Communication with parents in child welfare: skills, language and interaction

This paper reviews the literature on communication between professionals and parents/carers in health and social care. It notes that there is considerable research on doctor–patient communication and counselling, but much less on professionals who visit families in their homes. While there is a large literature on good practice and communication skills, there is little research on the actual encounters themselves. What counts as 'communication' in such publications is explored. The paper suggests that there is much to be gained by considering research in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics on professional–client encounters. Examples of some of the key concepts are discussed and an engagement with this literature is recommended.     

Implications of Eurocentrism for Social Work Education: Trivialization vis-à-vis Skin Color

The significance of skin color among people of color and its relative absence in social work literature is arguably attributed to Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism defines human reality via Eurocentric norms, ideas, values and perspectives. Evidence of Eurocentrism in social work is contained in its literature priorities, skin color litigation, brown racism and skin bleaching. Demonstration of the aforementioned social pathologies involving skin color pertaining to people of color is a critical, existential phenomenon. If social work is to remain viable and be sustained in the future, it must conform to the dictates of changes in the population. That will require a commensurate adjustment and a willingness of its intelligentsia to accommodate skin color and other alternative views relative to education and practice.     

Room for climate advocates in a coal‐focused economy? NGO influence on Australian climate policy

Many Australian environmental non‐government organisations (NGOs) have campaigned for greater political action and community awareness on human‐induced climate change for almost two decades. Australian emissions are the highest per person in the world, yet the Government's response is heavily influenced by the economically‐significant fossil fuel industry. NGO campaigners are sceptical of their campaigns' effectiveness. This paper presents three methods for evaluating the effectiveness of NGO climate change campaigns: Moyer's Movement Action Plan, Schumaker's Assessment of Political Effectiveness, and a document analysis of the influence of NGO submissions to climate policy processes. Evaluation is critical for NGO campaigns to improve their effectiveness, and evaluation criteria and methods should ideally be designed in parallel with the campaign strategy. Using these evaluation methods, it is evident that Australian NGO campaigns on climate change have been effective.     

Parent participation in social work meetings - the case of child protection conferences

This paper is about parent participation in cases where children are involved in a child protection process in the UK. It concentrates on the child protection conference as a site at which the participation of the client and decision-making by professionals are balanced with one another. Unlike previous research, which has been concerned with asking participants their reactions and views using research interviews, the focus here will be on the verbal exchanges between participants in the conference, based on a recording of a child protection review. In this way it is proposed that attention is directed at how the client is enabled to participate and what significance is given to such participation during the event. Der Aufsatz befaßt sich mit der Partizipation von Eltern im Fall, daß Ihre Kinder von der Arbeit des Kinderschutzes erfaßt werden. Er konzentriert sich auf die Kinderschutzkonferenz als den Ort, an dem die Partizipation von Klienten und die Entscheidungen der Professionellen in ein Gleichgewicht gebracht werden. Anders als vorgängige Forschungsansätze, die im Rahmen von Interviews die Klienten nach ihren Reaktionen und Einschätzungen befragt haben, wird hier auf der Basis eines aufgezeichneten Gesprächs zur Prüfung des Falles der Fokus auf die verbalen Interaktionen zwischen den Teilnehmern der Konferenz gerichtet. Deshalb wird vorgeschlagen, die Aufmerksamkeit darauf zu richten, auf welche Weise die Klienten zur Partizipation befähigt werden und welche Bedeutung einer solchen Form der Partizipation während des Prozesses zugemessen wird. Este artículo trata de la participación de los padres en casos en los que los niños se encuentran en situación de protección infantil en el Reino Unido. Se concentra en las conferencias para la protección a la infancia como un lugar en el que se equilibran la participación de los clientes y el proceso de toma de decisiones por parte de los profesionales. A diferencia de anteriores investigaciones, donde se pedía a los participantes que expresaran sus reacciones y puntos de vista a través de entrevistas, aquí nos centramos en los intercambios verbales entre los participantes de las conferencias, a través de la gravación de un caso específico. De esta manera se propone que se dirija la atención hacia cómo se facilita la participatión del cliente y la importancia que se da a dicha participatión durante el encuentro. Cet article traite de la participation des parents d'efants bénéficiant de la protection de l'enfance en Grande-Bretagne. La conférence sur la protection de l'enfance constitue l'objet de cette étude, en tant que lieu dans lequel la participation des usagers et la prise de décision par les professionnels se contrebalancent l'une l'autre. Contrairement à une recherche précédente pour laquelle on cherchait à connaître la réaction et l'opinion des participants en utilisant des entretiens de recherche, il s'agit ici d'étudier les echanges verbaux entre les participants de la conférence, à partir de l'enregistrement d'un compte-rendu sur la protection de l'enface. Ainsi, les auteurs choisissent de se concentrer sur la façon dont l'usager est amené à participer et sur la signification donnée à cette participation pendant l'événement.     

Improving coverage accuracy of nonparametric prediction intervals

Methods are suggested for improving the coverage accuracy of intervals for predicting future values of a random variable drawn from a sampled distribution. It is shown that properties of solutions to such problems may be quite unexpected. For example, the bootstrap and the jackknife perform very poorly when used to calibrate coverage, although the jackknife estimator of the true coverage is virtually unbiased. A version of the smoothed bootstrap can be employed for successful calibration, however. Interpolation among adjacent order statistics can also be an effective way of calibrating, although even there the results are unexpected. In particular, whereas the coverage error can be reduced from O ( n ^-1) to orders O ( n ^-2) and O ( n ^-3) (where n denotes the sample size) by interpolating among two and three order statistics respectively, the next two orders of reduction require interpolation among five and eight order statistics respectively.     

Conditions leading to collective negotiations among police

The number of cities that negotiate collectively with their police officers has grown rapidly in recent decades, but union penetration has been uneven. This paper tries to identify some of the factors which led to collective negotiations. A model designed to predict formal negotiations is tested using both logit and discriminant analysis. The results indicate that environmental factors and dissatisfaction with working conditions are significant influences on unionization. Far less important is the desire to maintain salaries above market levels. Evidence of state enabling laws contribute little to overall prediction once other factors are considered.     

Unionization and productivity in commercial banking

This paper examines the net effect of unions on productivity in the commercial banking industry. The focus of the study is on three methodological issues. First, an attempt is made to determine whether individual unions have a differential impact on banking productivity. The influence of unions on output per man-hour was initially estimated by including a union dummy variable in a Cobb-Douglas formulation of bank production. Separate binary variables were then entered into alternative specifications of the model to test the heterogeneity hypothesis. This hypothesis postulates differential productivity effects among the individual unions operating in the commercial banking sector. Second, the sample banks were paired on a case-by-case basis to assure the homogeneity of the two groupings: i.e., union and nonunion. Sample homogeneity is necessary because of the assumptions of identical production functions and output prices between the groups. Third, a complete covariance model was specified in order to estimate the impact of unionization on each parameter of the production function. In general, the unionized banks were less productive than their nonunion peers. It should be noted, however, that the standard errors were large in all the specifications. Moreover, the labor relations problems associated with one union had a large impact on the sector results.     

Who Is the Boss and Who Is Not? Accuracy of Judging Status

We investigated whether people were accurate at judging other people's status, what behavioral and appearance cues they relied on when assessing status, whether the way those cues were used was accurate, and whether target gender affected any of the results. Targets (N = 48) were university employees (faculty and staff) who were photographed while interacting with a coworker. One sample of perceivers (66 females, 42 males) rated the relative status of the two people in the photograph to each other, and another sample (60 females and males) rated each target in the photograph on status. Additionally, an array of behavioral and appearance cues of targets in the photograph was assessed. Results showed that (1) people were able to assess status in others, (2) the cues they used to assess female and male targets were somewhat different, and (3) how much people relied on specific cues corresponded to how status was expressed in these cues.