Social Work Students' Feelings and Concerns about the Ending of their Fieldwork Supervision

This qualitative study examines the feelings and concerns of 80 social work students at the ending of their fieldwork supervision. The findings show that students who described good relationships reported mixed or ambivalent feelings about the ending, deriving from their warm feelings of attachment, on the one hand, and from their drive to grow and develop, on the other. Those who described poor or fair relationships were spared feelings of sadness or loss, but they were also left without good feelings and with little ability to express their bad ones. The paper offers practical suggestions for improving the supervisory process and ending the fieldwork supervision.     

What Changes MSW Students' View on the Mission of Social Work?

Little is known about how professional social work education affects students' view on the social work mission. Using a secondary analysis of larger longitudinal data collected from masters in social work (MSW) students in California, USA, this study sought to explore the relationship among the students' demographic characteristics, their primary reasons for pursuing an MSW degree, and their view on the mission of social work at the time of entering an MSW program, whether the students' view on the mission of social work changed in the course of an MSW education, and factors contributing to a change of MSW students' view on the social work mission—individual adaptation vs societal change—between the beginning and the end of the MSW program. The results showed that students' degree of social action involvement, type of field practicum, and ideological variables predicted students' view changes or adherence between entering the MSW program and graduating.     

A Multi‐Program Collaboration in Field Education

This paper describes the development of a US‐based field education collaboration among three social work programs that includes: field instructor orientation, continuing education for field instructors, an advisory board, a joint website and database, a field instructor manual and selected joint forms. Benefits, challenges, considerations and strategies will be offered for programs that wish to embark on similar projects.     

Properties of Designs in Experiments on Spatial Lattices

ABSTRACT

When spatial variation is present in experiments, it is clearly sensible to use designs with favorable properties under both generalized and ordinary least squares. This will make the statistical analysis more robust to misspecification of the spatial model than would be the case if designs were based solely on generalized least squares. In this article, treatment information is introduced as a way of studying the ordinary least squares properties of designs. The treatment information is separated into orthogonal frequency or polynomial components which are assumed to be independent under the spatial model. The well-known trend-resistant designs are those with no treatment information at the very low order frequency or polynomial components which tend to have the higher variances under the spatial model. Ideally, designs would be chosen with all the treatment information distributed at the higher-order components. However, the results in this article show that there are limits on how much trend resistance can be achieved as there are many constraints on the treatment information. In addition, appropriately chosen Williams squares designs are shown to have favorable properties under both ordinary and generalized least squares. At all times, the ordinary least squares properties of the designs are balanced against the generalized least squares objectives of optimizing neighbor balance.     

四川青少年田径后备人才培养的现状与策略

鉴于20世纪80年代以来传统三级训练体制“学训矛盾”突出、耽误了不少后备人才的学业和出路,近年来,四川省在青少年田径后备人才的培养方面又作了新的探索,推出了以“华阳模式”为代表的“体教结合”培养模式。为了促进四川田径后备人才进一步全面发展,应当在“华阳模式”的基础上,提高人才选拔的科学化水平,加快竞赛制度和方法的改革,加强教练员队伍建设,并可因地制宜,利用地域优势,培育一些重点项目和特色项目,以提高后备人才的运动竞技水平,提升其文化素质,逐步建立健全完善的后备人才培养体制。     

Choosing fields in an expansionary era: Comparing two cohorts of baccalaureate degree-holders in the United States and Canada

In an era of expanding postsecondary markets and heightened student and institutional competition, students’ field of study decisions may be becoming an increasingly important point of differentiation in the process of social mobility. Drawing on the two most recent cohorts of the Baccalaureate and Beyond and National Graduates Surveys, this paper examines and compares field of study choices among American and Canadian baccalaureate degree-holders. Consistent with existing research, gender remains an important and consistent predictor of field of study choices. In Canada, the analyses show some evidence that the gender gap for business and management is shrinking, but the engineering and mathematics gap remains significant. In the U.S. the situation was reversed, as the engineering gap shrunk and the business and management gap did not change across cohorts. Moderate family background effects, strong and consistent academic ability effects and growing academic aspiration effects were found across most analyses, lending support to theories that predict family background has direct and indirect effects on higher education choices.     

Experimental designs in management and leadership research: Strengths,limitations, and recommendations for improving publishability

Despite the renewed interest in the use of experimental designs in the fields of leadership and management over the past few decades, these designs are still relatively underutilized. Although there are several potential reasons for this, chief among them is misunderstanding the value of these designs. The purpose of this article is to review the role of laboratory, field, and quasi-experimental designs in management and leadership research. We first discuss the primary goals of experimental studies. Next, we examine the characteristics of experimental designs and how to distinguish laboratory, field, and quasi-experiments from one another and from non-experimental studies. Following these discussions, we provide examples of each type of experimental design and discuss their relative strengths and limitations. Finally, we discuss steps that researchers can take to increase the probability of having articles reporting experiments accepted by leadership and management journals.     

Emergency Department Staff Planning to Improve Patient Care and Reduce Costs

In the face of high staffing costs, uncertain patient arrivals, and patients unsatisfied with long wait times, staffing of medical emergency departments (EDs) is a vexing problem. Using empirical data collected from three active EDs, we develop an analytic model to provide an effective staffing plan for EDs. Patient demand is aggregated into discrete time buckets and used to model the stochastic distribution of patient demand within these buckets, which considerably improves model tractability. This model is capable of scheduling providers with different skill profiles who work either individually or in teams, and with patients of varying acuity levels. We show how our model helps to balance staffing costs and patient service levels, and how it facilitates examination of important ED staffing policies.     

Image concerns in pledges to give blood: Evidence from a field experiment

We use a field experiment to study how social image concerns affect a commonly used strategy to attract new donors: pledges to engage in a charitable activity. While waiting for their appointment, visitors to a local government office are offered sign-ups for blood donations in a crowded waiting room. We randomly vary the visibility of the pledge to donate and the organization for which blood donations are solicited (charitable vs. commercial). Our setting provides natural variation in who observes the pledge. We do not find that visibility increases pledges to donate. Exploring heterogeneity in treatment effects, we find that visibility increases pledges when participants are observed by friends or family. Almost all subjects renege on their pledge.