Attention to Rural Populations in Social Work's Scholarly Journals

ABSTRACT

Rural populations should be considered a vulnerable group within social work's social justice framework. However, the degree to which social work research and scholarship engage with questions of significance to underserved rural populations remains unknown. This study sought to determine how many articles in highly ranked social work journals give prominent attention to rural populations and issues. A search of the highly ranked social work journals selected from the Journal Citation Reports for the Social Sciences found only 71 articles that explicitly focus on rural populations among a total of 3,004 peer-reviewed articles in 14 top social work journals during the years 2004 through 2008. Possible reasons for the paucity of rural-focused articles within social work journals are posited. We discuss the relative contributions of these journals to development of a comprehensive and useful knowledge base within social work for addressing the needs of rural issues. Future recommendations are made for expanding attention to scholarship in this area.     

Aggressive and Prosocial Peer Group Functioning: Effects on Children's Social,School, and Psychological Adjustment

This study examined the effects of aggressive and prosocial contexts of peer groups on children's socioemotional and school adjustment. Data on informal peer groups, social functioning, and different aspects of adjustment were collected from multiple sources in a sample of elementary school children (149 boys, 181 girls; M age = 10 years). Multilevel analyses indicated that group aggressive and prosocial orientations made direct contributions to children's social, school, and psychological functioning. Group contexts also moderated the individual‐level relations between social behavior and self‐perceptions; prosocial behavior was associated with social or scholastic self‐perceptions more evidently in low prosocial and high aggressive groups. The results suggest that the peer group is an important context for children's performance and adjustment in various domains.     

Lab to life: impression management effectiveness and behaviors

ABSTRACT

Studies assigning impression goals to achieve in the laboratory typically assume their results translate to social success outside. To test this, 156 participants interacted with a confederate, first with no goal (baseline) and then with a goal (post-goal). Goals were to appear likeable, intelligent, likeable and intelligent, or no goal (Control). Up to 10 friends provided ratings of participants. According to video perceivers, participants achieved their goals on average (relative to Control). Confident-type behaviors mediated Likeability condition assignment (relative to Control) and post-goal likeability, and less smiling/laughing mediated Intelligence condition assignment (relative to Control) and post-goal intelligence. Post-goal perceiver ratings (controlling for baseline) correlated with self-rated and friend-rated social life outcomes, suggesting laboratory impression success translates to outside social success.     

A poor cotton weyver: Poverty and the cotton famine in Clitheroe

The American Civil War had dramatic consequences for 500,000 Lancashire factory operatives who relied on supplies of cotton from America for their livelihoods. This study, concentrating on the small town of Clitheroe, investigates the responses of the Poor Law Board of Guardians, the charitable Relief Committee, local employers and the operatives themselves to this crisis and the deprivation that ensued. Using parliamentary papers, local newspaper reports, guardian Minutes Books and diaries kept by a prominent mill owner and one of his employees, the article questions the picture painted at the time and by later historians of a benevolent paternalism. It argues that relief was slow and strictly conditional. The employers' aim throughout was to take advantage of the economic situation and to maintain a submissive workforce. The cotton operatives found themselves at the mercy of the economic situation. Although praised for their quiet endurance, they protested at their treatment and accepted relief only grudgingly.     

At home with the young homeless

This paper considers ethnographic investigation 'at home' in reference, in part, to research carried out into youth homelessness in Britain. Relations of distance and familiarity in the field, and the notion of the ethnographer as stranger, are discussed so as to advance an understanding of the purpose and practice of participant observation. The paper explores fieldwork relations in the context of urban and social exploration, and also with reference to ethnographic research with young people and/or children. In conclusion, the paper argues for a recognition of difference and distance in fieldwork, not simply as obstacles to be somehow overcome but as something inevitable and necessary to the insights that fieldwork affords.