Messages to Social Work Education: What Makes Social Workers Continue and Cope in Child Welfare?

This article examines the positive elements which make social workers continue their career with a focus on statutory child welfare. Such analysis is needed, as existing research tends to highlight stress, exhaustion and career break-up issues. The empirical data consist of focus groups of 28 social workers and a questionnaire addressed to 56 professionals in child welfare in two Finnish urban municipalities. The focus groups were targeted at novice, expert and veteran social workers. The analysis presents organisational, person-related and client-work-related positive elements from the point of view of social workers. The results highlight that social work in child welfare may be experienced as being rewarding and professionally challenging. The positive elements vary among novice, expert and veteran social workers, with the latter especially viewing their work as independent expert work with major opportunities to make a change in children's lives. Commitment to care of children is one of the key motivating factors. The study suggests that social work education should recognise that the subjective motivation to do social work may change during one's career and that social work may be simultaneously both stressful and rewarding. Students should learn how to balance these aspects of their work.     

On recursive solutions to simple allocation problems

We propose and axiomatically analyze a class of rational solutions to simple allocation problems where a policy-maker allocates an endowment $E$ among $n$ agents described by a characteristic vector c. We propose a class of recursive rules which mimic a decision process where the policy-maker initially starts with a reference allocation of $E$ in mind and then uses the data of the problem to recursively adjust his previous allocation decisions. We show that recursive rules uniquely satisfy rationality, c-continuity, and other-c monotonicity. We also show that a well-known member of this class, the Equal Gains rule, uniquely satisfies rationality, c-continuity, and equal treatment of equals.     

Is Maternal and Child Health Service use a Causal Gateway to Subsequent Contraceptive use?: A Multi-Country Study

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between MCH service utilization and contraceptive use in five countries: Bolivia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Morocco, and Tanzania. The analysis is carried out at the level of the individual woman, with contraceptive-use status modeled as a function of: (1) the availability, quality, and packaging of MCH and family planning services; (2) community- and individual-level determinants of health service and contraceptive use; and (3) intensity of prior MCH service use. Data for the analysis comes from DHS data on women of reproductive age linked with data from service-availability surveys. We use full-information, maximum-likelihood regression techniques to control for the effects of unobserved heterogeneity that might otherwise bias our estimates. In three of the five countries (Morocco, Guatemala, and Indonesia) the results of the analysis suggest that the intensity of MCH service use is positively associated with subsequent contraceptive use among women, even after controlling for observed and unobserved individual- and community-level factors. This result lends support to the proposition that, at least in the context of these three countries, the intensity of MCH service per se use does have a “causal” impact on subsequent contraceptive use, even after controlling for factors that “predispose” sample women to use health care services.     

Two Population-Environment Regimes in the Great Plains of the United States, 1930–1990

This paper analyzes factors that affect net migration rates in counties in the U.S. Great Plains between 1930 and 1990, emphasizing the roles of weather (especially drought), environmental amenities, employment, and population, making use of a rich county-level data set. Using a pooled time series model the paper shows that environment is important in population processes, with weather and agricultural change more important in the 1930s and 1940s, and environmental amenities more important in later time periods. The paper provides important insights into how environmental impacts on migration might change over time, and how those changes might be measured.     

Adjustment failures in an immigrant population: Finns in Sweden

Using data sets from both Sweden and Finland, which have been linked at the individual level, we analyse whether Finnish immigrants who lived in Sweden in 1990 were employed, non-employed, return-migrated, or dead by 2001. The aim is to see how they interrelate with socio-demographic characteristics, and to compare Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking immigrants in this respect. Multinomial logistic regression models reveal that there is great variation in the level of outcomes between the two language groups, but that the interrelation between socio-demographic factors and each outcome is fairly similar across outcomes and across language groups. It is foremost the Finnish-speaking male immigrants who experience problems, having on average two times higher odds of being either non-employed, return-migrated, or death, as compared with Swedish-speaking male immigrants. Social disadvantage may consequently not only take the form of poor labour market position, but also return-migration and death. The paper illustrates the need for separating subgroups of immigrants when one is interested in integrational success. Comments from seminar participants at the Turku Centre for Welfare Research and anonymous persons are gratefully acknowledged.     

Demographic models of birth outcomes and infant mortality: An alternative measurement approach

Most demographic studies use 2,500 grams of birth weight and 37 weeks of gestation as cutpoints for evaluating the effects of adverse birth outcomes on infant mortality. We propose an alternative strategy, which relies on continuous measures of birth outcomes, identifies an optimal combination of birth weight and gestational age for infant survival, and estimates the effects of adverse birth outcomes in terms of their departure from this "optimal point." We illustrate the advantages of this approach by estimating a logistic model using data from the 1989-1991 NCHS linked birth/infant death files. Finally, we discuss future applications and methodological issues to be resolved in subsequent research.     

Clinical Gender Differences Among Adult Pathological Gamblers Seeking Treatment

This study aimed to examine the gender-related differences in demographics, gambling measures, psychological functioning, and motivation for therapy in an outpatient sample of pathological gamblers seeking treatment. Participants in this multisite study included 103 adult outpatients (51 women and 52 men) meeting current DSM-IV-TR criteria for PG. Logistic regression was used to examine if gender was related together to categorical and continuous independent variables. Female gamblers were older than men and more likely to be divorced or widowed and to have a lower annual income. Women became more dependent on bingo and men on slot machines. Gambling motivation and the course of illness for both sexes were also different. Female gamblers were more anxious and with a poorer self-esteem than male gamblers and more affected by depressive symptoms; in turn, men were more impulsive and higher sensation seekers than women and more affected by drug/alcohol abuse. The 68.6% of female gamblers reported being victims of intimate partner violence. There were no gender differences about the motivation for treatment. Future research should examine gambling behaviors and psychological functioning and suggest treatment approaches to address specific goals according to these gender-related differences.     

Baby booming inequality? Demographic change and earnings inequality in Norway, 1967�C2000

In this paper, we demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are due to changes in the age-structure. To this end, we use administrative data on earnings for every male Norwegian over the period 1967–2000. We find that the substantial rise in earnings inequality over the 1980s and into the early 1990s, is to some extent driven by the fact that the large baby boom cohorts are approaching the peak of the age–earnings profile. We further demonstrate that the impact of age-adjustments on the trend in inequality during the period 1993–2000 is highly sensitive to the method used: While the most widely used age-adjusted inequality measure indicates little change in inequality over this period, a new and improved age-adjusted measure suggests a decline in inequality.