Motivations to become a master in social work: a typology of students

ABSTRACT

In the field of social work education, many studies address students’ motivations to become social workers. Most of these studies focus on bachelor‘s students in social work and confirm that altruistic and expressive motivations underlie students’ decisions to enter the social work profession. However, few studies focus on students earning a Master in Social Work (MSW). The purpose of this paper is to explore why students want to earn a master’s degree in social work. An online questionnaire was developed, and the results of six focus group discussions were used. The sample includes 116 graduates from the past 8 years and current students from the MSW programme at the University of Antwerp. We use exploratory factor analysis and identify two types of motivation. In line with earlier studies, we find that the first type is an expressive motivation. These students want to learn more about poverty and social justice and are motivated to improve the life conditions of vulnerable target groups. The second type is an instrumental motivation. These students are oriented towards the development of their professional careers.     

Forecasting differences in life expectancy by education

Forecasts of life expectancy (LE) have fuelled debates about the sustainability and dependability of pension and healthcare systems. Of relevance to these debates are inequalities in LE by education. In this paper, we present a method of forecasting LE for different educational groups within a population. As a basic framework we use the Li–Lee model that was developed to forecast mortality coherently for different groups. We adapted this model to distinguish between overall, sex-specific, and education-specific trends in mortality, and extrapolated these time trends in a flexible manner. We illustrate our method for the population aged 65 and over in the Netherlands, using several data sources and spanning different periods. The results suggest that LE is likely to increase for all educational groups, but that differences in LE between educational groups will widen. Sensitivity analyses illustrate the advantages of our proposed method.     

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.

     

Dynamic collaboration between small- and medium-sized enterprises from highly dissimilar markets

Emerging markets have created significant opportunities for European small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Highly dissimilar market contexts compared to traditional markets and missing resources present substantial barriers to successfully serve those markets. Collaborative partnerships with local SMEs can help to overcome the barriers. Knowledge on how SMEs can develop lasting collaborative relationships in highly dissimilar contexts is scarce. This research investigates which factors influence the stability of more informal collaborative partnerships of Central European SMEs with SMEs located in China. A qualitative analysis of four cases confirms the importance of complementarity of partner resources, working well together based on mutual trust and commitment, shared sensemaking, and the balanced consideration of partner interests. Mutual learning and adaptation in iterative steps to enhance shared sensemaking and seeing differences in interpretation and behavior arising from contextual dissimilarity as opportunities instead of threats turn out to be SME-specific factors essential for building stable informal collaborative relations.     

Spouse “Together Time”: Quality Time Within the Household

During the last decade more and more time-use data were gathered on a household level in stead of on an individual level. The time-use information of all members of the household provides much more insight in research fields that until now largely used data gathered at the individual level. One of these research fields is the study of quality of life, based on the (quality) time partners within a household spend together which in turn is often linked to studying the associations between the amount of time spent together and relationship satisfaction. The amount of face-to-face spousal interaction is considered to be critically important for marital quality and is assumed to be violated within dual-earner couples, especially those with women working long hours. In this contribution we analyze the time-use of couples in the Belgian Time Use Surveys of 1999 and 2005. We identify which activities couples do together and which they do apart, and what household characteristics predict couples’ together time. Working times in general seem the most decisive factor influencing the amount of together time. The increased labor market participation of women, on the other hand, seems not to be so much a threat for the time a couple spends together.