Community College Programs for the Human Services

A national survey of 2-year human services programs in community colleges revealed the current status of these programs and identified significant trends in areas such as program number, curriculum design, standard-setting mechanisms, student composition and career paths, and faculty affiliation. Of particular interest was the relationship of these programs and their graduates to social work education and the social services job market. Among the principal findings were (a) these programs are in a period of renewed growth and (b) a need and an opportunity exist for the social work profession, particularly social work education, to be constructively involved in this level of education.     

Influence for empirical transforms

Estimation procedures based on certain empirical transforms have been shown to be robust (eg. Paulson and Nicklin, 1983). Here the robustness of such procedures is examined formally using techniques derived from influence theory. Examples are given which demonstrate the easy-to-use nature of these methods. A useful by-product is a simple formula for asymptotic variances.     

Premarital contraception: Research reports and problems

While investigations of the effects of erotic material are badly needed, most studies suffer from serious inadequacies. The problem is largely definitional—to date there has not been agreement on the properties that define sexual stimuli, the nature of sexual arousal, and behavioral, attitudinal or other effects that are supposed to result from exposure to sexual stimuli. This paper focuses on the three major problems which make research especially difficult: (1) the special sensitivity of the area; (2) difficulties in measuring sexual arousal; and (3) problems involving appropriate control groups.     

Measuring the Development of Social Attention Using Free‐Viewing

How do young children direct their attention to other people in the natural world? Although many studies have examined the perception of faces and of goal‐directed actions, relatively little work has focused on what children will look at in complex and unconstrained viewing environments. To address this question, we showed videos of objects, faces, children playing with toys, and complex social scenes to a large sample of infants and toddlers between 3 and 30 months old. We found systematic developmental changes in what children looked at. When viewing faces alone, younger children looked more at eyes and older children more at mouths, especially when the faces were making expressions or talking. In the more complex videos, older children looked more at hands than younger children, especially when the hands were performing actions. Our results suggest that as children develop they become better able to direct their attention to the parts of complex scenes that are most interesting socially.     

British Jewry and the fight against the international white‐slave traffic, 1885–1914

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Jews from eastern and central Europe became involved in the white‐slave traffic, as migratory prostitution was called at the time. Jews in Britain, which was a point of trans‐shipment for the major vice markets in South America and South Africa, helped to lead an organized international movement to defeat the traffic and thereby to deny this issue to anti‐semites.     

Sex Differences in the Relationship between Harsh Discipline and Conduct Problems

Research on sex differences in antisocial behaviour may shed light on the causes of childhood antisocial behaviour. Using a longitudinal design, we tested whether there were sex differences in the amount of harsh discipline children received or in the effect of harsh discipline and whether this accounted for sex differences in later conduct problems. Our sample was a representative, longitudinal sample of 13 830 twins born in England and Wales between 1994 and 1996. Results showed that boys experienced more harsh discipline than girls and that the sex difference in harsh discipline accounted for 10 percent to 20 percent of the sex difference in conduct problems. We found no evidence that harsh discipline had a greater effect on boys vs. girls. We also found evidence of a bidirectional relationship between harsh discipline and child conduct problems. These findings were replicated within families, automatically controlling for between‐families confounding factors.     

Hoarding Cases Involving Older Adults: The Transition From a Private Matter to the Public Sector

Hoarding interventions with older adults require significant resources from multiple public agencies, yet recidivism occurs frequently. To improve services through better coordination, some communities have formed multiagency hoarding teams (MAHT), which include aging services. MAHTs requested this mixed methods study to understand the progression of cases through the public sector. Quantitative data collected on 52 cases involving adults ages 60+ identified steps in this process. Qualitative data collected from MAHT members were the basis for case studies illustrating the progression of cases through the public sector. Findings have implications for social workers involved in local service coordination, training, and policy.     

Effects of urbanism,race, and class on happiness and physical health

The joint effects of urbanism, race, and socioeconomic status on self reported health and happiness are studied. Relationships of “neighborhood fear” and unemployment with health and happiness are also studied within different urban/rural race‐class categories. It is hypothesized that 1) lower socioeconomic status (SES) blacks residing in central cities will report the poorest health and lowest happiness and 2) “neighborhood fear” and unemployment will be most strongly related to health and happiness among central city lower SES blacks. The sample is pooled data from the 1972–1983 National Opinion Research Center (NORC) General Social Surveys. Findings indicate that urbanism has a modest negative relationship to happiness, but low SES urban blacks are not uniquely low in happiness. Contrary to the central city hypothesis, neighborhood fear is most strongly related to health among suburban blacks with less than high school or high school graduation attainment. A relative deprivation explanation is advanced. Unemployment negatively relates to the happiness of blacks and whites in a variety of urban‐SES‐race categories.     

The Use of Adjunct Faculty: An Exploratory Study of Eight Social Work Programs

This pilot study of the practice of employing social work practitioners as adjunct faculty analyzes the results of questionnaires returned from 6 deans/directors, 43 adjunct faculty, and 175 students at 8 U.S. institutions offering BSW and/or MSW programs. The responses covered the teaching effectiveness of adjunct faculty (in 1992–93), their reasons for teaching, the support received from and expectations of the programs, and various pros and cons surrounding their employment. Among the findings: students regard adjunct faculty as somewhat less effective teachers than full-time faculty, but appreciate their expertise on contemporary or specialized practices; administrators appreciate the financial benefits and flexibility associated with adjunct instruction; and the adjuncts themselves appreciate affiliation with academic programs.