Studies of Scholarly Productivity in Social Work Using Citation Analysis

Ideally, an educator’s reputation should be based primarily on that person’s scholarly publications. However, reputation is more than the sum of one’s scholarly efforts. In this article, the authors seek to add objective information to the subjective decision-making process involved in hiring, promoting, or providing tenure to educators. The authors present norms of citations—objective indicators of reputation—for professors, associate professors, and assistant professors. These norms were derived from the Citation Index of the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Four studies were undertaken to examine scholarly productivity using the same basic methodology: citation analysis. In Study 1, the authors examined a sample of educators listed in the Encyclopedia of Social Work. These experts were used as a national norm against which other educators could compare themselves. Study 2 was based on a citation analysis of deans of all graduate schools of social work. In Study 3, the authors examined “local norms” of four particular schools of social work and discussed the differences between national and local norms. In Study 4, the authors examined “personal norms” through a detailed study of the careers of three individual professors, and compared their entirely scholarly productions against the SSCI record.     

Gay Dads: Transitions to Adoptive Fatherhood by Abbie E. Goldberg

Abstract

PATTY'S JOURNEY FROM ORPHANAGE TO ADOPTION AND REUNION. Norling, Donna Scott. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 208pp., Hardcover ISBN 0-8166-2866-1, $17.95 cloth. Reviewed by Karen Schmid.

KINSHIP WITH STRANGERS: ADOPTION AND INTERPRETATIONS OF KINSHIP IN AMERICAN CULTURE. Modell, Judith S. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, 286 pp., Hardcover ISBN 0-520-08118-8, $35.00 cloth. Reviewed by Karen Schmid.     

Child center closures: Does nonprofit status provide a comparative advantage?

Reliable access to dependable, high quality childcare services is a vital concern for large numbers of American families. The childcare industry consists of private nonprofit, private for-profit, and governmental providers that differ along many dimensions, including quality, clientele served, and organizational stability. Nonprofit providers are theorized to provide higher quality services given comparative tax advantages, higher levels of consumer trust, and management by mission driven entrepreneurs. This study examines the influence of ownership structure, defined as nonprofit, for-profit sole proprietors, for-profit companies, and governmental centers, on organizational instability, defined as childcare center closures. Using a cross sectional data set of 15724 childcare licenses in California for 2007, we model the predicted closures of childcare centers as a function of ownership structure as well as center age and capacity. Findings indicate that for small centers (capacity of 30 or less) nonprofits are more likely to close, but for larger centers (capacity 30 +) nonprofits are less likely to close. This suggests that the comparative advantages available for nonprofit organizations may be better utilized by larger centers than by small centers. We consider the implications of our findings for parents, practitioners, and social policy.     

Change and Inertia in the New York State Medicaid Personal Care Services Program: An Institutional Case Study

This study analyzes how competing logics (belief systems) of stakeholders have influenced patterns of change and inertia in the development of the New York Medicaid Personal Care Services (PCS) program. A case-study methodology was used to collect documents, statistics, and interview data from four key stakeholder groups: state and city officials, PCS agencies, a labor union, and consumer advocates covering the period 1999 to 2005. The New York PCS program is one of the oldest, largest, and most stable programs in the United States. Its early unionization of workers resulted in relatively generous wages and benefits and made New York number one nationally in PCS spending per capita. In spite of wide support from stakeholder groups, the overall number of participants has gradually declined since 1999. A consumer-directed model of personal care developed in 1995 challenged the status quo and has grown steadily. Resistance by public officials, agency providers, and union representatives to the consumer-directed model has resulted in a small program that is often targeted toward individuals labeled “difficult to serve.” Dominant stakeholders in New York have ensured a stable personal care program that has resisted change and led to program inertia.     

Social Capital or Social Cohesion: What Matters For Subjective Well-Being?

The theoretical analysis of the concepts of social capital and of social cohesion shows that social capital should be considered as a micro concept whereas social cohesion, being a broader concept than social capital, is a more appropriate concept for macro analysis. Therefore, we suggest that data on the individual level should only be used to analyze the relationship between social capital, social cohesion indicators and subjective well-being and that they do not allow commenting on the level of social cohesion in a society. For this last type of analyses aggregated indicators of social cohesion have to be computed which is not the issue of this paper. Our empirical analysis is based on individual data for Luxembourg in 2008. In general, our results suggest that investments in social capital generate monetary returns (increased income) and psychic returns (increased subjective well-being) even in a highly developed and multicultural country like Luxembourg. When we are adding on the micro level variables representing the economic domain of social cohesion following Bernard (1999), then we observe that this domain also has an effect on income and on subjective well-being. Therefore, we recommend including the economic domain in any future analysis using the concept of social cohesion.     

The governance of strategic networks: how do different configurations influence the performance of member firms?

Journal of Management and Governance - The purpose of this paper is to analyze how different configurations of network governance influence the performance of member firms. To achieve this...     

Modified S-charts for controlling process variability

To help in the detection of variance increases and decreases, three modified versions of traditional Shewhart S-charts are evaluated in terms of their average run length values. One scheme uses control limits based on equal tail chi-square distribution probabilities. The second uses control limits based on unequal tail probabilities. The third uses warning limits based on equal tail probabilities, but requires two successive points beyond the warning limit to give an out-of-control signal. They all result in better average run length values than the traditional S-chart. Also, if the only concern is the detection of variance increases, then both S-charts and warning limit charts without lower control limits are shown to have better average run length values than those of the traditional charts.     

The Eternal Triangle: Sixty Years of the Centre–Periphery Relationship in the National Health Service

The history of the National Health Service in England is marked by a paradox. Even while successive governments used the rhetoric of power to the periphery, the exhort‐and‐hope system of 1948 was transformed into a command‐and‐control system over the next 60 years. The contrast between rhetorical aspirations and policy trajectory can be traced back, this article argues, to a debate in the 1945 Cabinet about the design of the NHS: a debate which set out the tension between three policy goals – equity, efficiency and democracy. The pursuit of equity and efficiency (variously defined) has provided the rationale for centralization, at the expense of democracy seen as control by elected local bodies. The major change over time has been less in central government's policy ambitions than in its administrative capacity. New organizational structures and managerial techniques made it possible to exploit opportunities created by information technology.     

Relating mothers' social framing to their children's entry competence with peers

The purpose of this study was to examine how mothers view and construct meaning their children's social interactions, and to understand the interpretive frames they bring to filtering the social world and conveying meaning to their children. Maternal narrations to their children' videotaped entry behavior revealed narration patterns related to their children' entry behavior and the group's response. Generally, when their children were behaving competently, mothers appeared to have a broad based, context embedded view of the interaction, but focused more specifially when difficulties arose, These narration patterns were influenced ny the mothers' own remembered childhood social competence and recollections of positive and anxious peer experiences. Implications of these results for the socialization process were discussed.