An Evaluation of the Scholarly Productivity of Doctoral Graduates

Scholarly publication is becoming increasingly important in social work. Not only does publication reflect the knowledge development effort of the profession, but it apparently positively affects the careers of the authors. In the current study, the authors evaluated the scholarly productivity of 284 randomly selected doctoral graduates from 30 social work programs. The authors accumulated and aggregated for each program counts of publications appearing in the Source Index of the Social Sciences Citation Index.Findings indicated that the level of article productivity among doctoral graduates was normative. In addition, the productivity of doctoral program faculty was found to be related to the productivity of the program’s doctoral graduates. The authors suggest that perhaps productive faculty provide positive role models to their students; this mentoring relationship contributes to graduate productivity outcomes.     

Race,power and white siege cultures

A group's awareness of its own particular ‘identity (racial, cultural, ethnic, etc.) is heightened when it competes with other groups for power, privilege and resources. It is especially when a group (be it a dominant or subordinate group) perceives its culture threatened that it mobilizes its resources, articulates its beliefs and organizes its followers to assure its cultural survival. When its protective efforts are blocked or stymied, the group is transformed into what Smelser terms a ‘value‐oriented movement’. It becomes a culture under siege, and its development closely follows those characteristics and stages of collective behaviour that Smelser identifies. Continued stress or threats to a siege culture also lead to the transformation of the group's beliefs into what Rokeach identifies as a ‘closed belief system,’ characterized by dogmatic beliefs and, among its members, highly rigid and intolerant forms of behaviour. Where a group's racial beliefs are threatened, the group is readily transformed into a siege culture. This is evident especially in three historical/contemporary cases: White Southerners in the U.S., Afrikaners in South Africa, and White Rhodesians. Their cultural/racial beliefs (based on White superiority and White supremacy) threatened, the three groups became value‐oriented movements, their transformation and characteristics (closely paralleling each other) easily identified in terms of the analyses of Smelser and Rokeach.     

Responding to a Critique of ‘The Interpersonal Process in Generic Social Work’

The Social Workers Oncology Group is a professional support network, which brings together a group of specialist professionals with a unique knowledge about the psychosocial consequences of a cancer disease. The Group provides professional peer support, as well as providing a forum for the utilisation of research programmes and resource development.     

Management of Energy Technology for Sustainability: How to Fund Energy Technology Research and Development

Operations management methods have been applied profitably to a wide range of technology portfolio management problems, but have been slow to be adopted by governments and policy makers. We develop a framework that allows us to apply such techniques to a large and important public policy problem: energy technology R&D portfolio management under climate change. We apply a multi‐model approach, implementing probabilistic data derived from expert elicitations into a novel stochastic programming version of a dynamic integrated assessment model. We note that while the unifying framework we present can be applied to a range of models and data sets, the specific results depend on the data and assumptions used and therefore may not be generalizable. Nevertheless, the results are suggestive, and we find that the optimal technology portfolio for the set of projects considered is fairly robust to different specifications of climate uncertainty, to different policy environments, and to assumptions about the opportunity cost of investing. We also conclude that policy makers would do better to over‐invest in R&D rather than under‐invest. Finally, we show that R&D can play different roles in different types of policy environments, sometimes leading primarily to cost reduction, other times leading to better environmental outcomes.     

Testosterone,alcohol, and civil and rough conflict resolution strategies in lesbian couples

The present study investigated the relations among testosterone level, acute alcohol consumption, and the use of violent (Rough) or non-violent (Civil) conflict resolution strategies in lesbian couples. The participants were 54 lesbian campers at a women's campground or spectators at a gay pride celebration who each provided a saliva sample for testosterone assay and completed a questionnaire. On the questionnaire, participants indicated whether they used Civil or Rough tactics to deal with domestic discord, and whether or not their use of these tactics varied with their use of alcohol. High testosterone women used Rough tactics equally when drinking as when not drinking, while low testosterone women used Rough tactics far more often when drinking than when not drinking. Alcohol appears to release violent tenden- cies in low testosterone women, who are characteristically restrained under sober conditions, but has little effect on high testosterone women.     

A demographic examination of grandparent caregivers in the Census 2000 Supplementary Survey

As part of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, the Census Bureau is required to determine how many grandparents are serving as caregivers to a grandchild. Using data from the Census 2000 Supplementary Survey, this paper presents demographic information on two types of grandparent households, and outlines the challenges associated with use of the new questions about grandparent care developed by the Census Bureau. We compare skipped-generation households, in which a grandparent and grandchild coreside but no parent is present, to three-generation shared-care households in which the grandparent claims primary responsibility for the grandchild. We focus on two geographic regions of the United States, New England and the Deep South, providing the first report on the prevalence and characteristics of these households, and the extent to which these attributes are geographically variable. We estimate that the population of three-generation shared-care families is at least as large as the population ofskipped-generation grandparent care families.We identify a number of differences between skipped-generation and shared-care households, especially with respect to the age of the grandchildren involved and the levels of economic hardship. Significant regional differences are also observed, with grandparent care households of both types being more common in the Deep South than in New England. We conclude that data using these new questions have the potential to greatly enrich our demographic understanding of grandparent households by shedding new light on a type of grandparent care often hidden from analysis: grandparents who are responsible for grandchildren in three-generation households.     

Difficult Data: Boundary Dynamics,Public Engagement and Bridging Technologies in a Science/Policy Controversy

In 2001, the New Zealand Ministry of Health (MoH) contracted the Institute of Environmental Science and Research Ltd. (ESR) to undertake a serum dioxin study to determine exposure (current and historical) to dioxins for residents living in close proximity to the former Ivon Watkins Dow chemical plant in Paritutu, New Plymouth. In the years that the plant had operated, a number of activist groups had organised in the community to ask the government to respond to their concerns about possible exposure and any links to adverse health effects. The members of these groups were angry and frustrated. They distrusted industry and the various government agencies involved, and felt that previous scientific studies had marginalised their concerns. This paper explores the processes that enabled ESR to work with the community to produce a robust scientific study. Key dynamics, lessons, methods and mechanisms critical to the success of this intervention are appraised. This paper offers theoretical reflection on boundary work between science, policy and community and focuses on the challenges in including local knowledge to produce ‘useable knowledge’ in this case.     

Women,Health and Housing Assistance: Implications in an Emerging Era of Housing Provision

Women and the households that they head are over‐represented among the most economically and socially disadvantaged households in Australia. Recent changes in the provision of housing assistance for low income households in Australia have distinct implications for women and this paper examines the implications of these changes. Shifting the emphasis in housing assistance away from publicly provided and rent‐controlled housing to direct subsidisation of rents for private tenants has important, largely negative, consequences for the health, affordability and security of housing for many women. This situation is made worse given the current housing affordability crisis in Australia; a crisis that extends across all private housing tenures.