Social Work Faculty Development: An Exploratory Study of Non-Tenure-Track Women Faculty

Administrators of schools of social work are paying more attention to the changing roles and types of faculty in their institutions, particularly given the surge of non-tenure-track faculty in academia. This topic is timely as social work grapples with the divergent roles, structure, and demographic characteristics of non-tenure-track faculty compared to their tenured or tenure-track counterparts. This exploratory study presents data from non-tenure-track women faculty (N = 10) on how they experience professional development. In-depth, qualitative data was collected to answer the research question, What do faculty identify as the barriers, supports, and opportunities for professional development and job satisfaction? Results indicate that organizational climate and mentoring are barriers and facilitators of faculty development, and the subjective definition of faculty development varies.     

Cohabitation in Spain: No Longer a Marginal Path to Family Formation

Although many indicators reflect the marked retreat from marriage occurring in Spain since the 1980s, the diffusion of cohabitation has been slow. The confluence of very low and late fertility, latest‐late marriage, and low cohabitation has been largely regarded as defying the predictions of the second demographic transition and has fueled a debate over the distinctiveness of the Mediterranean model of family formation. Comparative analyses based on the Family and Fertility Survey documented the marginal role of cohabitation in Spain and in the rest of southern European countries by the mid‐1990s. In this research, the authors used more recent data from the 2006 Spanish Fertility, Family and Values Survey (N = 5,750) to reveal that cohabitation has spread significantly among younger cohorts and hence can no longer be considered as playing a marginal role in the family formation process.     

Trauma-informed care training in a child welfare system: Moving it to the front line

The use of trauma-informed practices in the child welfare system is critically important to prevent system-induced trauma and encourage timely assessment, triage and referral for care when indicated. Ultimately, such measures have the potential over time to decrease the risk for mental health problems in children exposed to a trauma. This study evaluates an initiative in Arkansas to train child welfare front-line staff members in trauma-informed care practices. We evaluated the impact of the training on knowledge and use of trauma-informed care practices among three types of child welfare staff (Caseworkers, Program Assistants and Other front-line staff). Results suggest that this training process was highly successful in improving knowledge of trauma-informed care practices, especially among staff with the least formal education and training. We also found a significant increase in staff use of trauma-informed care practices at the three-month follow-up with little difference observed across staff groups. Barriers that may prevent staff from full implementation of training concepts are described and strategies to address barriers are proposed.     

Lessons from a project to create performance measures for public health

This paper uses a specific example to illustrate complications that arise in formulating and implementing performance measures. The context of this demonstration is a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-funded project to explore the feasibility of performance measures developed at the national level for local sexually transmitted disease (STD) prevention and control programs. Grantees provided local data and reported on their experience in eliciting the data and using the results for program development. The experience of this project suggests that measures can be made operationally feasible and programmatically useful only if terminologies are subjected to extensive definition and clarification activities. These activities must include development of common language, mapping of workflows, and clarification of spheres of influence. Finally, performance measures must be used with some caution, as they often unintentionally capture extraneous program elements.     

Safety Nets and Scaffolds: Parental Support in the Transition to Adulthood

Using longitudinal data from the Youth Development Study (analytic sample N = 712), we investigate how age, adult role acquisition and attainments, family resources, parent-child relationship quality, school attendance, and life events influence support received from parents in young adulthood. Parental assistance was found to be less forthcoming for those who had made greater progress on the road to adulthood, signified by socioeconomic attainment and union formation. The quality of mother-child and father-child relationships affected parental support in different ways, positively for mothers, negatively for fathers. School enrollment, negative life events, and employment problems were associated with a greater likelihood of receiving support. The findings suggest that parents act as "scaffolding" and "safety nets" to aid their children's successful transition to adulthood.     

The knowledge of caring: revisiting the need for knowledge support of carers

Foster carers' knowledge of caring for abused and neglected children is a largely under-researched area. We know very little about the nature of carers' knowledge in relation to caring for children who have been abused or neglected. This paper reports on an exploratory study which examined the knowledge of caring. Qualitative data were analysed based on in-depth interviews with 10 foster carers in Queensland, Australia. A range of knowledge was identified showing an interaction of both personalized and formal understandings in the caring response. Given the breadth of knowledge recognized from the analysis, this paper presents one dimension of their knowing: theory and abuse-indicated understandings. Participants' responses in these areas were at times sound, but many struggled to provide convincing and well-formed explanations of topics, such as attachment, harm and child development which may suggest that their understandings are not what they could be. Although further research is needed on a larger scale, this study does highlight the necessity to re-examine processes and strategies for carer knowledge support, so as to strengthen their understanding of these issues.     

Parental Expenditures on Children's Education

This study examined selected factors related to parents' allocation of money for children's primary and secondary education and, if money was spent on education, the variation in the amount spent. Cragg's double-hurdle model was utilized to analyze data from the 1996 Consumer Expenditure Survey on 331 families that spent money on their children's primary and secondary education and 827 families where parents reported no such expenditures. Factors that were significantly related to spending money on children's primary and secondary education, included after-tax income, parent's education, region, and season of the year. Variables significantly related how much was allocated to children's primary and secondary education, included after-tax income, parent's education, age, and race.     

Long-term care in Spain: Difficulties in professionalizing services

The aim of this article is to analyze the difficulties in professionalizing the long-term care system in Spain. Since 2006, the new Spanish law has recognized care as a subjective right, and regulations are being designed to create a framework for its professionalization. Nowadays, family remains the most important group of providers who care for their elders, and women remain the main informal caregivers. Why do families resist using public long-term care services and professional carers included in the new law? The hypothesis highlights sociocultural factors as an obstacle to professionalization of long-term care services in addition to political and economic factors. The results show qualitative data about expectations, preferences, and discourses that women caregivers have in relation to their responsibility. The empirical material includes 25 interviews with different profiles of caregivers and six focus groups with family caregivers. The article suggests that the Spanish ideal of care is a problem for the professionalization of services because the family remains as the main provider of care—without specific skills, knowledge, and abilities.