Afraid to care; unable to care: A critical ethnography within a long-term care home

This paper describes the findings of a critical ethnographic research study conducted in an urban long-term care home. While our intention was to learn more about the culture of care, specifically as it relates to mental health care provision, the participants in the study consistently spoke with us about (what we have labeled as) a culture of compliance. In a context where new long-term care legislation is being implemented along with new, standardized resident assessment instruments, gaining a deeper understanding of the (un)intended consequences of government's efforts to ensure a high quality of care is of paramount importance. This research demonstrates how policy-driven structural mechanisms can (re)produce conditions that result in frontline staff being afraid and unable to care, and thus contributes to a better understanding of the lived experience of frontline long-term care staff who find that their caregiving responsibilities are displaced by caregiving accountabilities.     

Communication with parents in child welfare: skills, language and interaction

This paper reviews the literature on communication between professionals and parents/carers in health and social care. It notes that there is considerable research on doctor–patient communication and counselling, but much less on professionals who visit families in their homes. While there is a large literature on good practice and communication skills, there is little research on the actual encounters themselves. What counts as 'communication' in such publications is explored. The paper suggests that there is much to be gained by considering research in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics on professional–client encounters. Examples of some of the key concepts are discussed and an engagement with this literature is recommended.     

Implications of Eurocentrism for Social Work Education: Trivialization vis-à-vis Skin Color

The significance of skin color among people of color and its relative absence in social work literature is arguably attributed to Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism defines human reality via Eurocentric norms, ideas, values and perspectives. Evidence of Eurocentrism in social work is contained in its literature priorities, skin color litigation, brown racism and skin bleaching. Demonstration of the aforementioned social pathologies involving skin color pertaining to people of color is a critical, existential phenomenon. If social work is to remain viable and be sustained in the future, it must conform to the dictates of changes in the population. That will require a commensurate adjustment and a willingness of its intelligentsia to accommodate skin color and other alternative views relative to education and practice.     

Room for climate advocates in a coal‐focused economy? NGO influence on Australian climate policy

Many Australian environmental non‐government organisations (NGOs) have campaigned for greater political action and community awareness on human‐induced climate change for almost two decades. Australian emissions are the highest per person in the world, yet the Government's response is heavily influenced by the economically‐significant fossil fuel industry. NGO campaigners are sceptical of their campaigns' effectiveness. This paper presents three methods for evaluating the effectiveness of NGO climate change campaigns: Moyer's Movement Action Plan, Schumaker's Assessment of Political Effectiveness, and a document analysis of the influence of NGO submissions to climate policy processes. Evaluation is critical for NGO campaigns to improve their effectiveness, and evaluation criteria and methods should ideally be designed in parallel with the campaign strategy. Using these evaluation methods, it is evident that Australian NGO campaigns on climate change have been effective.     

Parent participation in social work meetings - the case of child protection conferences

This paper is about parent participation in cases where children are involved in a child protection process in the UK. It concentrates on the child protection conference as a site at which the participation of the client and decision-making by professionals are balanced with one another. Unlike previous research, which has been concerned with asking participants their reactions and views using research interviews, the focus here will be on the verbal exchanges between participants in the conference, based on a recording of a child protection review. In this way it is proposed that attention is directed at how the client is enabled to participate and what significance is given to such participation during the event. Der Aufsatz befaßt sich mit der Partizipation von Eltern im Fall, daß Ihre Kinder von der Arbeit des Kinderschutzes erfaßt werden. Er konzentriert sich auf die Kinderschutzkonferenz als den Ort, an dem die Partizipation von Klienten und die Entscheidungen der Professionellen in ein Gleichgewicht gebracht werden. Anders als vorgängige Forschungsansätze, die im Rahmen von Interviews die Klienten nach ihren Reaktionen und Einschätzungen befragt haben, wird hier auf der Basis eines aufgezeichneten Gesprächs zur Prüfung des Falles der Fokus auf die verbalen Interaktionen zwischen den Teilnehmern der Konferenz gerichtet. Deshalb wird vorgeschlagen, die Aufmerksamkeit darauf zu richten, auf welche Weise die Klienten zur Partizipation befähigt werden und welche Bedeutung einer solchen Form der Partizipation während des Prozesses zugemessen wird. Este artículo trata de la participación de los padres en casos en los que los niños se encuentran en situación de protección infantil en el Reino Unido. Se concentra en las conferencias para la protección a la infancia como un lugar en el que se equilibran la participación de los clientes y el proceso de toma de decisiones por parte de los profesionales. A diferencia de anteriores investigaciones, donde se pedía a los participantes que expresaran sus reacciones y puntos de vista a través de entrevistas, aquí nos centramos en los intercambios verbales entre los participantes de las conferencias, a través de la gravación de un caso específico. De esta manera se propone que se dirija la atención hacia cómo se facilita la participatión del cliente y la importancia que se da a dicha participatión durante el encuentro. Cet article traite de la participation des parents d'efants bénéficiant de la protection de l'enfance en Grande-Bretagne. La conférence sur la protection de l'enfance constitue l'objet de cette étude, en tant que lieu dans lequel la participation des usagers et la prise de décision par les professionnels se contrebalancent l'une l'autre. Contrairement à une recherche précédente pour laquelle on cherchait à connaître la réaction et l'opinion des participants en utilisant des entretiens de recherche, il s'agit ici d'étudier les echanges verbaux entre les participants de la conférence, à partir de l'enregistrement d'un compte-rendu sur la protection de l'enface. Ainsi, les auteurs choisissent de se concentrer sur la façon dont l'usager est amené à participer et sur la signification donnée à cette participation pendant l'événement.     

Improving coverage accuracy of nonparametric prediction intervals

Methods are suggested for improving the coverage accuracy of intervals for predicting future values of a random variable drawn from a sampled distribution. It is shown that properties of solutions to such problems may be quite unexpected. For example, the bootstrap and the jackknife perform very poorly when used to calibrate coverage, although the jackknife estimator of the true coverage is virtually unbiased. A version of the smoothed bootstrap can be employed for successful calibration, however. Interpolation among adjacent order statistics can also be an effective way of calibrating, although even there the results are unexpected. In particular, whereas the coverage error can be reduced from O ( n ^-1) to orders O ( n ^-2) and O ( n ^-3) (where n denotes the sample size) by interpolating among two and three order statistics respectively, the next two orders of reduction require interpolation among five and eight order statistics respectively.     

Importance of interpolation when constructing double-bootstrap confidence intervals

We show that, in the context of double-bootstrap confidence intervals, linear interpolation at the second level of the double bootstrap can reduce the simulation error component of coverage error by an order of magnitude. Intervals that are indistinguishable in terms of coverage error with theoretical, infinite simulation, double-bootstrap confidence intervals may be obtained at substantially less computational expense than by using the standard Monte Carlo approximation method. The intervals retain the simplicity of uniform bootstrap sampling and require no special analysis or computational techniques. Interpolation at the first level of the double bootstrap is shown to have a relatively minor effect on the simulation error.     

Confidence intervals for secondary parameters following a sequential test

In sequential studies, formal interim analyses are usually restricted to a consideration of a single null hypothesis concerning a single parameter of interest. Valid frequentist methods of hypothesis testing and of point and interval estimation for the primary parameter have already been devised for use at the end of such a study. However, the completed data set may warrant a more detailed analysis, involving the estimation of parameters corresponding to effects that were not used to determine when to stop, and yet correlated with those that were. This paper describes methods for setting confidence intervals for secondary parameters in a way which provides the correct coverage probability in repeated frequentist realizations of the sequential design used. The method assumes that information accumulates on the primary and secondary parameters at proportional rates. This requirement will be valid in many potential applications, but only in limited situations in survival analysis.