Reflective Practice,Reflexivity, and Critical Reflection in Social Work Education in Australia

Reflective practice, reflexivity, and critical reflection are now widely accepted as important in contemporary social work practice. Despite this, there remain differences in how the terms are discussed within the literature. This results in confusion in how students are instructed about reflective practice, reflexivity, and critical reflection. This paper presents a proposal for clarifying these concepts based on the results from an interpretive study of reflective practice in social work education and practice in Australia. The study utilised three different methods: autoethnography, an archaeological analytic, and qualitative interviews. It found that reflective practice is understood as a capability, a form of critical thinking, a discipline response to a changing sector, and a way of theorising from practice. Conceptual clarifications of reflective practice, reflexivity, and critical reflection are presented.

IMPLICATIONS

• There is a need for clarification about the meaning of reflective practice, reflexivity, and critical reflection within social work.

• Findings from a qualitative study on the meaning and use of reflective practice in Australian social work education may provide conceptual clarification of these terms.

     

A multiple testing protocol for exploratory data analysis and the local misclassification rate

A false discovery rate (FDR) procedure is often employed in exploratory data analysis to determine which among thousands or millions of attributes are worthy of follow-up analysis. However, these methods tend to discover the most statistically significant attributes, which need not be the most worthy of further exploration. This article provides a new FDR-controlling method that allows for the nature of the exploratory analysis to be considered when determining which attributes are discovered. To illustrate, a study in which the objective is to classify discoveries into one of several clusters is considered, and a new FDR method that minimizes the misclassification rate is developed. It is shown analytically and with simulation that the proposed method performs better than competing methods.     

Cost-benefit analysis—a critique

This paper surveys some of the main criticisms of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) that have emerged over the years. It is noted in passing that views on what type of technique CBA really is, or should be, have differed and continue to differ depending on the set of value judgements used. We emphasise that the more recent suggested extensions to or modifications of CBA have sought to make the technique more comprehensive (i.e. to include distributional, environmental quality and other objectives as well as economic efficiency) at the inevitable cost of a loss of precision. The underlying principles of CBA are examined and the problems of multiple objective planning highlighted. Valuation problems are analysed, in particular with regard to amenity and environmental effects. Finally, the issues of uncertainty, irreversibility and intergenerational equity are raised briefly to indicate the complexity of the decision-making task when large-scale technologically advanced projects have to be appraised. In conclusion it is argued that CBA presented in a disaggregated format, as a comprehensive method for the ordering of information and a testing procedure for a range of valuations can perform a useful role in the decision-making process. The term ‘policy analysis’ is probably a better one for this broader view of the use of CBA. Ultimately we seem to be searching for a synthesis of the participatory and the traditional (technocratic) style of decision-making though we have a long and difficult course to chart before we even approach such a goal.     

Cross-Field Comparison of Ethics Education: Golden Rules and Particulars

Research misconduct negatively impacts the scientific community and society in general. Providing training in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) to researchers is one viable approach to minimizing research misconduct. Although recent evidence suggests ethics training can indeed be effective, little empirical work has examined the similarities and differences across fields. In the present study, we analyzed 62 empirical studies in engineering, biomedical science, social science, and mixed fields. The findings suggest certain instructional principles, or “golden rules,” apply generally to all fields. These golden rules include maintaining a field-specific or field-general approach and emphasizing processes in training. The findings also suggest that content areas contributing to instructional effectiveness vary as a function of field. Generally, it appears that all fields may benefit from taking a multi-pronged approach to ethics education wherein the salient field issues are covered. Implications for RCR education are discussed.     

Reducing Risk for Youth Violence by Promoting Healthy Development with Pyramid Mentoring: A Proposal for a Culturally Centered Group Mentoring

This article proposes ways to promote healthy psychosocial development among at-risk young African American males with a multigenerational culturally centered group mentoring intervention. The potential for addressing commonalities of risk factors for both internalized and externalized responses to environment stressors is discussed. The authors propose an innovative group intervention that is influenced by social learning theory, the triadic theory of influence, identity, and cognitive development theory. The article also highlights research that suggests benefits of culturally and therapeutically centered group mentoring. The focus of the proposed intervention is on psychosocial assets that are utilized to nurture life skills developed within the framework of a culturally centered multigenerational group mentoring process called pyramid mentoring.     

Translating Bourdieu into youth studies

ABSTRACT

Against a backdrop of lively discussion about the best ways to do youth studies, or sociology of youth, this article asks: Can Pierre Bourdieu’s work be translated into youth studies in ways that benefit the field? We begin by considering Bourdieu’s thoughts on the category of ‘youth’ using a new translation of this text, and then turn to an important discussion by Furlong, Woodman, and Wyn about certain long standing tensions in youth studies. These tensions are between writers engaging in the ‘structure versus agency’ debate that is mapped onto the ‘culture versus transitions’ binary. We consider the case for adopting a ‘middle-ground’ represented by Bourdieu’s writings. We argue that many in youth studies work from an unacknowledged substantialist tradition, which is contra to Bourdieu's relational perspective. The result includes misunderstandings of Bourdieu's thinking and expectations of his work, for example, that it can pass certain empirical tests. We argue that if Bourdieu's relational perspective is to be translated into youth studies, we will need a more determined effort to understand that perspective first.     

Evaluating paired categorical data when the pairing is lost

We encountered a problem in which a study's experimental design called for the use of paired data, but the pairing between subjects had been lost during the data collection procedure. Thus we were presented with a data set consisting of pre and post responses but with no way of determining the dependencies between our observed pre and post values. The aim of the study was to assess whether an intervention called Self-Revelatory Performance had an impact on participant's perceptions of Alzheimer's disease. The participant's responses were measured on an Affect grid before the intervention and on a separate grid after. To address the underlying question in light of the lost pairing we utilized a modified bootstrap approach to create a null hypothesized distribution for our test statistic, which was the distance between the two Affect Grids' Centers of Mass. Using this approach we were able to reject our null hypothesis and conclude that there was evidence the intervention influenced perceptions about the disease.