社会工作视角下大学生志愿服务长效机制构建

当前我国大学生志愿服务大多属于临时或短期的志愿服务活动,缺乏稳定性和持久性,严重制约了大学生志愿服务的深入及可持续发展。大学生志愿服务长效机制的建立,是保证志愿服务可持续发展的重要条件。个人、志愿服务和学校层面因素对大学生长期参与志愿服务产生着不同影响,通过社会工作视角分析发现,健全志愿者选拔与培训体系、导入社工价值理念、建立监督评估激励机制、创建社工义工联动机制等是构建大学生志愿服务长效机制的重要内容。     

网络社交历史与中国早期网民个体生活空间变迁

中国最早的网络移民自始至终伴随了中国互联网的发展,他们的网络使用行为形成了一段不长但至少可以追溯的历史。早期的网络社交将个体从现实物理空间局限中解放出来,具有高蹈于日常生活之上的虚拟色彩;随着网络空间中现实好友的增多和移动位置社交的兴起,网络空间的虚拟色彩渐渐褪去;如今,日常生活中的人际交往不再是在某一单一空间中进行,人们不断地在物理空间与网络空间切换,亦或同时在场。     

How leader role identity influences the process of leader emergence: A social network analysis

Contemporary theories on leadership development emphasize the importance of having a leader identity in building leadership skills and functioning effectively as leaders. We build on this approach by unpacking the role leader identity plays in the leader emergence process. Taking the perspective that leadership is a dynamic social process between group members, we propose a social network-based process model whereby leader role identity predicts network centrality (i.e., betweenness and indegree), which then contributes to leader emergence. We test our model using a sample of 88 cadets participating in a leadership development training course. In support of our model, cadets who possess a stronger leader role identity at the beginning of the course were more likely to emerge as leaders. However this relationship was only mediated by one form of network centrality, indegree centrality, reflecting one's ability to build relationships within one's group. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Capturing hearts and minds: The influence of relational identification with the leader on followers' mobilization and cardiovascular reactivity

The influence of relational identification (RI) on leadership processes and the effects of social identity leadership on followers' responses to stress have received scant theoretical and research attention. The present research advances theoretical understanding by testing the assertion that high RI with the leader drives follower mobilization of effort and psychophysiological responses to stress. Two experimental scenario studies (Study 1 and Study 2) support the hypothesis that being led by an individual with whom followers perceive high RI increases follower intentional mobilization. Study 2 additionally showed that high (vs. low) RI increases follower resource appraisals and cognitive task performance. A laboratory experiment (Study 3) assessing cardiovascular (CV) reactivity showed that, compared to neutral (i.e., non-affiliated) leadership, being led by an individual with whom participants felt low RI elicited a maladaptive (i.e., threat) response to a pressurized task. In addition, relative to the low RI and neutral conditions, high RI with the leader did not engender greater challenge or threat reactivity. In conclusion, advancing social identity leadership and challenge and threat theory, findings suggest that leaders should be mindful of the deleterious effects (i.e., reduced mobilization and greater threat state) of low RI to optimize follower mobilization of effort and psychophysiological responses to stress.     

Does community social embeddedness promote generalized trust? An experimental test of the spillover effect

Despite the theoretical relevance attributed to the spillover effect, little empirical research has focused on testing its causal validity. Addressing this gap in the literature, I propose a novel experimental design to test if the overall density of social links in a community promotes trustworthy and trusting behaviors with absolute strangers. Controlling for social integration (i.e. the individual number of social connections), I found that density fosters higher levels of trust. In particular, results show that people in denser communities are more likely to trust their unknown fellow citizens, encouraging isolated subjects to engage with strangers. However, evidence did not support the idea that community social embeddedness causes an increase of trustworthiness, indicating that the spillover effect works only with respect to trust.     

She persisted: the pursuit,persistence, & power of African American women in social work graduate programs at Historically Black Institutions (HBI)

Social work graduate programs have long grappled with ways to attract and retain students at the intersection of race and gender. The central structure of this analysis is a hermeneutic phenomenological qualitative study on the pursuit and persistence of African-American women in graduate Social Work programs at a Historically Black Institution (HBI). The data in this article were derived from the responses of 13 participants written in their own words. The themes that emerged around the pursuit of a social work degree were (a) service to Black communities, (b) resistance to misrecognition, and (c) a seat at the table. After sharing the salient characteristics of the findings, the article opens a discussion around the significance of HBIs in educating social workers to work in urban communities and the implications for policy and practice.     

Professional discretion and length of work experience: what findings from focus groups with care managers in elder care suggest

ABSTRACT

Research has explored how care managers in elder care – who often function as ‘street-level bureaucrats’ – regard professional discretion. The way in which length of work experience affects care managers’ use of professional discretion remains, however, unexplored. This article present findings from 12 focus groups with 60 care managers. By bringing attention to how care managers experience the needs assessment process, this article sheds light on how these ‘street-level bureaucrats’ struggle when they try to balance their clients’ needs against institutional frameworks and local guidelines. Length of work experience seems to play a role in how care managers claim to use professional discretion. Experienced care managers describe how they deviate from the guidelines at times in order to create an increased scope of action in their decision-making process. Those with less time in the profession describe greater difficulties in this respect. Findings suggest that research should explore if length of work experience plays a role in the actual way in which care managers assess needs and make decisions. As such, they contribute to our understanding of how needs assessment processes are navigated by professionals while also pointing towards the nature of professional discretion in gerontological social work.     

Examining multiplicity and dynamics of publics’ crisis narratives with large-scale Twitter data

The new reality of networked publics on social media calls for crisis communication practitioners and researchers to understand the narratives generated by publics on social media during organizational crises. As social media publics possess diverse, unique characteristics and communicative needs during a crisis, they form interpretative communities and co-create various symbolic interpretations of the crisis. Extending the public-centric and narrative perspective to the context of social media crises, we examined what crisis narratives were constructed by social media publics (i.e., multiplicity) and how these narratives changed by crisis stages (i.e., dynamics). Using topic modelling based on large-scale Twitter data of the Chipotle E. coli crisis (N?=?40,610), we identified ten narratives subsumed under two themes (i.e., sharing-based and conversation-based) based on publics’ social constructions of their perceived risks and crisis experience. On the one hand, sharing-based narratives, heavily impacted by publics’ shared media coverage, reflected media crisis narratives and salient risk perceptions aligning with the news agenda. On the other hand, conversation-based narratives, fueled by publics’ opinion expression and emotional venting, demonstrated publics’ interpretations of their experience with the organization in the crisis with less salient but more diversified risk perceptions. Crisis managers are recommended to produce and deliver compelling narratives resonating with different groups of social media publics during crises.