Helping the police with their inquiries: the development of special care questioning techniques

SUMMARY. When children are dealt with in the justice system, by the police or the courts, the results are often highly emotionally distressing, and damaging to the true purpose of testimony. This paper describes a training programme of ‘special care questioning’ developed by a police force which employs clinical pychologists. An outline rationale is described, and the results discussed. It concludes that the task of protecting children cannot be the exclusive domain of either Clinical* social service practitioners or legal officers. Creative and ethical cooperation is possible and necessary. The special care questioning programme was developed from experimental work previously carried out with the Metropolitan Police with funding from the Police Foundation, UK.     

Decision making in Child Protection: The Use of Theoretical, Empirical and Procedural Knowledge by Novices and Experts and Implications for Fieldwork Placement

Correspondence to Dr Julie Hudson, 89 Yorktown Road, Elizabeth Park, South Australia 5113 Summary This paper is concerned with the process of decision makingin child protection, particularly as it relates to the decisionwhether or not to remove a child from home. The study compareda group of novice social workers with expert practitioners,placing a particular focus on the types of knowledge that novicesdraw upon when making such decisions. A three-stage, qualitative methodology was employed to investigatechild protection decision making. All parts of the study utilizeda case vignette of a neglect scenario. This paper reports onsome of the findings in respect of the use of theoretical, empiricaland procedural knowledge. The findings suggest that novices tend to lack a clear understandingof the factors that are associated with child maltreatment.While they have a superficial awareness of the concept of riskassessment, they have an inability to weigh factors appropriatelyand to apply this to their practice. The implications of these findings are discussed in relationto field education.     

A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF THE EFFECT OF A SERVICE GUARANTEE ON SERVICE QUALITY

This paper develops a theoretical framework that relates a service guarantee to service quality. The framework hypothesizes that a service guarantee can positively affect service quality through its positive effect on both learning through service failure and employee motivation and vision. A longitudinal, empirical study was conducted to test these hypotheses. Surprisingly, the service guarantee was not found to have a direct effect on learning through service failure. However, the service guarantee clearly had a positive effect on service quality primarily through its positive effect on employee motivation and vision. The research strongly supports using a service guarantee to improve service quality.     

Les facteurs sociaux liés au degré d'information de la population du Saguenay‐Lac‐Saint‐Jean à propos des maladies héréditaires et des services disponibles*

The past few years have seen significant advances in medical genetics. These advances have in turn given rise to several important clinical applications that have targeted populations with specific historical and demogenetic characteristics. One such population lives in the Saguenay‐Lac‐Saint‐Jean region of Quebec. One might think that this population is reasonably well informed of the situation. But their knowledge of population‐specific genetic pathologies and of the services available to them happens to vary considerably from one social group to another. This article presents the results of a quantitative study aimed at determining the factors that contribute to the acquisition of such knowledge in this population. Depuis quelques années, nous assistons à d'importantes avancées en génétique médicale. Celles‐ci induisent un développement sans précèdent de nouvelles applications cliniques qui interpellent certaines populations dont les caractéristiques historiques et démogénétiques font qu'elles sont davantage concernées. C'est le cas, notamment de la population du Saguenay‐Lac‐Saint‐Jean (Québec). On pourrait penser que cette population s'avère, dans l'ensemble, largement sensibilisée mais il appert que le niveau d'information sur les génopathies régionales et les services offerts varie considérablement d'un groupe social à l'autre. Le présent article livre les résultats d'une enquête quantitative visant à connaître les facteurs qui favorisent l'acquisition de telles connaissances dans cette population.