The Role of Religiosity for Formal and Informal Volunteering in the Netherlands

This paper deals with the question: To what extent do individual religious characteristics, in addition to collective religious characteristics, contribute to the explanation of formal and informal volunteering in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 21st century? To answer this research question, we used the SOCON 2005–2006 dataset. Our main finding concerns informal volunteering: we found that spirituality increases the likelihood of informal volunteering, implying that openness to other people’s needs increases the likelihood of the actual provision of help. There are no other aspects of religiosity that are related to informal volunteering. With regard to formal volunteering we found that, in line with previous research, religious attendance is related positively to formal volunteering, religious as well as secular volunteering, which can be regarded as support for the proposition that religious involvement is important for norm conformity. Further, having a more religious worldview decreases the likelihood of formal volunteering which might show that those with a strong religious worldview are more concerned with the ‘otherworldly’ and less so with what they do in this world. We found no influence of individual religious characteristics on formal volunteering. These results confirm the idea that integration into a religious community plays quite a large role in explaining formal volunteering. Informal volunteering, however, seems to be independent of social networks: it rather depends on individual motivation.     

How Billionaires Explain Their Philanthropy: A Mixed-Method Analysis of the Giving Pledge Letters

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This study investigates a discourse about billionaire philanthropy established in letters submitted by 187 of 209...     

“Crowding in” or “crowding out”? An examination of the impact of the welfare state on generalized social trust

Generalized social trust is correlated with increased levels of civic engagement, lower crime rates, and greater economic growth. Many scholars believe that equality provides the conditions in which social trust can flourish. Thus, welfare programs might be one way to generate social trust. However, the relationship between social spending and trust is contested: Some argue it is negative, while others argue it is positive. This study examined the effects of total social welfare expenditures on social trust in 18 OECD countries, holding constant individual characteristics, country characteristics, and country and year effects. Fixed effects analyses indicate that every additional percent of gross domestic product spent on social expenditures 5 years prior is associated with a 4.7 percent increased likelihood that respondents of that country will endorse trusting other people. Further testing for reverse causality found no significant association between trust and later social expenditures, supporting the claim that expenditures drive trust instead of the reverse.     

Intensive family preservation services in Flanders: an outcome study

Set up as a one-group pre-test–post-test follow-up design, this study examines the outcomes of intensive family preservation services (IFPS) in Flanders addressing the following research questions: Does IFPS make a significant difference concerning (1) the interaction between parent and child? (2) social support as experienced by the parent? (3) stress and empowerment of the parent? and (4) the strengths and difficulties of the minor? Families seem to indicate that their family situation is more manageable, although still, professional help is needed. Parents feel more resilient about the situation and indicate that they can get along with their child better than before the crisis intervention. Parents still feel uncertain about the future and about their role as a parent. There seems to be no indications that their level and quality of social contacts have changed. Further research is suggested to provide more in-depth information about the conditions associated with processes of change during an IFPS intervention.     

Reliability of Information Aggregation with Regional Biases: A Note

Is there a rationale for an electoral college system or do these voting systems always waste useful information? This paper studies this question in a setup in which voting is supposed to aggregate decentralized information about individual preferences for two candidates. Individual perceptions may be affected by regional information. When such regional information plays a major role, an electoral college system may be superior to simple majority voting.     

Social work programmes in the social democratic welfare regime

In this article we examine the emergence of social worker training in the Nordic countries and discuss the possible effects that the social democratic welfare regime has had on such training. We also discuss the development in recent decades of the academisation of the training and the establishment of social work as a subject of research and teaching. The early history of social worker education is based on archival material, national inquiries and secondary sources. Our presentation of the recent history of social work education is based on the responses to a questionnaire sent to teachers of social work in 33 Nordic social work programmes, and on a survey of course syllabi and prospectuses. It is also based on the reading lists for the social work courses in these programmes.     

Model uncertainty and variable selection in Bayesian lasso regression

While Bayesian analogues of lasso regression have become popular, comparatively little has been said about formal treatments of model uncertainty in such settings. This paper describes methods that can be used to evaluate the posterior distribution over the space of all possible regression models for Bayesian lasso regression. Access to the model space posterior distribution is necessary if model-averaged inference—e.g., model-averaged prediction and calculation of posterior variable inclusion probabilities—is desired. The key element of all such inference is the ability to evaluate the marginal likelihood of the data under a given regression model, which has so far proved difficult for the Bayesian lasso. This paper describes how the marginal likelihood can be accurately computed when the number of predictors in the model is not too large, allowing for model space enumeration when the total number of possible predictors is modest. In cases where the total number of possible predictors is large, a simple Markov chain Monte Carlo approach for sampling the model space posterior is provided. This Gibbs sampling approach is similar in spirit to the stochastic search variable selection methods that have become one of the main tools for addressing Bayesian regression model uncertainty, and the adaption of these methods to the Bayesian lasso is shown to be straightforward.     

‘I Just Don't Agree’: A Voice-Oriented Analysis of An IFPS Case of Alleged Child Maltreatment

In contrast to the many outcome studies of Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS), little is known about the underlying personal and relational dynamics of family crisis interventions. This article focuses on the core evolving dynamics of the changing self-presentations of a parent involved in an intensive home-based family preservation case of alleged child maltreatment. Three key family intervention sessions were videotaped and transcribed including both verbal and nonverbal behavior. The Listening Guide Method – a theoretically flexible, qualitative, relationally oriented method of in-depth interpretative analysis – served as our guide for this case analysis. In the processes of change toward a jointly constructed meaningful narrative on responsibility and self-care, two key elements emerged as playing a pivotal role: (1) the momentum of a potential referral of children to out-of-home care that precedes the start of an IFPS intervention and (2) the rhizomatic or root-like intertwinement of the voices of both parent and therapist with respect to the rationale for any involvement of society in the family. We argue that discourses on imminent placement in the context of family preservation deserve a genuine and valuable position in the initial discourse of a family therapist when entering a family in the context of crisis intervention. Both in understanding and driving any processes of change, we may need to reconsider our own willingness to step into the blending interplay of discourse and counter-discourse with our clients on the subject of our often drastic intervention. Consequently, we may read this narrative analysis as an invitation to reflect on the conceptualization of ‘client readiness’ in psychotherapy and to shift our thinking on preconditions for therapy from a client's readiness toward a therapist's attentiveness to listen.