American Racism: Implications for Social Work

The opportunity to conduct research into an area of personal disability provides the graduate student additional maturation and increased self-realization. The student is thereby able to contribute significantly to the corporate knowledge of the disability through integration of past personal experience with the knowledge and techniques gained through professional education.     

Book Review: Children of Addiction: Research,Health, and Public Policy Issues. Edited by Hiram E. Fitzgerald,Barry M. Lester,and Barry S. Zuckerman. Routledge Falmer,London/NewYork, 2000

Sociological Practice -     

Play as a Resource for Children Facing Adversity: An Exploration of Indicative Case Studies

In this paper, we suggest that the ability and opportunity to play affords children a natural resource to meet intellectual and emotional challenge. Analysis of case studies focusing on interventions with children caught in the bombing of Beirut, children abandoned to the state system in Romania, and the street children in Rio de Janeiro and Cali is used to support this view. When resources are in deficit, challenge is more likely to become adversity. The impact of adversity is particular to context, but comparison across contexts also shows connections between children’s disparate experiences. Analysis confirms that given the opportunity, children interact with and influence their environment through play and that this process provides a resource to meet the challenge of adversity.     

Putting Principles Into Practice: Addressing Historical Trauma,Mistrust, and Apprehension in Research Methods Courses

The social work profession has articulated commitments to acknowledging and affirming how diversity and culture shape the human experience and to developing social workers who can competently engage in research-informed practice and practice-informed research. However, there remains a need in social work education for more widespread use of culturally relevant pedagogies that can help achieve these goals. Informed by historical trauma theory and the Black perspective, this article presents a model we used for teaching research to master’s-level social work students at a historically Black university. The article describes assignments and classroom exercises that were used and discusses the implications of this model for culturally informed research curricula that promotes antioppressive research in diverse classroom settings.     

25 years of digital archives of visual materials: what we’ve done,what we’ve learned,and what challenges remain

In this article, the author looks back at the history of American digital archives of visual materials. Beginning with the Berkeley Image Database in 1986, he outlines the contributions that various projects made to the development of new tools and approaches, focusing on three important projects in which he participated in the decade leading up to 1996. How did both content and metadata change as these projects went from single collections to aggregations of diverse collections? After situating these three projects, the author then briefly covers highlights of other visual collection projects and systems from the subsequent 15 years, discussing their need to evolve from access systems into archival systems. The article concludes with an outlook on past challenges that the field has already overcome and a discussion of the new challenges for digital archives in the future.     

How Pervasive Are Abuses in Fundraising Among Nonprofits?

This article explores selected fundraising information for charitable nonprofits, asking whether widespread abuses might exist in this sector. After examining the pervasiveness of fundraising and its relation to mission, we show that a few nonprofits raise a majority of sector charitable revenues, and we present the ratio of funds raised to funds spent on fundraising by mission categories. We find that 72 percent of charitable nonprofits do not report direct fundraising expenditures, 5 percent of the active fundraising nonprofits obtain 90 percent of total funds raised, mission is related to a nonprofit's ability to raise funds, the median nonprofit spends about 9.6 percent of total raised funds for fundraising, and only one in five nonprofits hires a professional fundraiser. At least in terms of the measures used in this report, widespread abuses are not obvious.