Changing practice cultures in statutory child protection: Practitioners' perspectives

Many child protection systems struggle to implement effective models of frontline practice in the context of high caseloads, increasing costs, and compliance‐focused bureaucratic cultures. This article discusses changes brought about by “Practice First,” a framework for practice introduced to improve the quality and effectiveness of child protection work in New South Wales, Australia. Findings drawn from quantitative and qualitative research with practitioners show that the initiative was effective in changing cultures of practice. It enabled workers to spend more face‐to‐face time with families and build relationships and was perceived to improve the quality of decision‐making. At the same time, the article highlights difficulties in attempting to embed change in practice cultures when broader systemic challenges persist.     

Book Review: Peter Frumkin,On Being Nonprofit: A Conceptual and Policy Primer,Harvard University Press,Cambridge, MA, 2002, 213 pp., preface,notes, index, $35.00

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

Seeing Clinical Attention Anew: Results from an Exploratory Study of Attention in Clinical Practice

Attention is an acknowledged component of the therapeutic relationship that forms the heart of clinical work. Yet it is rarely studied. This study explored the structure of clinical attention with a focus on internal processes occurring within the clinician, not on actions or interventions taken in sessions. Fourteen experienced clinicians participated in an elicitation interview. Data analysis followed a modified phenomenological methodology. The structure of clinical attention was discovered to consist of a dynamic and iterative process of intention and intuition based in distinct, recursive and iteratively related attentional levels. Attention is a process grounded in inner psycho-physiological awareness providing clinicians with abilities to reflect on practice and regulate affective experience.     

Amnestic Heterosexism and Bystander Responses to Anti-Gay Bullying

Amnestic heterosexism (AH) reflects the belief that, in contemporary society, people who are lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) no longer experience discrimination related to sexual orientation. We investigated potential associations between individuals’ AH beliefs and their responses to anti-gay bullying. Heterosexual undergraduates (N = 238) completed a measure of AH before responding to a scenario in which a man accuses another man of being a “fag.” As expected, those with greater AH beliefs perceived the situation as less severe/dangerous, felt less personally responsible to intervene, and were more blaming toward the target of bullying. In multivariate analyses, AH was indirectly associated with intent to confront the perpetrator via a path of reduced personal responsibility. Our results indicate that beliefs denying the existence of discrimination based on sexual orientation reduce feelings of personal responsibility to address anti-gay bullying. In turn, low personal responsibility inhibits confrontation of those who perpetrate bullying behaviors.     

A Comparison of South-East Asian and Australian First-Year Students' Views on University

A questionnaire study was carried out with Asian and Australian university entrants in order to ascertain their differential attitudes as to the purposes of an ideal university, and their expectations as to the milieu of an actual university. The implications of the significant culturally based differences between the two groups are discussed in terms of relative value systems, culture-shock effects, and the ramifications for both academic policy and inter-racial relations.     

Estimation of multi-state models with missing covariate values based on observed data likelihood

Abstract

Continuous-time multi-state models are commonly used to study diseases with multiple stages. Potential risk factors associated with the disease are added to the transition intensities of the model as covariates, but missing covariate measurements arise frequently in practice. We propose a likelihood-based method that deals efficiently with a missing covariate in these models. Our simulation study showed that the method performs well for both “missing completely at random” and “missing at random” mechanisms. We also applied our method to a real dataset, the Einstein Aging Study.