Operationalizing a QLR project on social change and whiteness in South Africa, 1770s–1970s

The Whites Writing Whiteness project is concerned with changes to the racial order in South Africa over a long time-period and connects ‘big numbers’ and work on very large archive collections with close textual analysis of particular documents. It uses longitudinal data within a Qualitative Longitudinal Research methodological approach, combining formal analysis with a sampling process. In operationalizing this, letters from the Findlay Family collection with thousands of documents, a group of around 190 letters by Elizabeth Price, and a small set of Gottlob Schreiner’s letters, are discussed. In doing so, useful conceptual and methodological tools for analysing other large longitudinal datasets are provided.     

Depression in the Profession: Social Workers' Experiences and Perceptions

This study reports the findings of interviews with fifty socialworkers who volunteered to describe their personal experiencesof depression in the workplace. The findings confirm the literatureon the stresses of social work and provide an account of theways in which the social workers sought to reconcile their mentalhealth needs with their role as professionals. The study suggeststhe potential for those working at all levels in social workagencies to support social workers who are experiencing depression.At a time of shortages in the profession in the UK, and of effortsto enable those with mental health problems to remain in orreturn to work, the experiences of those social workers interviewedillustrate the managerial, training and human resource imperativesto provide more supportive workplaces.     

Multi-Stage Model Estimates of Lung Cancer Risk from Exposure to Diesel Exhaust, Based on a U.S. Railroad Worker Cohort

A California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal/EPA) report concluded that a reasonable and likely explanation for the increased lung cancer rates in numerous epidemiological studies is a causal association between diesel exhaust exposure and lung cancer. A version of the present analysis, based on a retrospective study of a U.S. railroad worker cohort, provided the Cal/EPA report with some of its estimates of lung cancer risk associated with diesel exhaust. The individual data for that cohort study furnish information on age, employment, and mortality for 56,000 workers over 22 years. Related studies provide information on exposure concentrations. Other analyses of the original cohort data reported finding no relation between measures of diesel exhaust and lung cancer mortality, while a Health Effects Institute report found the data unsuitable for quantitative risk assessment. None of those three works used multistage models, which this article uses in finding a likely quantitative, positive relations between lung cancer and diesel exhaust. A seven-stage model that has the last or next-to-last stage sensitive to diesel exhaust provides best estimates of increase in annual mortality rate due to each unit of concentration, for bracketing assumptions on exposure. Using relative increases of risk and multiplying by the background lung cancer mortality rates for California, the 95% upper confidence limit of the 70-year unit risks for lung cancer is estimated to be in the range 2.1 x 10(-4) (microg/m3)(-1) to 5.5 x 10(-4) (microg/m3)(-1). These risks constitute the low end of those in the Cal/EPA report and are below those reported by previous investigators whose estimates were positive using human data.     

Developing Employment Opportunities for Care Leavers

This article describes an action research project carried out in North West England that aimed to assist Children’s Services Departments and Care Trusts in developing their strategies for supporting care leavers into employment and training. The study found a range of models and approaches that can be utilised to develop local and regional partnerships offering employment and training opportunities designed to meet the needs of care leavers. Relevant questions about the extent to which such opportunities should be ring‐fenced or targeted on particular fields of employment are identified. © 2010 The Author(s). Children & Society © 2010 National Children’s Bureau.