Becoming a Social Worker: Chris' Account

Chris Murray, a young African-American male, admitted on a scholarship to a social work masters program, reflexively explores his negotiation of difference in dialogue with an Australian female social work educator twice his age. Standpoint theory and the concept of intersectionality are used to frame Chris' experiences at a private northeast US university after achieving an undergraduate degree in his southern home state. His initial access to university came through military service. Chris was interviewed by the author as part of her international study project examining social work students' experience of diversity in the classroom. The open-ended interview was designed to allow self-identity of difference. Chris ethnographically recounts to a stranger a subjectivity statement of who he is in relation to studying social work. Chris' story works the hyphen between the binary of subjectivity and objectivity through the particulars of his personal history and world-view and his expectation that I as a social work educator share his seeking of social justice. His detailing of what moved him to become a social worker and contextual complexities negotiated along the way connect to wider discourses on how agency and structure play out in lived experience in seeking social justice.     

Family problem solving: A case study

Abstract

Working with the families of young offenders may often be the best method of helping those young offenders to change. Sometimes, however, social workers and others who work with young offenders are reluctant to work with family groups because they may feel that they lack skills in family counselling. This article presents a case study which illustrates a family counselling intervention. The case study uses Family Problem Solving, a method which involves the adaptation of mainstream social work skills to work with families. It is anticipated that the article might be of interest to social workers who work with families but who feel apprehensive about counselling family groups.     

Book Reviews

Abstract

This paper explores the emergence of the social work profession in Western Australia from beginnings in the 1920s through to 1970 when the first local graduates gained employment. The authors illustrate how WA's history both connects with and diverges from patterns of the profession's development in more populous states, througt, the use of interviews conducted with pioneering social workers These oral histories illuminate how gender, class and other markings of privilege and power framed, and were framed by, the education, practice, sites of practice and career paths of social workers in the early years. Two interacting themes identified in this research were restricted employment possibilities for social workers in the State and a lack of locally available professional education until the mining boom of the sixties. The paper concludes by listing six lessons for current practitioners: the transcendent importance of reading contexts; identifying and developing relevant sites of practice; maintaining flexible boundaries of professional practice; being able to articulate a dynamic value base to drive practice; the importance of practitioners in shaping education, and continuing practitioner reflexivity.     

Kinship structures and survival: maternal mortality on the Croatian-Bosnian border 1750-1898

This is an analysis of maternal survival of up to 13,202 mothers following 56,546 births in south central Slavonia (Croatia) in the period 1714-1898, using automated family reconstitution of 23,307 marriages, 112,181 baptisms, and 94,077 burials from seven contiguous Catholic parishes. Physiological factors have the effects commonly expected. Maternal risk is increased by general economic and social conditions that are plausibly related to withdrawal of men's labour from family farming as a result of military mobilizations and growing levels of wage labour. Risk is decreased by membership in large patriarchal kin groups, but is increased by both the presence of classic rivals (husband's brothers' wives) and being married to a husband junior among his brothers. The analysis demonstrates the sensitivity of maternal survival to macrolevel changes in such factors as the collapse of feudalism, military involvement, economic stagnation, and monetization, as well as to microeconomic and micropolitical factors at the household and local kin-group level.     

The association of maternal depressive symptoms with child externalizing problems: the role of maternal support following child sexual abuse

This study examines the role of abuse-specific maternal support in the association between parent depressive symptoms and child externalizing problems in a sample of children with a history of sexual abuse. In total, 106 mother-child dyads were studied. The association between maternal depressive symptoms and child delinquency behaviors was found to partially operate through abuse-specific maternal support, which was assessed via parent report. Implications of the findings for parenting programs are discussed, and future research directions are considered.     

A systematic review of evidence-based interventions for students with challenging behaviors in school settings

The author's systematic review of 2,294 articles from 10 journals in the fields of education, special education, school social work, school psychology, and school counseling identified 42 articles meeting search criteria of addressing evidence-based interventions for students with challenging behaviors in school settings. Interventions were considered evidence-based if they were (a) manualized or structured to facilitate replication; (b) evaluated with an experimental design; and (c) demonstrated to be effective. Current practices available to address students who require evidence-based interventions for challenging behaviors are summarized. Suggestions for intervention development to address the needs of students with difficult behaviors are offered.