Sustainable social work: Modelling knowledge production,transfer, and evidence‐based practice

Gray M, Schubert L. Sustainable social work: modelling knowledge production, transfer, and evidence‐based social work This article is a first attempt to present a model of knowledge production and transfer in social work, drawing on the expanding literature on knowledge production. It highlights features of knowledge production in social work, such as the diverse contexts in which knowledge is developed and applied. It argues that knowledge production by itself is not enough. Equally important is knowledge transfer and implementation. The literature on knowledge production highlights problems with the implementation of actually existing knowledge and the potential resistance to this implementation as highly important issues for social work research. It leads to a greater awareness of the context in which knowledge is produced and applied and creates a bridge between traditional informal and tacit ways of knowing in social work and the demands of evidence‐based practice.     

Unheard voices,unmapped terrain: Care work in long‐term residential care for older people in Canada and Sweden

Daly T, Szebehely M. Unheard voices, unmapped terrain: care work in long‐term residential care for older people in Canada and Sweden This article aims to contribute to comparative welfare state research by analysing the everyday work life of long‐term care facility workers in Canada and Sweden. The study's empirical base was a survey of fixed and open‐ended questions. The article presents results from a subset of respondents (care aides and assistant nurses) working in facilities in three Canadian provinces (n= 557) and across Sweden (n= 292). The workers' experiences were linked to the broader economic and organisational contexts of residential care in the two jurisdictions. We found a high degree of country‐specific differentiation of work organisation: Canada follows a model of highly differentiated task‐oriented work, whereas Sweden represents an integrated relational care work model. Reflecting differences in the vertical division of labour, the Canadian care aides had more demanding working conditions than their Swedish colleagues. The consequences of these models for care workers, for older people and for their families are discussed.     

On the significance of social control: Treatment‐entry pressures,self‐choice and alcohol and drug dependence criteria one year after treatment

Storbjörk J. On the significance of social control: treatment‐entry pressures, self‐choice and alcohol and drug dependence criteria one year after treatment This article explores how self‐choice and treatment‐entry pressures are associated with one‐year treatment outcome (dependence symptoms, 0–6, 12 months) among alcohol and drug misusers, respectively. Informal pressures (from family and friends), formal pressures (related to work, healthcare, social services, social allowances, child custody) and legal pressures (related to the police, criminal justice system, compulsory treatment) were analysed. A sample (N= 1,210) representative of the addiction treatment system of Stockholm County was interviewed when starting a new treatment episode and after one year. Regression analyses indicated that self‐choice and pressures are associated with outcome among alcohol misusers but not among drug misusers when controlling for background factors and severity. Self‐choice (without pressures) correlated with a good outcome (a lower number of dependence criteria). Pressures were generally associated with poorer outcome. Alcohol misusers who had experienced threats regarding child custody did better in comparison with those not experiencing such pressure. The difference in results by drug type and implications were discussed.     

Left behind: How to encourage biological parents' involvement in their children's group homes

This paper addresses the challenges and benefits of involving biological parents in group homes in Israel and presents various means to encourage their involvement in care. Using family systems theories and the concept of co‐parenting, it analyses the fragile and complex relationship caseworkers and foster parents have with biological parents. The paper presents four components that might play a role in encouraging parental involvement to benefit their children's adjustment. The components are demonstrated through case studies and include assessing the family profile; addressing the family's needs within the child's intervention plan; training biological and foster parents; and building co‐parenting between biological and foster parents.     

Decision‐making in child welfare services: Professional discretion versus standardized templates

The article explores differences in the assessment and decision‐making processes, in child welfare services where a standardized template is implemented and in services where it is not. Child welfare services in several countries use different approaches to assess children's and families' need for intervention. In Norway, as in other European countries, there is a shortage of knowledge about decision‐making strategies. The article examines how 36 child welfare caseworkers in 6 different teams in Norway investigate, assess, and make decisions at the phase of an incoming referral. The analysed data were collected by focus group interviews. We use decision theory as a theoretical frame of reference. The analysis shows variation in the assessment procedure at different points of the process, depending on which approach was used. Despite such differences, the final decisions made were almost identical. Even though the data has its limitations because of the small number of informants, the results indicate that choice of approach is not decisive for decision‐making in the child welfare services.     

Better educational inclusion of migrant children in urban schools? Exploring the influences of the population control policy in large Chinese cities

The educational inclusion of rural–urban migrant children in Chinese urban schools has been promoted in the past decades. This paper provides a contextualized interpretation of recent policy developments governing large Chinese cities and evaluates its impact upon the status of migrant children's education. Drawing on data collected from 1,331 migrant children in urban inclusive schools, this study compared current migrant children's family backgrounds and psychological sense of belonging at school in relation to educational outcomes at the primary education level. Results showed that migrant children's socioeconomic status (SES) levels were slightly higher than their counterparts in inclusive schools and a salient SES stratification of migrant students was found. This correlates with students’ reports of fewer incidences of discrimination than hypothesized. Furthermore, capital in migrant families was positively associated with the psychological sense of belonging and academic achievement. These results reveal a significant change to migrant students’ SES as a result of the recent population control policy pertaining to China's large cities since 2014. Implications for research and educational practice, especially with at‐risk migrant students of low‐SES, are discussed.     

The effects of income transfers on poverty reduction in people with disabilities in South Korea

Using a nationally representative sample dataset from the 2016 Korean Welfare Panel Study, we examined the anti‐poverty effects of income transfers in people with disabilities. Our findings indicate that in households with a person with a disability, income transfers decreased by 55.9% and 84.8% of the pre‐transfer poverty rate and poverty gap, respectively. Before income transfers, households with a person with a disability were 1.94 times more likely to be poor compared to those without a person with a disability. When income transfers were offered, the chance of being poor in the disability group was only 1.11 times higher than that in the non‐disability group. Findings from the aggregated data suggest that means‐tested income transfers were more effective in reducing poverty levels than social insurance or private income transfers. At the individual level, the provision of means‐tested programs was also more likely to decrease the likelihood of experiencing poverty than social insurance and private income transfers.     

Natural (Non‐)Informative Priors for Skew‐symmetric Distributions

In this paper, we present an innovative method for constructing proper priors for the skewness (shape) parameter in the skew‐symmetric family of distributions. The proposed method is based on assigning a prior distribution on the perturbation effect of the shape parameter, which is quantified in terms of the total variation distance. We discuss strategies to translate prior beliefs about the asymmetry of the data into an informative prior distribution of this class. We show via a Monte Carlo simulation study that our non‐informative priors induce posterior distributions with good frequentist properties, similar to those of the Jeffreys prior. Our informative priors yield better results than their competitors from the literature. We also propose a scale‐invariant and location‐invariant prior structure for models with unknown location and scale parameters and provide sufficient conditions for the propriety of the corresponding posterior distribution. Illustrative examples are presented using simulated and real data.     

An Optimal Semiparametric Method for Two‐group Classification

In the classical discriminant analysis, when two multivariate normal distributions with equal variance–covariance matrices are assumed for two groups, the classical linear discriminant function is optimal with respect to maximizing the standardized difference between the means of two groups. However, for a typical case‐control study, the distributional assumption for the case group often needs to be relaxed in practice. Komori et al. (Generalized t ‐statistic for two‐group classification. Biometrics 2015, 71: 404–416) proposed the generalized t ‐statistic to obtain a linear discriminant function, which allows for heterogeneity of case group. Their procedure has an optimality property in the class of consideration. We perform a further study of the problem and show that additional improvement is achievable. The approach we propose does not require a parametric distributional assumption on the case group. We further show that the new estimator is efficient, in that no further improvement is possible to construct the linear discriminant function more efficiently. We conduct simulation studies and real data examples to illustrate the finite sample performance and the gain that it produces in comparison with existing methods.