Best practices for online Canadian prenatal health promotion: A public health approach

Background

Prenatal health promotion provides information regarding pregnancy risks, protective behaviours and clinical and community resources. Typically, women obtain prenatal health information from health care providers, prenatal classes, peers/family, media and increasingly, Internet sites and mobile apps. Barriers to prenatal health promotion and related services include language, rural/remote location, citizenship and disability. Online public health platforms represent the capacity to reach underserved women and can be customised to address the needs of a heterogeneous population of pregnant women.

“With Whom no White Scholar can Compare”: Academic Interpretations of the Relationship between W.E.B. Du Bois and Max Weber

Max Weber (1864–1920) is considered one of the canonical founders of sociology, while W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), author of The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Black Reconstruction (1935), has only recently been included in the sociological canon. We provide a historical review of what we know of their relationship in order to first ask, what did Du Bois say about Weber, and second, what did Weber say about Du Bois? We then analyze the extant scholarly discourse of published English-language academic journal articles that substantively mention both Weber and Du Bois in order to address a third question: what did other scholars say about their relationship? We provide an analysis of the variation of scholars’ perceptions on the relationship between Du Bois and Weber to illumine the dominant assumptions about founding figures and the origin story of American sociology writ large. We argue that three mechanisms of white group interests configured the marginalization of Du Bois from both mainstream and sub-disciplinary sociological theory: (1) reduction or “knowing that we do no know and not caring to know” (when knowledge is perceived as irrelevant to white group interests), (2) deportation or “not wanting to know” (when knowledge is systematically exiled), and (3) appropriation or “not knowing that we do not know”) (when dominant knowledge usurps or assimilates challenges to that knowledge).     

Advancing Social Capital Measurement: Using General Social Survey Cycles to Develop an Efficient Survey Instrument

The General Social Survey (GSS) has provided significant insight about the state of societies around the world through the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). Although broadly applicable, in this study the context for developing a new social capital survey instrument covers the Canadian GSS since 1985. Questions in the GSS are often used by researchers who are interested in specific questions or themes for use in some form of re-sampling. Given significant social and relational themes, GSS cycles from 1985 to 2013 were reviewed using a social capital framework to produce a new Social Capital GSS survey instrument. A process of vetting and sorting questions led to development of a 41 question instrument that includes 16 demographic and context variables and 25 social network and trust variables. After testing and refinement, the instrument was used with a randomly sampled group across selected East Hamilton Census Tracts that are differentiated by median income and a standard deviation above and below respectively (n?=?97).     

Maintaining Sexual Desire in Long-Term Relationships: A Systematic Review and Conceptual Model

The most universally experienced sexual response is sexual desire. Though research on this topic has increased in recent years, low and high desire are still problematized in clinical settings and the broader culture. However, despite knowledge that sexual desire ebbs and flows both within and between individuals, and that problems with sexual desire are strongly linked to problems with relationships, there is a critical gap in understanding the factors that contribute to maintaining sexual desire in the context of relationships. This article offers a systematic review of the literature to provide researchers, educators, clinicians, and the broader public with an overview and a conceptual model of nonclinical sexual desire in long-term relationships. First, we systematically identified peer-reviewed, English-language articles that focused on the maintenance of sexual desire in the context of nonclinical romantic relationships. Second, we reviewed a total of 64 articles that met inclusion criteria and synthesized them into factors using a socioecological framework categorized as individual, interpersonal, and societal in nature. These findings are used to build a conceptual model of maintaining sexual desire in long-term relationships. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the existing research and suggest clear directions for future research.     

Infusing Clinical Supervision Throughout Child Welfare Practice: Advancing Effective Implementation of Family-Centered Practice Through Supervisory Processes

Child welfare supervision is fundamental to advancing the quality of practice when seeking to ensure the safety, permanency, and well-being of children. Child welfare supervisors serve administrative, educational, and support functions as they oversee frontline caseworkers and direct service providers. Clinical supervision, a dialog-driven process of case review and consultation is situated within the educational function. The process of clinical supervision is essential to child welfare practice, because it prompts reflection and builds analytical thinking skills needed to address complex situations involved in child protection. Despite increased recognition regarding the importance of clinical supervision, child welfare supervision continues to focus primarily on administrative tasks. Organizational climate and external pressures push this administrative agenda. In addition, many child welfare supervisors lack experience, training, and therefore competency in facilitating clinical case reviews. Strengths-Based Supervision (SBS; Lietz 2013) is a model of clinical supervision that was developed to (a) increase child welfare supervisors’ intentionality regarding the importance of infusing clinical supervision into child welfare supervision and (b) advance the skills needed to implement this practice effectively representing one solution to this ongoing challenge.     

Introduction to the Special Issues on the Supervision of Staff and Field Education of Students

Two Special Issues of the Clinical Social Work Journal have been dedicated to building on the social work discipline’s tradition and commitment to the supervision of staff and field education of students. These issues bring together contemporary theorizing, clinical supervisory and field education practice experience and wisdom, and research studies to contribute to the knowledge base for practicing supervisors and field educators. As the first of the Special Issues, this issue has been dedicated to the supervision of staff. In this Introduction, we share the salient aspects of the articles published, as they relate to contemporary social work supervision, relational considerations within the supervisory dyad, models of supervision for fields of specialization, as well as measurement and evaluation. Implications are shared, with highlights and connections for practicing supervisors made throughout.     

Pointing to Visible and Invisible Targets

We investigated how the visibility of targets influenced the type of point used to provide directions. In Study 1, we asked 605 passersby in three localities for directions to well-known local landmarks. When that landmark was in plain view behind the requester, most respondents pointed with their index fingers, and few respondents pointed more than once. In contrast, when the landmark was not in view, respondents pointed initially with their index fingers, but often elaborated with a whole-hand point. In Study 2, we covertly filmed the responses from 157 passersby we approached for directions, capturing both verbal and gestural responses. As in Study 1, few respondents produced more than one gesture when the target was in plain view and initial points were most likely to be index finger points. Thus, in a Western geographical context in which pointing with the index finger is the dominant form of pointing, a slight change in circumstances elicited a preference for pointing with the whole hand when it was the second or third manual gesture in a sequence.     

Negotiating Symbolic Boundaries in Conflict Resolution: Religion and Ethnicity in Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict

This article is an inquiry into understanding why supranational religious identity often fails to act as a conflict resolution tool in religiously homogenous ethnic conflicts. Narrowing its focus down to the role of religious elites as potential peacemakers in such conflict zones, it proposes the divergence in their conceptualizations of religious and ethnic identities as an explanatory factor. Building on 62 in-depth interviews conducted in Turkey with Sunni Muslim Kurdish and Turkish religious elites, it identifies a three-fold typology of religious and ethnic identities, as conceptualized by these elites: 1) religio-ethnic; 2) ethno-religious; 3) religious. After exemplifying each category with interview data it demonstrates the role these distinctions play in preventing the successful implementation of “Muslim fraternity” as a solution to the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. With these findings, the article contributes to both the literature on religion in conflict resolution and that on identity formation and boundary making. While it invites the former to turn its gaze from macro-level structural factors to meso- and micro-level cultural factors in analyzing religious elite involvement in conflict resolution, it invites the latter to stop employing “ethnicity” as an all-encompassing term (that covers a vast array of identity markers including religion) and focus, instead, on the gradations between religion and ethnicity as sources of identity.     

THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION AND THE UNSECURED CREDIT MARKET

The information technology (IT) revolution coincided with the transformation of the U.S. unsecured credit market. Households' borrowing increased rapidly and there was an even faster increase in bankruptcy filings. A risk of default model with asymmetric information and costly screening is introduced to study this period. When information costs are high, the design of contracts under private information prevents some households from borrowing with a risk of default. As information costs drop, households borrow more and bankruptcy filings increase. Quantitative exercises suggest that the IT revolution may have played an important role in the transformation of the unsecured credit market. (JEL E43, E44, G33)