A Question of Friendship: Community Care and the Relationships of People with Learning Difficulties

There is evidence that a number of people with learning difficulties living in the community do not enjoy a range of satisfactory social relationships. This paper will examine the way that the issue of the apparent loneliness of people with learning difficulties has been approached in the community care literature. I will argue that there is a clear assumption in much of the literature that friendships between disabled and non-disabled people are of greater value than those relationships between disabled people. The low value accorded to friendships between disabled people is very damaging to their individual self-esteem, as well as to the possibility of political action based on a sense of solidarity. The paper will point also to the constraints that many people with learning difficulties face which render it difficult for them to form friendships and, therefore, reinforce their isolation.     

Disentangling the sources of variation in the survival of the European dipper

The population growth rate of the European dipper has been shown to decrease with winter temperature and population size. We examine here the demographic mechanism for this effect by analysing how these factors affect the survival rate. Using more than 20 years of capture-mark-recapture data (1974-1997) based on more than 4000 marked individuals, we perform analyses using open capture-mark-recapture models. This allowed us to estimate the annual apparent survival rates (probability of surviving and staying on the study site from one year to the next one) and the recapture probabilities. We partitioned the variance of the apparent survival rates into sampling variance and process variance using random effects models, and investigated which variables best accounted for temporal process variation. Adult males and females had similar apparent survival rates, with an average of 0.52 and a coefficient of variation of 40%. Chick apparent survival was lower, averaging 0.06 with a coefficient of variation of 42%. Eighty percent of the variance in apparent survival rates was explained by winter temperature and population size for adults and 48% by winter temperature for chicks. The process variance outweighed the sampling variance both for chick and adult survival rates, which explained that shrunk estimates obtained under random effects models were close to MLE estimates. A large proportion of the annual variation in the apparent survival rate of chicks appears to be explained by inter-year differences in dispersal rates.     

Is Unemployment a Health Hazard? Health-related behaviours of a sample of unemployed Sydney youth in 1980

A self-report questionnaire, tapping a variety of areas of health-related behaviours, was administered individually to a hundred young men and women aged between 15 and 24 years, solicited outside the Commonwealth Employment Service Office in Liverpool, New South Wales, in August 1980, all of whom described themselves as having been continuously unemployed for at least four weeks up to the time of interview. The group was divided at its approximate median of five months in terms of duration of current period of unemployment, and the short-term and long-term unemployed groups thus derived were contrasted on all variables. The resultant analysis showed the total long-term unemployed group to be characterized by heavier smoking, reduced participation in sport, and, though not statistically significant, increased drug usage, relative to the short-term group. Within the long-term group, females were drinking more, and visiting the doctor more, than their short-term peers; males were changing their drinking, friendship, eating and sleeping habits in directions indicative of loss of social contact.     

Measuring the impact of child mortality on fertility: A methodological note

Recent studies of the impact of child mortality on children ever born have used the “replacement factor” to measure mortality. When microlevel data are used, however, use of the replacement factor (or other variables which are nonlinear in the family’s experienced child mortality rate) yields biased coefficients. An alternative model suggests a sequential, rather than a static, decision-making process to relate the decision to have an additional child to the reproductive experience to date. In this case, unbiased coefficients are obtained if the functional form is correctly specified. In the absence of a priori knowledge of the functional form, it is difficult to untangle true effects from spurious ones.     

Joined-Up Government for Welfare Administration Reform in Norway

One of the largest public sector reforms in Norway is the welfare administrative reform of 2005. The aims are to get passive beneficiaries back into work and to make the administration more user-friendly, holistic and efficient. The aims are to be achieved by increasing the administration’s capacity to address “wicked issues” by cutting across existing policy fields and administrative levels. This joined-up-government approach poses three main challenges: 1) to get a merged central government agency to work, 2) to establish constructive cooperation between the central and local authorities and 3) to coordinate front-line services with user-oriented employment and welfare offices. The article shows that increasing the capacity of government to cut across existing policy fields and handle transboundary wicked issues are still struggling to be implemented. Cooperation between sectors is however easier to achieve than cooperation between levels. The joined-up-government-approach also tends to make accountability relations more ambiguous.     

Mandatory Reporting and Child Exposure to Domestic Violence: Issues Regarding the Therapeutic Alliance with Couples

Some child welfare legislation have recently expanded the definition of ‘a child in need of protection’ to include child exposure to intimate partner violence. Such legislation places clinicians in the challenging position of determining whether a situation falls under their duty to report. The current paper examines a case example in which there was child exposed to intimate partner violence, the clinician made a report to child welfare authorities and attempted to maintain the therapeutic alliance with the couple in treatment. The couple viewed contacting child welfare authorities as a crisis situation both in their marriage and in their family. Practice principles for clinicians are suggested.     

The client as learner and the clinician as teacher: Working with an educational lens

This article highlights the social worker's role as educator and how that role relates to clinical practice. The educational component of practice is not grounded in a substantial theoretical, research, or practice literature, and yet teaching is a nascent role for most clinicians. For the most part, the educational aspects of clinical practice have languished, at least from a theoretical perspective, in the shadow of therapy. In this paper we advocate for developing and articulating the clinician/teacher role in order to support effective use of the learning relationship as a dynamic and necessary means for assisting clients in managing life transitions, developmental challenges, and adversity. We propose the use of an educational lens derived from the fields of education, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, to provide perspective from which the client is viewed as learner, and the client‐work relationship is seen as an educational transaction. We highlight the transformative power of educational transactions that we think are as significant as primary caregiving, and also provide a working definition of education as it is used in clinical teaching‐learning relationships. And finally, we elaborate on the range of purposes education may serve in social work practice.     

That Teenage Feeling

This article deconstructs news media representations of two custody abductions that took place in Aotearoa New Zealand in the mid-2000s. In the first case, the father abducted his five-month-old daughter; in the second case, the mother was held responsible for the abduction of her six-year-old son even though he was in the presence of his maternal grandfather. The analysis demonstrates that the media's pejorative construction of the mothers at the center of both cases was facilitated by a number of significant gaps and silences in the narration of the abductions. These silences, in lending support to a fathers' rights construction of custody disputes in which mothers are to blame for dispossessing fathers of their children, reveal the media's reliance on pro-father discourses, particularly fathers' rights discourse.     

The impact of governmental assistance on insurance demand under ambiguity: a theoretical model and an experimental test

This article deals with the impact of governmental assistance on insurance demand under ambiguity, i.e., in situations where probabilities are uncertain. First, using a model of insurance demand under ambiguity, we derive theoretical predictions about the impact of several governmental assistance programmes on optimal insurance demand. For example, governmental assistance through a fixed public support scheme implies that partial insurance is always optimal under fair insurance with ambiguity. Second, we present the results of an experiment designed to test these predictions. We find support for several of our theoretical predictions. For example, the presence of governmental assistance through a fixed public support scheme decreases individuals’ willingness to pay to be fully insured. Finally, we compare these results with those obtained for a risk situation. We find that, regardless of the form of governmental assistance, participants in the ambiguity context are consistently willing to pay more to be fully insured than participants in the risk situation.