Film Portrayals of Social Workers Doing Child Welfare Work

This article reports on research that investigated the images of social workers engaged in child welfare work as portrayed in movies, a major medium of popular culture. Findings from an analysis of 27 movies spanning from 1938 to 1999 are presented with particular attention to themes about how children are depicted as recipients of child welfare services and how child welfare worker activities and interventions are portrayed. Ways that the results of the research can guide intervention efforts that more accurately and more completely portray the activities, values, and knowledge base of the profession of social work are suggested.     

Staff-resident interaction in the nursing home: An ethnographic study of socio-economic disparities and community contexts

In recent years, nursing home (NH) researchers have paid increasing attention to socio-economic and racial/ethnic disparities in quality of care. Although there is growing evidence of disparities in resident health outcomes, less is known about the ways in which these differences manifest in care processes from a qualitative perspective. This paper addresses this gap by comparing staff-resident interactions in two urban, non-profit NHs, including roughly 50 staff participants in each facility. The researcher conducted ethnographic observation in one facility serving a white, middle class community and another serving low-income Black and Hispanic clients from an underserved neighborhood. Grounded theory methods generated three categories of interaction—activating, relating, and attending—which were performed differently in the two NHs. In the more affluent facility, staff interacted with residents in a dynamic fashion, adapting to residents’ responses, and they were relatively well equipped with resident-specific information when responding to individual concerns. In the safety-net facility, staff interacted with residents in a one-directional, “didactic” fashion, providing instruction without a mechanism for adapting to residents’ responses, and they were not as well equipped with resident-specific information. These differences reflected disparities between the two facilities in staff communication skills, underscoring the importance of workforce development to enhance the quality of staff-resident interaction and promote resident-centered care. This study raises further questions about the role of neighborhood contexts in shaping organizational processes that influence quality of life for NH residents. Moreover, the study offers a unique contribution to the NH literature by generating a typology of styles of interaction that can be used to develop a conceptual framework for understanding staff-resident interaction in the nursing home. Such a framework can inform efforts to improve residents’ quality of life.     

Redefining procreation: facing the issues

It is now possible for a child to have up to 5 individuals claiming to be parents: a sperm donor, an egg or ovum donor, the woman providing a womb for gestation, and the couple raising the child. Technology has provided 3 techniques of conception: artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer, and surrogate motherhood. There is increased concern with infertility in the US and decreased availability of children for adoption. New reproductive technologies share, with the recent profound changes in the American family and more relaxed attitudes towards sexuality, a common potential to alter family structure and family dynamics. Certain issues are germane to all birth technologies such as whether such technologies should exist at all, whether there is a right to procreate, what criteria should govern access to these technologies, and how they should be regulated. Complex ethical, legal, social and moral questions are involved. Advances in reproductive technologies have created a gap between science and public policy. The articulation of guiding principles is essential to narrow that gap.     

Life Satisfaction Among Israeli Youth in Residential Treatment Care

This study is a preliminary examination of life satisfactionamong 103 children in one residential treatment care (RTC) settingin Israel. Life satisfaction was examined using the MultidimensionalStudents Life Satisfaction Scale (MSLSS). Gender differencesin life satisfaction and correlations with background and in-carevariables were examined. The study revealed that girls weremore satisfied with RTC-specific domains than boys and thatthe residential child-care worker–child relationship playsa major role in the child’s life satisfaction. Findingsprovided some support for the utility of the MSLSS to describeRTC children and youth’s life satisfaction across a numberof important life domains. Ongoing administration of such scaleshas the potential to monitor RTC children’s life satisfactionand its correlates throughout their stay in care.     

Publishing with Open Journal Systems (OJS): A Librarian’s Perspective

Abstract

The genesis of this paper is a workshop presentation on publishing with Open Journal Systems (OJS) that was delivered during the Kenya Library and Information Services Consortium Pre-Annual General Meeting held on May 30, 2019, at the Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology, Kenya. The article lays the context of online hosting of university sponsored journals in Kenya and gives a background of Online Journals Systems. The paper further describes potential roles that librarians can play in institutional journal publishing. The article concludes that librarians possess the requisite skills for participating in scholarly journal publishing and recommends that including publishing literacy skills in information literacy sessions provides an excellent opportunity to showcase librarians’ value in the scholarly journal publishing process.     

The development of interindividual differences in sympathy: The role of child personality and adults’ responsiveness to distress

In a three‐wave longitudinal study of 85 children (43 girls) at 5, 6, and 7 years of age, the role played by child personality (inhibition, aggressiveness) and adults’ responsiveness to distress in children's sympathy was examined. At all three times, sympathy was measured via standardized observations as well as children's self‐reports. Child inhibition and aggressiveness were assessed with reports by teachers at T1 and T2. Parents’ and teachers’ responsiveness to distress were inferred from interviews with the children at T1 and T2. Longitudinal analyses via latent regression using structural equation models showed that earlier sympathy explained most of the variance in later sympathy. Additionally, higher inhibition at T1 predicted less sympathy at T2. Higher sympathy at T1 predicted more adult responsiveness at T2. Higher aggressiveness at T2 predicted less sympathy at T3. Within time, at T1, sympathy was positively related to adults’ responsiveness. At T2, inhibition and sympathy were negatively related. The discussion focuses on the question of how child personality as well as parental and non‐parental socialization experiences work in concert to explain interindividual differences in sympathy.     

Back to the future: A continuity of dialogue on work and technology at the ILO

Concerns about technological unemployment are not new. Specifically, policy debates surrounding automation processes in the 1960s reflected both optimism and concerns about the job-destroying potential of technology. Studying the archives, and in particular the information collected by the Bureau of Automation, shows that many of today's policy proposals were originally raised at the ILO during that period, even though they were never translated into regulatory policy. This article thus suggests that reopening this past dialogue may reveal useful insights for addressing current challenges, and enable us to achieve the world of work we wish to see in the future.     

The Working Families’ Tax Credit and Some European Tax Reforms in A Collective Setting

A framework for simplified implementation of the collective model of labor supply decisions is presented in the context of fiscal reforms in the UK. Through its collective form the model accounts for the well known problem of distribution between wallet and purse, a broadly debated issue which has so far been impossible to model due to the limitations of the unitary model of household behavior. A calibrated data set is used to model the effects of introducing two forms of the Working Families’ Tax Credit. We also summarize results of estimations and calibrations obtained using the same methodology on data from five other European countries. The results underline the importance of taking account of the intrahousehold decision process and suggest that who receives government transfers does matter from the point of view of labor supply and welfare of household members. They also highlight the need for more research into models of household behavior.

Collective Models of Labor Supply with Nonconvex Budget Sets and Nonparticipation: A Calibration Approach

We suggest a methodology to calibrate a collective model with household-specific bargaining rules and marriage-specific preferences that incorporate leisure externalities. The empirical identification relies on the assumption that some aspects of individual preferences remain the same after marriage, so that estimation on single individuals can be used. The procedure maps the complete Pareto frontier of each household in the dataset and we define alternative measures of a power index. The latter is then regressed on relevant bargaining factors, including a set of variables retracing the potential relative contributions of the spouses to household disposable income. In its capacity to handle complex budget sets and labor force participation decisions of both spouses, this framework allows the comparison of unitary and collective predictions of labor supply reactions and welfare changes entailed by fiscal reforms in a realistic setting (see Michal Myck et al., 2006; Denis Beninger et al., 2006).