Creating trauma-informed child welfare systems using a community assessment process

This article describes a community assessment process designed to evaluate a specific child welfare jurisdiction based on the current definition of trauma-informed child welfare and its essential elements. This process has recently been developed and pilot tested within three diverse child welfare systems in the United States. The purpose of the assessment is to identify strengths and barriers related to trauma and child welfare in each site, to make tailored recommendations to help the sites better understand, and to address the impact of trauma on the families served and on the child welfare system itself. The specific components of the assessment process will be explained, and a summary of some of the findings that were common across sites will be provided. Recommendations for future work will also be discussed.     

Coming of age

Those of us who study aging have the unique opportunity to live their subject matter. Whether we learn any personal lessons is a matter of our own reflectivity, but personal experience can make us far better scholars than can scholarship alone. As one ponders the life course, it is clear that a number of institutional influences, temporal patterning, and unexpected intervening variables are involved in the unfolding of one's life. Life-long institutional memberships furnish social capital that helps establish parameters for our personal experience, for how we view our personal trajectories and for our ability to cope with the aging process itself. But how to come to terms with unexpected occurrences that alter the anticipated futures we had in mind? Do our scholarly efforts and our experience come together in ways that enrich one or the other? These are the questions I explore in this personal essay.     

Should evaluators judge whether services are appropriate?

If an Aid for Dependent Children (AFDC) mother receives a cash reward for helping police apprehend a criminal, she automatically loses part of her children's benefits. Is this appropriate? More central to this article, does an evaluator of the AFDC program have the right to judge whether this is appropriate? Although decision makers' abilities to rectify such situations are increasingly constrained, they clearly need to know about such seemingly inappropriate aspects of services. But should evaluators be a source for this information? Yes — even though there are undeniable risks involved. This article discusses these issues and offers 18 suggestions for gathering and presenting information on appropriateness.     

Deregulation and labor earnings

Cross-sectional data drawn from the March CPS from 1968 to 1988 and the May CPS from 1973 to 1988 are used to estimate the impact of deregulation on labor earnings in trucking, telephones, bus transportation, airlines, and railroads. Both average differentials and union-nonunion differentials are computed. Contrary to popular belief, deregulation does not reduce earnings in many of these industries. Implications for theories of regulatory impact are discussed.     

Maternal Sensitivity and Child Responsiveness: Associations with Social Context,Maternal Characteristics,and Child Characteristics in a Multivariate Analysis

This study examined unique associations of multiple distal context variables (family socioeconomic status [SES], maternal employment, and paternal parenting) and proximal maternal (personality, intelligence, and knowledge; behavior, self‐perceptions, and attributions) and child (age, gender, representation, language, and sociability) characteristics with maternal sensitivity and child responsiveness in 254 European American mothers and their firstborn 20‐month‐olds. Specific unique relations emerged in hierarchical regression analyses. Mothers who worked fewer hours per week and reported less dissonance in their husbands' didactic parenting, whose children spoke using more vocabulary, and who reported less limit setting in their parenting and attributed their parenting failures to internal causes were observed to be more sensitive in their interactions with their children. Children in higher SES families, whose mothers worked fewer hours and attributed their parenting failures to internal causes, and who themselves used more vocabulary were observed to be more responsive in their interactions with their mothers. Although potential associations are many, when considered together, unique associations with maternal sensitivity and child responsiveness are few, and some are shared whereas others are unique.     

How Far Have We Come? An Updated Scoping Review of Young Carers in the U.S.

Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal - Approximately 1.4 million young carers (aged 8–18) in the United States are providing multifaceted, extended care to adults with serious illness, in...     

Some considerations on the validity of evidence-based practice in social work

Summary This paper considers the validity of evidence-based practicein social work. It critically examines various underlying presuppositionsand assumptions entailed in evidence-based practice and drawsout their implications for social work. The paper is dividedinto three main parts. Following a consideration of the backgroundto the development of evidence-based practice and a discussionof its key organizing concepts, the paper goes on to examineits underlying scientific assumptions. It shows that evidence-basedpractice proposes a particular deterministic version of rationalitywhich is unsatisfactory. Evidence-based practice is derivedfrom ideas based on optimal behavior in a planned and systematicallyorganized environment. By concentrating on 'epistemic processes'involved in planning and psychological inference it is claimedthat cognitive heuristic devices are the determinants of decisionmaking and not evidence. The heuristic model suggests that decisionmaking is indeterminate, reflexive, locally optimal at bestand based on a limited rationality. It is argued that socialworkers engage in a reflexive understanding and not a determinateor certainty based decision-making process based on objectiveevidence. Complex phenomena such as decision making are notrationally determined or subject to 'control'. The paper goeson to suggest that the tendency to separate processes into 'facts'and 'values' implicit in evidence-based procedures underminesprofessional judgement and discretion in social work. The thirdpart of the paper focuses on the connection between method andideology in evidence-based practice. It examines how the evidence-basedpreoccupation with positivistic methods and determinate judgemententraps social workers within a mechanistic for of technicalrationality. This framework restricts social work to a narrowends-means rationality such that only certain forms of actionare considered legitimate. This feeds into the rhetoric of newmanagerialist strategies aimed at developing a performance cultureby further regulating and controlling individual practitioners.In the conclusion a number of critical indicators are givenwhich should be addressed by the proponents of evidence-basedpractice. It is suggested that unless these are adequately dealtwith, social work is not greatly advanced by adherence to anevidence-based approach. Moreover, the problematic epistemologicaland ideological base associated with it are to be regarded asinherently insuperable.     

蒙古族自然观对现代环境保护的启示

蒙古族先民们在长期的游牧生活中创造了辉煌的草原文化。蒙古族草原文化中的自然观是一种内在的回归自然、追求朴素的生态伦理观。也正是在这种自然观的引导下,草原自然环境长期以来得以保持其原貌——蓝天、碧草、清水、净土。蒙古族草原文化的自然观既符合当代人热爱优美环境,渴望实现人与自然和谐发展的美好愿望,又对治理和保护目前日益恶化的人类生存环境具有重要的启示作用。     

将精读教学与口语教学穿插进行

针对目前公共英语教学中口语教学的不足,笔者在授课过程中发现,以学生为中心,重视语言综合应用能力和学生自学能力的培养为特色的<新编大学英语>教材,成功地将精读教学和口语教学结合起来.教师采用让学生复述故事、上台表演、看图说话和讨论等方式,在精读课上进行口语练习.这种将两者穿插进行的方式,不失为解决口语教学不足的一个良策.     

Wage and nonwage outcomes in collective bargaining: Determinants and tradeoffs

Using unskilled labor wage rates and union contract scores derived from a sample of 500 U.S. manufacturing contracts, this study finds that in 1975 there was considerable variation in unions’ abilities to deliver higher wages and desirable nonwage contractual provisions to their members (though it is clear that the stronger unions have bargained high levels of both wages and nonwage items). There are a variety of union power, employee quality, union preference, and employer cost variables which impact upon the bargaining choices made between wages and nonwage provisions, and it appears that union strength tilts the compensation package toward wages. The authors, associate professors at the University of Illinois, are very grateful to Christopher Pawlowicz, Ronald Seeber, and Roger Wolters for their help in gathering data. They also are grateful to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Policy, Evaluation and Research of the U.S. Department of Labor and to the Research Board of the University of Illinois for financially supporting this research. Such support in no way implies, however, that the Department or the University endorses the methods or conclusions in this study.