Learning from Mental Health Lived Experience and the Influence on Students’ Practice

This study explored how learning from mental health lived experience influenced Australian social work students’ practice during their first fieldwork placement. Involvement of mental health consumers in social work education is gaining momentum, yet little is known about how this type of learning informs students’ practice. Ten social work students participated in semistructured interviews and one focus group. Findings suggest that learning from lived experience promoted social work practice that honoured the expertise of mental health consumers and privileged personal recovery. Factors such as organisational culture and supervisor attitudes were found to mediate the students’ attempts to privilege lived experience.     

Why do women continue to smoke in pregnancy?

Smoking during pregnancy not only impacts on the woman's health but that of her unborn child. Women most likely to continue smoking throughout pregnancy are generally of lower age, socio-economic status, level of education and occupational status. Women who continue to smoke during pregnancy often feel criticized by society. They feel guilt and personal conflict at not quitting. Lack of long-term positive outcomes from anti-smoking campaigns may result form ignorance surrounding socio-economically disadvantaged women's life circumstances. Current interventions often ignore the emotional and psychological stressors associated with pregnancy; they do not address the altered physiological processes that occur during pregnancy. A review of the literature pertaining to women who smoke throughout pregnancy is presented. Women want an individualised approach to smoking cessation advice, with health care workers having knowledge of the woman's social situation and viewpoints. This paper reveals that the woman's perspective has largely been ignored. Indeed health care professionals have attempted to manipulate women to stop smoking rather than engage in mutually respectful dialogue.     

Active Participation and Well-Being Among the Elderly in Belgium and the USA: A Cross-National Time-Use Perspective

Active participation of the elderly is a recognized response to address the societal and individual challenges of rising life expectancy such as releasing the pressure of age-related public spending, reducing social isolation and improving well-being. How much time older people devote to active participation and whether their time allocation is associated with well-being remains under-investigated. Using time-use data from Belgium (n?=?1384) and the USA (n?=?2133), we investigate the time older people (65–80 years) spent on active participation and examine how this relates to their life satisfaction as an indicator of well-being. The countries vary in the amount of time spent on paid employment and volunteering, but not on informal help. Belgian older people spend much less time on paid employment than their American counterparts. This implies more are available to volunteer and provide informal help. Yet participation rates in these activities are higher in the USA. Multivariate analyses show that associations between active participation and life satisfaction vary between both countries and within both countries by gender and age. Overall, positive associations between paid work and volunteering and life satisfaction suggest that governments would do well to mobilize elderly into active participation, especially in Belgium. Negative associations between informal help and life satisfaction suggest governments should provide greater support for informal carers.

     

Foster carer perceptions of support and training in the context of high burden of care

The challenges of providing sensitive and structured care for children in foster care go well beyond normative experiences of parenting. The present paper describes a mixed‐methods study of foster carers' perceived need for support and training, referenced to estimates of their burden of care. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 17 foster carers in the Canterbury region of New Zealand. Carers' perceived need for support and training were identified through qualitative analysis of interviews using domain analysis method. Carers' burden of care was estimated from the Parenting Stress Index and from a measure of carers' encounters with children's emotional, behavioural and relationship difficulties that was designed for the present study (the Caregiver Behavioural Encounters Index). Foster carers reported substantive, unmet needs for support and training. Foster carers also reported high parenting stress and encounters with a wide range of children's mental health difficulties, including both uncommon and severe difficulties, which together represent an exceptional burden of care. Carers' highest priority need was for training and support on managing and responding to children's mental health difficulties, while their greatest existing support came from Caregiver Liaison Social Workers and other carers. The findings suggest a number of critical implications for practice.     

Work and Family: How Does the (Gender) Balance Change as Children Grow?

This article investigates how work–family balance and the gender division of labour differ according to whether children are in early childhood, middle childhood or the early teen years. It uses measures of both behaviour and attitudes, drawing on two nationally representative Australian data sets, the Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey and the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia. Women have more responsibility for care than men, but with older children there is greater gender equity in the division of labour, a less pressing domestic burden and less maternal time stress. This occurs because women recalibrate their commitments to work and home, not because domestic labour is redistributed between mothers and fathers. Further, it does not hold if women replace unpaid with paid labour; mothers who work full time have high total workloads and high stress levels regardless of the age of children. Fathers are more satisfied with their work–family balance the more they participate in childcare and the more they feel supported by their workplace to access family‐friendly work policies.     

Feeling Rushed: Gendered Time Quality,Work Hours,Nonstandard Work Schedules,and Spousal Crossover

The authors investigated gender differences in couple parents' subjective time pressure, using detailed Australian time use data (n=756 couples with minor children). They examined how family demand, employment hours, and nonstandard work schedules of both partners relate to each spouse's non‐employment time quality (“pure” leisure, “contaminated” leisure, multitasking housework, and child care) and subjective feelings of being rushed or pressed for time. Mothers averaged more contaminated leisure and less pure leisure and did much more unpaid work multitasking than fathers. These results suggest that these differences in time quality do partially account for mothers feeling more rushed than fathers. Weekend work was associated with mothers having less pure leisure, but not contaminated leisure. The opposite was found for fathers. Spousal work characteristics also related to time use and feeling rushed in gendered ways, with male long work hours positively associated with higher time pressure for mothers as well as the fathers who worked them.     

Critical Theory and Medical Care in America: Changing Doctor–Patient Dynamics

This paper examines the potential for theory to adapt to changing contexts of health in the western world. The commoditization of health and the ideology of biomedicine affects social life in creating dependency, social control, and vast inequalities. At the same time, increased access and diversity of consumer health knowledge as evidenced by the use of the Internet and the sharp rise in alternative medicine point to a different dialectic between doctor and patient and the potential for transforming diagnostic, treatment, and economic components of health care. Recent trends suggest increasing patient autonomy and the possibility of a re-emergence of medical pluralism. New theoretical directions should be considered by social scientists in order to more fully understand these changes.     

Qualitative computing--a methods revolution?

Qualitative computing is often described by enthusiasts as revolutionary, but in stark contrast, its methodological innovations are rarely discussed. Why is the debate missing? The paper charts some of the major developments in support for coding and theory-building, exploring the many reasons why these are either taken for granted or unrecognized and often unused. Whilst these tools had the potential to change methods, their adoption and their impact have been uneven, and they have been subjected to remarkably little sharp and critical debate. The paper concludes by asking what is required if researchers are to benefit from and drive this technological change.