing period, generally after the couple has had one-or more children, that the formation of keeper unions begins considerably earlier and that the common law type is a transitional state between the looser keeper union and the state of formal marriage.

There seems to be no chance of studying fertility differentials among the several family types in terms of reproduction rates. Census data however provide three measures for this purpose, all of which show that fertility is highest for the married type and lowest for the single or keeper union. These differentials seem to run counter to the more usual pattern of fertility differentials which show fertility lowest among groups of high socio-economic standing.

Imbalance between the sexes is of importance primarily in the problem of arriving at satisfactory indices of fertility, though it may also have contributed somewhat to the establishment of the pattern of low marriage rates. Wide discrepancies between rates based on males and rates based on females appear, both in respect of fertility levels at given points of time and in respect of fertility trends. These discrepancies seem closely related to the imbalance between the sexes in. the reproductive age span. Under these conditions the use of joint G.R.B's clearly offers a more realistic measure of fertility than rates based on either sex.     

Disparities in Academic Achievement: Assessing the Role of Habitus and Practice

Bourdieu’s theory of cultural and social reproduction—with its core concepts cultural capital, habitus, practice and field—is a leading account of the intergenerational persistence of educational inequality. Although numerous studies examine the relationship between class, cultural capital and academic outcomes, and some focus on gender differences in cultural capital, few attempt to operationalize Bourdieu’s accompanying concepts of habitus and practice, and to consider gender differences along these dimensions. The present study addresses these gaps by examining a “structure-disposition-practice” model of the relationships between family socioeconomic status (SES), sex, habitus, academic practices, and academic achievement using multilevel Canadian data. Findings of SES and gender differences in the model offer qualified support for the potential of Bourdieu’s framework to help increase our understanding of class and gender disparities in educational outcomes. Results suggest that habitus, practice and the “structure-disposition-practice” model are not only theoretically sophisticated, but also empirically sustainable and that future efforts to more precisely measure the model’s concepts and relationships are warranted.     

One of us? Reaction formation and inclusion as a strategy in the ethnic state

Many states question how to manage burgeoning migration. This is particularly problematic for ethnic states whose foundation myths imagine the state as the home for the nation. In this paper, we argue that ethnic states engage a type of defense mechanism, ‘reaction formation’, as part of migration policy to distract attention from threats to the claimed ethnic homogeneity that undergirds the reason for the state's existence. Using Israel as a case of a planned ethnic state, we show how a state develops a spectrum of membership models to incorporate ‘others’ into the nation-state. We suggest that Israel could conceivably devise some arrangement to incorporate the several hundred thousand labor migrants currently resident there. We argue that the state is reluctant to recognize these migrants as ‘Israeli’ because to do so would reveal a hidden truth: Israel may be becoming more Israeli than Jewish and, thus, the recognition of labor migrants and their children provokes questions about Israel's very reason for existence, that is, being a Jewish state.