Using a Group Work Practice Standards Inventory to Assess the Impact of a “Social Work Practice with Groups” Course

This article describes the design and delivery of a group work course that has as its primary purpose the meeting of group work practice standards. This multisection course uses a common course syllabus and a team approach to ensure the fidelity of course implementation. The recent development of a standards-based inventory of competencies in social work with groups, which measures the perceived importance of, and confidence in performing practice standards, led to the decision to administer the inventory to the authors' students at the beginning and end of the course to see if students were in fact making significant progress in the group work practice skills articulated in the standards. The results indicated that students were significantly more confident in their group work practice skills; however a few areas, particularly the development of middle-stage skills, were in need of further attention.     

The Use of IASWG Standards for Social Work Practice with Groups in Supervision of Group Work Practitioners

This article describes a model for supervision for practicing group leaders. The content and process of the model is participant driven, with the International Association for Social Work with Groups Standards for Social Work Practice with Groups used as a core element to guide development of the model as well as the support offered by the supervisor and participants.     

How to Evaluate the Implementation of Title IX at Colleges and Universities and Attitudes and Interest of Students Regarding Athletics

The following was written as an assignment for a Graduate School of Education class, titled Program and Policy Analysis, at the University of Pennsylvania. The students were instructed by Professor Rebecca Maynard to develop a research plan for a topic of interest to them. "How to Evaluate the Implementation of Title IX at Colleges and Universities and Attitudes and Interest of Students Regarding Athletics" was selected by Barbara Murray.     

Ellen Swallow Richards: “Humanistic Oekologist,” “Applied Sociologist,” and the founding of sociology

Best known as the first woman graduate from MIT, and the founder of Home Economics, Ellen Swallow Richards was a Progressive Era reformer who applied social science research techniques to problems of concern to early sociologists. As a mentor to many women who joined the “Cultural” and “Pragmatic” feminists of Hull House, her secular theories of “Oekology” and “Euthenics” challenged many of the models of social change prevalent in the Cambridge and Chicago academic communities. Her most radical contribution as a feminist was her assertion that women’s unpaid labor in the home played a vital economic role in maintaining capitalism and was the ultimate source of their second-class citizenship. She shared a belief in democracy and education as a feminist “Pragmatist,” and laid the groundwork for the contemporary “Ecofeminist” movement. Although she was a biochemist by training, she engaged several genera-tions of women in the application of scientific methods to the solution of contemporary social problems. As a political organizer, much of her legacy is reflected in the accomplishments of the reform organizations she was instrumental in founding.     

Integrating feminist and sociological thought: The life and work of helena Znaniecka Lopata

This work is a biographical essay on the academic career of Helena Znaniecka Lopata, a noted sociologist in her own right and the daughter of Florian Znaniecki, a principal contributor to qualitative and humanistic sociology. Lopata’s story documents the difficulties of establishing a career in a social climate that did not place high value on women beyond their wife and mothering roles. Once she defied her cultural expectations, she also had to overcome the shadow of her father’s legacy and, finally, she had to find acceptance for doing research on women’s everyday life experiences. Lopata’s work provides important insights into the sociological study of social roles and of gender as a structural component of stratified social systems. She has published articles on the women’s movement, politics and the family, and the abortion controversy. Her book,Feminism and the Women’s Movement: Dynamics of Change in Social Movement Ideology and Activism, is forthcoming from Unwin Hyman. A version of this paper was presented at the 1989 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA.     

Decision-making patterns and postdecision adjustment of childfree husbands and wives

The processes by which married couples come to the decision to have no children and the mechanisms they employ in reaction to pronatalist pressures were explored in interviews with 44 childfree husbands and wives. Two characteristic paths of decision-making were identified, Independent and Negotiated, and further categorization on the basis of degree of influence exerted by each spouse was proposed. Several mechanisms employed to counter pronatalist pressures were identified, including defense of the childfree lifestyle, devaluation of the parenthood status and denigration of parents, and avoidance of pronatalist company. Implications of these findings for the study of childfree marriages are discussed.     

Unfeeling knowledge: Emotion and objectivity in the history of sociology

The theoretical concern of this paper is with the relationship of gender, personal life, and emotion to the social construction of sicentific knowledge. I examine this question through biographical research into the life and work of William Fielding Ogburn (1886–1959), a major figure in the history of American sociology. Ogburn believed that emotion was inimical to science and that statistics could help control what he considered to be its distorting effects. My analysis suggests that there was a personal component, reflecting Ogburn's search for masculinity, to the development of his ideas about how scientific sociology should be defined and practiced. I also suggest that Ogburn's ideas were favorably received by his mostly male audience because they spoke to broad cultural and historical currents. My analysis shows the need for a view of scientific knowledge that takes into account the effects of gender relations and emotion on intellectual activity.     

TOWARD THE IDENTIFICATION OF VARIABLES FOR EVALUATING FAMILY THERAPY WORKSHOPS*

If the field of family therapy is to improve the quality of its continuing education, a useful measurement of workshop quality must be developed. In a preliminary step towards this goal, 14 expert subjects from the field of family therapy were interviewed to identify variables and relationships that can be hypothesized to influence the quality–as assessed by participants–of family therapy workshops. This paper reports the opinions of the subjects, using counts and quotations to convey as much of the raw information as space allows, and presents the methods through which the information was organized by the authors into four categories and 58 (assumed to be interdependent) variables.