The Coordination of Welfare and Health Services in Australia

The report of the Task Force on Coordination in Welfare and Health (Bailey Report) is the most important single report on the organization of health and welfare services since the first Medibank Green Paper. It provides for the collapsing of a plethora of categorical grants into four broad ‘programme grants’. The effects of this report will be felt by most health and welfare organizations. It is the purpose of the article to review the main recommendations of the Task Force and of the related Report from the Committee on the Aged and the Infirm.     

Suzi and Mr. S.: Gender role stereotyping in social workers' court reports in custody and access cases.

This paper analyzes the “gender strategies” of a sample of Israeli women social workers as evidenced in the recommendations that they write for the courts on custody and visiting rights for divorcing couples. Textual analysis of these reports reveals what Hochchild terms a “traditional gender strategy,” manifested in a consistent pattern of gender stereotyping. There are clear differences in the way the social workers present the husband and wife as persons, both separately and in relation to one another, and in the roles that they expect them to fulfill, with the man being assigned the provider role and the woman the parent role. Even the way they collect information about the two parents' relationships with their children is different. The paper concludes with a discussion of the practical implications of the findings.     

Consistency and Change in Children's Tattling on their Siblings: Children's Perspectives on the Moral Rules and Procedures of Family Life

Children's tattling on their siblings was observed in 39 families when children were 2- and 4- and 4- and 6-years of age. Tattling was more frequent among older siblings, and increased across time, despite a corresponding decrease in sibling transgressions against one another and an increase in parents' negative reactions to tattling. Tattling was largely truthful, implicit in form, and more likely to concern transgressions of what parents also regarded as more important standards. Among 4- and 6-year-olds, tattling was related to children's negative behaviour to one another and equally likely when children faced ongoing conflict issues and when they merely wished to inform parents of sibling wrongdoing. Parents generally allowed their children to tattle on one another, rarely reprimanded tattlers, but responded to the information contained in the tattlers' reports. The parents' responses were related to the quality of their children's tattling, but the children's tattling was unrelated to the likelihood that parents would react either positively or negatively to it. Results are discussed in terms of the place of tattling within the family system, with emphasis on the children's understanding of the implications of their parents' involvement in their own disputes.     

From the discourse of the other to the other discourse: stakeholder-based models of evaluation and the human side of social welfare

Stakeholder-based evaluation models, like predecessor models, respond to issues and concerns identified as evaluation practice has matured. The characteristics of such models are outlined, and the relationships between stakeholder models, social work values, liberal political goals, and feminist theorizing are explored.     

Contingent Eclecticism

For more than a century, methodological diversity within the social sciences has been the source of recurrent paradigm wars, and no obvious winner seems to be in sight. The aim of this article is to explore the contingencies underlying this diversity. It is argued that the shared condition of complexity forces us to adopt a pragmatic perspective from which even relevant ontological and epistemological assumptions should be thought of as contextual rather than absolute. In particular, the extent to which social causality is perceived as stable and universal vs. dynamic and contextual and the extent to which research‐related reflexivity is an issue appear to set apart the different approaches. Towards the end of the article examples of methodological fit and misfit are provided to illustrate the relevancy of the “contingent eclecticism” observed in practice.