Evaluating the Impact of Post‐Qualifying Social Work Education

Post‐qualifying awards in social work are well established within the continuing professional development agenda for qualified social workers in the UK. The evaluation of education and training should be an integral part of this agenda because it is important to ensure that programmes continue to meet standards of delivery, are successful in meeting their aims and objectives and are making an impact on practice. However, there is a limited amount of published work on the evaluation of post‐qualifying social work education, with studies often focusing on programme delivery rather than on their impact on practice.

This paper explores evaluative work within the current post‐qualifying social work framework and discusses the results of an evaluation of the Vulnerable Adults and Community Care Practice programme, a specialist post‐qualifying social work education programme run by a UK university, as an example of an evaluation of the impact on practice. The results indicate positive evidence of impact on practice and demonstrate examples of how the programme has had a direct effect on individuals, teams, organisations and on people who use services.     

Mall walking and urban sociability

In this article we examine a relatively new social activity: mall walking: This is a low‐impact, aerobic workout in which participants walk for exercise in the climate‐controlled, safe environment of the shopping mall before it is officially open to the public. Participants mall walk for various reasons and display differing levels of commitment. However, through their sociability and interaction, a shared environment of mall walking has been constructed and maintained. In sum, mall walkers have transformed the physical setting of the mall into one where, in conjunction with exercise, the quest for sociability can be somewhat satisfied.     

An analysis of dyadic dominance in family decision‐making among older adults

Growth of the population aged sixty‐five and over is a significant trend in the sociodemographic structure of society. As a result, this age group is receiving increased attention from governmental and business decision‐makers. Little is known, however, about intra‐family decision‐making among members of this group. This paper presents an analysis of the determinants of husband and wife dominance in family decision‐making. The data indicate that dominance by the wife in decision‐making is related to the wife's positive self‐concept concerning the ability to make decisions as well as a “rub‐off” effect on the wife by the husband's self‐concept. Work history of the husband, in turn, contributes to his self‐concept. There were, however, no significant relationships between educational levels of either spouse and decision‐making dominance.     

Synthesizing ENABLE-AGE Research Findings to Suggest Evidence-Based Home and Health Interventions

ABSTRACT

As the quest for knowledge translation from research to practice and policy contexts is growing stronger, researchers need to develop strategies for synthesizing research findings. Since home environments constitute an important context for the delivery of health care and social services to older adults and people aging with disabilities, research in this field can serve as an example for such endeavors. Using 35 original publications and one unpublished doctoral dissertation based on the European ENABLE-AGE Project, we aimed to demonstrate a systematic approach to synthesize research findings generated by large research projects as the basis for evidence-based interventions. The synthesized findings highlighted the complex interactions between objective and perceived aspects of housing and aspects of health in very old age, impacting on, for example, residential decision making. Independence in daily activity is influenced by the sociocultural care and service context. A familiar and safe neighborhood, a social network, and a good supply of services are important to perceptions of participation. Going further, we suggest housing-related interventions that address problems and challenges related to ongoing demographic changes. This article contributes to the development of strategies for knowledge translation, connecting research and practice and policy contexts struggling to meet the societal challenges that accompany population aging.     

Contemporary Youth Violence Prevention: Interpersonal-Cognitive Problem-Solving

ABSTRACT

Considerable progress has been made in the past decade in identifying which factors contribute to youth violence. The purpose of this article is to illuminate the issues and group factors that underlie youth violence, assessment and profiling, and prevention programs. Guidelines for predicting youth violence are presented and critiqued. School violence prevention programs, the role of SAMHSA, and interpersonal-cognitive problem-solving are presented.     

Event history modeling of world fertility survey data∗

Event history analysis seems ideally suited for the analysis of World Fertility Survey, WFS, data, which consists of full birth histories and related information, but it has not been much used for this purpose. This may be because event history analysis has practical drawbacks for WFS data, namely partial dates, computational burden, the need to take account of five clocks at once and the difficulty of interpreting coefficients.

We propose a modeling strategy for the event history analysis of WFS data which overcomes these problems, and we apply it to the previously unanalyzed WFS data from Iran. This yields estimates of the time of onset of fertility decline and the extent to which it was due to compositional changes in the population. It also enables us to determine whether it was a period effect, a cohort effect, or both. These results would have been hard to obtain using other approaches. In addition, the usefulness of ACE as an exploratory tool for determining the best coding of independent variables is illustrated.     

International Migration, Sex Ratios, and the Socioeconomic Outcomes of Nonmigrant Mexican Women

This article assesses whether international migration from Mexico affects the marital, fertility, schooling, and employment outcomes of the Mexican women who remain behind by exploiting variation over time as well as across Mexican states in the demographic imbalance between men and women. I construct a gauge of the relative supply of men for women of different age groups based on state-level male and female population counts and the empirically observed propensity of men of specific ages to marry women of specific ages. Using Mexican census data from 1960 through 2000, I estimate a series of models in which the dependent variable is the intercensus change in an average outcome for Mexican women measured by state and for specific age groups, and the key explanatory variable is the change in the relative supply of men to women in that state/age group. I find that the declining relative supply of males positively and significantly affects the proportion of women who have never been married as well as the proportion of women who have never had a child. In addition, states experiencing the largest declines in the relative supply of men also experience relatively large increases in female educational attainment and female employment rates. However, I find little evidence that women who do marry match to men who are younger or less educated than themselves.     

Estimating class-specific parametric models using finite mixtures: an application to a hedonic model of wine prices

Hedonic price models are commonly used in the study of markets for various goods, most notably those for wine, art, and jewelry. These models were developed to estimate implicit prices of product attributes within a given product class, where in the case of some goods, such as wine, substantial product differentiation exists. To address this issue, recent research on wine prices employs local polynomial regression clustering (LPRC) for estimating regression models under class uncertainty. This study demonstrates that a superior empirical approach – estimation of a mixture model – is applicable to a hedonic model of wine prices, provided only that the dependent variable in the model is rescaled. The present study also catalogues several of the advantages over LPRC modeling of estimating mixture models.