Dis-integrated policy: welfare-to-work participants' experiences of integrating paid work and unpaid family work

Using a critical feminist theoretical lens, we followed 17 families for one year – as they attempted to make the transition from welfare to work – eliciting narrative accounts of their day-to-day lives. We used an institutional–ethnographic methodology to analyse the data. Our study shows that the juncture at which unpaid caring work and paid employment meet may be more difficult to negotiate for low-income lone-parent families than for coupled, middle-class employed families. Findings reveal that the unpaid work that happened on the edges of a paid work day, what we refer to as ‘the work outside the work’, took considerable time and energy for participants, making it difficult for them to procure and/or sustain employment. This was due to a number of factors including their limited access to economic and non-economic resources, and the complex nature of their lives, including struggles with day-to-day functioning and childcare arrangements. These challenges, combined with the realities of the low-income labour market made it difficult, if not impossible, for most participants to effectively integrate work and family. These findings suggest that the dis-integrated nature of welfare-to-work policies, which overlooks the actualities of low-income parents’ lives, limits families’ ability to become self-sufficient.     

College Health as a Partner in the Care of Pediatric Cancer Survivors

Abstract

Objective: This study reviews an initiative to educate providers on pediatric cancer survivor care and to establish a cancer survivor registry in a college health center. Participants: Participants were University of Georgia (UGA) college health providers. Methods: Providers attended lectures on survivor care and were encouraged to register on Cancer SurvivorLink. Changes in provider familiarity and practice were measured using baseline and follow-up surveys. A survivor registry was created using health entrance forms and medical records abstraction. Results: Twenty-four providers registered on SurvivorLink, and 16 completed both surveys. Familiarity with survivor care (p = .003) and a survivor health care plan (p = .016) increased. Likelihood to deliver survivor care increased (p = .01). UGA follows 95 survivors; 71 diagnosed at < 21 years. Among survivors diagnosed at < 21 years, 91% reported their diagnosis on entrance forms. Conclusions: Through education and optimization of health informatics, college health centers can identify and provide survivor care to this medically vulnerable population.     

Individualized Educational Approach to Fieldwork in a Community Mental Health Center

Social work educators have voiced differing views about the best preparation for practice. Some feel that two types of social workers are needed: one to help people in trouble and one to work toward changing society. Other educators advise that programs be aimed at developing general skills. The authors discovered that by concentrating on producing truly educated individuals this conflict was avoided and graduating interns were prepared for a multitude of careers. This individualized educational approach involved the interns in all educational decisions, which helped develop a mature, creative thinking style.     

Mission Impossible?: Measuring Success in Nonprofit Organizations

The difficulty of measuring performance in the nonprofit sector has long been recognized. This article begins with a case study detailing how one organization, The Nature Conservancy, tackled the challenge of moving beyond measuring activity to measuring mission impact. After several false starts, the Conservancy developed a model for measuring success, divided into three broad areas: impact, activity, and capacity. The article then presents data from interviews with leaders of thirty other leading nonprofits, who reveal how their organizations measure performance in these three areas. It concludes with some lessons learned about performance measurement in the nonprofit sector.     

The Hidden Costs of Informal Elder Care

Demographic, socio-economic, and political trends throughout the developed world have contrived to make elder care an issue of utmost policy importance. They also have led to sharp reductions in health and social program expenditures. Policymakers are looking to communities to help meet growing care needs because community care is believed to be better and cheaper than institutional care. However, these beliefs become untenable when costs beyond public sector costs are considered. In fact, informal care carries a number of hidden costs that seldom are considered in health and social policy discussions. This article introduces a taxonomy of the costs of informal elder care, which can be categorized as out-of-pocket expenditures, foregone employment opportunities, unpaid labor, and emotional, physical and social well-being costs. Then, an illustration is provided regarding how the taxonomy can be applied to understanding the incidence, magnitude, and distribution of these costs among stakeholder groups. This taxonomy can help inform ongoing debate about health and social policy reform.     

Age,Experience and Corporate Synergy: When Are They Sources of Business Unit Advantage?

When do older businesses have a competitive advantage over new startups? When do the corporate subsidiaries have advantages over independent firms? This paper tackles these questions by comparing the performance of businesses classified according to age and affiliation in the game of competitive survival. The research is based on an analysis of 377,000 United States business units between 1978 and 1984. Our results suggest that age confers substantial advantages in competitive environments where intangible assets, accumulated through experience, are critical to success. These include industries with high-labour intensity, high skill levels and heavy reliance on push marketing. For other industries, e.g., where competitive advantage can be built through superior service or media hype, age advantage is generally much more limited. Affiliation with a corporate group, meanwhile, allows young businesses to overcome some of their handicap by ‘borrowing’ experience through their parent. Once a business is well established, however, affiliation is immaterial.     

Assessing the pension reform potential of a notional defined contribution pillar

Abstract As some of the limitations of the traditional pay‐as‐you‐go defined benefit public pension model have become more evident in recent years, pension experts have begun searching for alternative models. The notional defined contribution model, also financed on a pay‐as‐you‐go basis, has emerged as one of the major new approaches. Drawing on evidence from schemes in six countries (Sweden, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Kyrgystan and Mongolia), this article aims to describe the notional defined contribution model and to review its strengths and limitations relative to the major alternatives, the pay‐as‐you‐go defined benefit model and the funded defined contribution model. A four‐pillar pension model is proposed.     

A bayesian approach for testing periodicity of dichotomous observations

A Bayesian approach is utilized to test for periodicity in a dichotomous time series. Dichotomous data arise in a variety of circumstances when a variable takes on only two possible values. Conjugate and noninformative priors are considered as well as a hierarchical Bayes approach; the latter is considered the superior Bayes methodology. The situation of stochastic period lengths is also discussed. The generalization to the multinomial model is investigated to allow for the case that a variable takes on more than two possible values. In all cases decisions are made based on a Bayes factor. The proposed procedures are demonstrated on earthquake data in the central Virginia seismic zone     

Estimating detailed distributions from grouped sociodemographic data: ‘get me started in’ curve fitting using nonlinear models

In much demographic analysis, it is important to know how occurrence-exposure rates or transition probabilities vary continuously by age or by time. Often we have coarse or fluctuating data so there can be a need for estimation and smoothing. Since the distributions of rates or counts across age or another variable are often curved, a nonlinear model is likely to be appropriate. The main focus of this paper is on the estimation of detailed information from grouped data such as age and income bands; however, the methods we outline could also be applied to other settings such as smoothing rates where the original data are ragged. The ability to carry out curve fitting is a very useful skill for population geographers and demographers. Curve fitting is not well covered in statistics textbooks, and whilst there is a large literature in journals thoroughly discussing the detail of functions which define curves, these texts are likely to be inaccessible to researchers who are not specialists in mathematics. We aim here to make nonlinear modelling as accessible as possible. We demonstrate how to carry out nonlinear regression using SPSS, giving stepped-through hypothetical and research examples. We note other software in which nonlinear regression can be carried out, and outline alternative methods of curve fitting.