The Role of Supervision in Professional Development of Social Work Specialists

The professionals use social services supervision as an educational and administrative process, meant to support. Supervision is a relatively new field introduced in the Romanian social welfare institutions. The article approaches the role of supervision in the process of professional development of social workers, following a research based on Grounded theory. We conducted this research into an elite NGO, in the North-Eastern Romania, in the domain of child protection. Supervision is a social practice based on the relationship between a person with extensive professional experience and a professional effectively involved in case management. Supervision is seen as a prerequisite to quality social services organization. Effectiveness of the supervision process may be an indicator of the quality of social work practice in an organization. The data were collected through interviews of participants in the research. The interviewed subjects operate with a definition of the supervision as being a practice based on individual or group interview, formal or informal, consisting in a series of specific phases (initial, development, end). Supervision involves the establishment of professional relationships between the participants and the quality of services and training received. This definition is partially different from those in the literature.     

Cluster‐Specific Variable Selection for Product Partition Models

We propose a random partition model that implements prediction with many candidate covariates and interactions. The model is based on a modified product partition model that includes a regression on covariates by favouring homogeneous clusters in terms of these covariates. Additionally, the model allows for a cluster‐specific choice of the covariates that are included in this evaluation of homogeneity. The variable selection is implemented by introducing a set of cluster‐specific latent indicators that include or exclude covariates. The proposed model is motivated by an application to predicting mortality in an intensive care unit in Lisboa, Portugal.     

Inequality in the “Cradle of Liberty”: Race/Ethnicity and Wealth in Greater Boston

New data collected for the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area provide detailed information on financial assets that allow analysis to extend beyond the traditional black–white divide. Targeting US-born blacks, Caribbean blacks, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other Hispanics, findings from the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color survey underscore the large racial and ethnic disparities in financial wealth, even after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic status. Further, some notable differences between Boston’s communities of color highlight the importance of detailed analyses for research on the racial wealth gap. In particular, among non-white communities Dominicans report comparatively low asset and high debt amounts, while Caribbean blacks report relatively higher levels of wealth. Altogether, these findings point to the need for wealth building opportunities in communities of color and further investigation of the causes and consequences of financial disparities between groups of color disaggregated by specific ancestral origin.     

Evaluating the Move to a Linear Tax System in Germany and Other European Countries

This paper proposes a comparison of the results of tax policy analysis obtained on the basis of unitary and collective representations of the household. We first generate labour supplies consistent with the collective rationality, by use of a model calibrated on microdata as described in Vermeulen et al. [Collective Models of Household Labor Supply with Nonconvex Budget Sets and Nonparticipation: A Calibration Approach (2006)]. A unitary model is then estimated on these collective data and unitary and collective responses to a tax reform are compared. We focus on the introduction of linear taxation in Germany. The exercise is replicated for other European countries and other topical reforms. Distortions due to the use of a unitary model turn out to be important in predicting labour supply adjustments, in the design of tax revenue neutral reforms, and in predicting a reform’s welfare implications.

A Response to Commentary on Faust,Bridges, and Ahern's (2009) “Methods for the Identification of Sexually Abused Children”

With every Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that has been published, there has been controversy within controversy; however, what appears to be lacking is the importance of truly understanding what, why, and how the changes impact the community at large. Issues such as homosexuality, the five axial diagnostic system, and transitioning from a medical model to a biopsychosocial model have been hot topics that have led clinicians to challenge the reliability and validity of the manual throughout history. As clinicians and medical professionals, it is important to objectively look at the manual and become educated on how and why these changes exist. With that being said, this commentary aims to challenge the article “Commentary: Problems with the Sexual Disorders Sections of DSM-5” by Colin A. Ross (2015). The structure of this commentary purposefully mirrors the structure of the commentary that it is challenging.     

Infants’ Style of Emotion Regulation with Their Mothers and Fathers: Concordance between Parents and the Contribution of Father–Infant Interaction Quality

The concordance between infants’ emotion regulation styles with different partners has not been consistently analysed nor have the relational correlates of such potential across‐partners similarities. We explored these issues by assessing 10‐month‐olds’ (59.6 percent boys) emotion regulation styles separately with mother and father and by evaluating mother–infant and father–infant interaction quality. The sample consisted of 50 low‐risk families. Two home visits were conducted and similar procedures were adopted for each visit. Parent–infant interaction quality was assessed during daily routines and during free play; both parents independently completed a temperament questionnaire. Infant emotion regulation was assessed in a semi‐structured problem‐solving task: adaptive vs. maladaptive (under and over‐regulation) styles. As predicted, infants’ emotion regulation with their mothers and fathers were related. However, only father–infant interaction quality predicted infants’ emotion regulation concordance: lower interaction quality was associated with maladaptive concordance compared with non‐concordance and higher interaction quality was associated with adaptive concordance compared with non‐concordance. Our results support the claim that by the end of the first year of life, infants use similar emotion regulation styles with mother and father and point to father–infant interaction as an important correlate of emotion regulation across‐parents.     

Lean-healthcare approach to reduce costs in a sterilization plant based on surgical tray rationalization

Abstract

Sterilization plants process all reusable materials used in hospitals during different stages of healthcare provision. Most items sterilized come from the surgical theater in the form of individual instruments, linen and surgical trays. Reducing the number of instruments in trays impacts on the performance of the sterilization process. Here, we propose a three-phase method, based on lean healthcare principles, cluster analysis and kaizen groups of experts to rationalize surgical trays, reducing sterilization processing costs. We innovate by proposing a strategy to approach tray rationalization prioritizing surgical specialties that are both complex and frequent, and by using group technology to cluster surgical trays expediting expert analyses carried out by kaizen groups. Our propositions were tested in a high complexity, tertiary care hospital, covering 12 surgical specialties, reducing the number of instruments by average 9.75%, and the time-to-assemble trays by average 9.68%, obtaining annual savings of US$285.756,00 in sterilization processing costs.     

"Fundamental causes" of social inequalities in mortality: a test of the theory

Medicine and epidemiology currently dominate the study of the strong association between socioeconomic status and mortality. Socioeconomic status typically is viewed as a causally irrelevant "confounding variable" or as a less critical variable marking only the beginning of a causal chain in which intervening risk factors are given prominence. Yet the association between socioeconomic status and mortality has persisted despite radical changes in the diseases and risk factors that are presumed to explain it. This suggests that the effect of socioeconomic status on mortality essentially cannot be understood by reductive explanations that focus on current mechanisms. Accordingly, Link and Phelan (1995) proposed that socioeconomic status is a "fundamental cause" of mortality disparities-that socioeconomic disparities endure despite changing mechanisms because socioeconomic status embodies an array of resources, such as money, knowledge, prestige, power, and beneficial social connections, that protect health no matter what mechanisms are relevant at any given time. We identified a situation in which resources should be less helpful in prolonging life, and derived the following prediction from the theory: For less preventable causes of death (for which we know little about prevention or treatment), socioeconomic status will be less strongly associated with mortality than for more preventable causes. We tested this hypothesis with the National Longitudinal Mortality Study, which followed Current Population Survey respondents (N = 370,930) for mortality for nine years. Our hypothesis was supported, lending support to the theory of fundamental causes and more generally to the importance of a sociological approach to the study of socioeconomic disparities in mortality.     

Wage Mobility in Israel: The Effect of Sectoral Concentration

Using a unique eight-year data set, merging population census and national insurance data, the paper examines and compares patterns of wage mobility in Israel. First, the public and the private sectors are compared. Second, within each of these sectors, a distinction is made between sub-sector groupings that exhibit a high level of concentration and those that are more diffuse and unregulated. Based on alternative measures of wage mobility, the central finding of the paper is that the extent of wage mobility in a given economic sector is negatively related to the degree of concentration in that sector.