What We Are Talking About When We Talk About Social Media: A Framework for Study

Social media continues to grow as a focus of social, organizational, and scholarly interest, yet there is little agreement as to what constitutes social media and how it can be effectively analyzed. We review various definitions of social media and note that much of the confusion regarding social media comes from conflation between social media types, platforms, and activities. To facilitate investigations of social media, we debunk common social media myths and review the relationship between social media and several prominent sociological concerns. We conclude by reflecting on directions for future research on social media.     

The Evolution of Welfare Reform: Policy Changes and Current Knowledge

Welfare reform has had dramatic repercussions for millions of adults andchildren in the country. So far, the results of the "naturalexperiment" of welfare reform have shown both benefits and problems. Although welfare reform became law in 1996, there have been legislativerevisions and other policy changes aimed at making the law moreeffective and less punitive. The latest research indicates that welfare reform has had a major impact on the number of people who are receiving welfarebenefits but not on the income of former welfare recipients. Research also suggests that there are families who are suffering as a result of welfare reform. In this article, I discuss how welfare reform has evolved and theimplications for policy changes in the future.     

Exploring the Transferability of Competency-Based Education Model to Social Work Education in Vietnam

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam (hereafter Vietnam) has made extraordinary strides in terms of economic progress during the past two decades. Such rapid economic change has also created many social problems such as poverty, family abuse, substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, and mental health problems. Vietnam has taken steps to develop workforce capacity to ameliorate such challenges by investing in social work educational programs, including participation in an international collaborative initiative, the Social Work Education Enhancement Program (SWEEP). This article describes the procedures and process of the initial stage of the development of a competency-based social work curriculum in Vietnam through SWEEP. More specifically, this paper presents the following collaborative strategies between partners in Vietnam and the SWEEP team in the United States: conducting a needs assessment; providing trainings on competency-based education (CBE) to the partners in Vietnam; and receiving feedback from the partners to grasp the challenges at the early stage of development of CBE in Vietnam. While this article focuses on Vietnam, the SWEEP project can be a reference from which to develop social work education in other countries in regard to global collaboration for development of social work curriculum based on the CBE model.     

Mexican-American families: A psychoeducational approach for addressing chemical dependency and codependency

Chemical dependency and codependency are often referred to as family problems, and the ways in which families frame these problems may be influenced by their ethnic and cultural background. Increased efforts are being made to help families understand the problems that arise from alcohol and other drug abuse by utilizing approaches that take into consideration their unique cultural aspects. This article reviews some of the ways in which Mexican-American families, in particular, may view chemical dependency and codependency. More importantly, it describes the cultural adaptation of a psychoeducational program to help. Mexican-American parents, primarily mothers whose children are drug involved or who are considered to be at risk for drug use, better address these problems.     

Group Process in a Women's Career Intervention

This study explored women's experiences of group process in a career planning intervention, and the relationship of those experiences to vocational maturity. We used goal instability as the dependent variable to describe the psychological states and needs of career-undecided women (n = 99), and we used Yalom's model of group process to identify group process factors and their influence on levels of goal instability at posttest and follow-up interviews 2 months later. Results indicated that women clients, similar to other counseling clients, highly valued both cognitive and affective components of group process in career counseling groups.     

Detention in South Africa: A woman’s experience

From the bookLives of Courage: Women for a New South Africa, by Diana E.H. Russell, copyright ? 1988 by Diana E.H. Russell, to be published in the fall of 1989 by Basic Books, Inc.     

Intransitivities in multidimensional spatial voting: period three implies chaos

It is well known that multidimensional spatial voting can involve intransitivity and cycles, resulting in outcomes anywhere in the policy space. These results are typically referred to as the chaos theorems. In this paper, I show that the connection between non-equilibrium spatial voting and chaos is not merely semantic, but is theoretic. Using symbolic dynamics, I show that if a three-cycle intransitivity among social choices exists, then cycles of all lengths greater than three are possible. This result is then used to establish the three conditions of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, topological transitivity, and dense periodic points, demonstrating the formal connection between multidimensional spatial voting and chaotic nonlinear dynamics.