Challenges and dilemmas working with high‐conflict families in child protection casework

Social workers within child protection services report that families marked by high levels of conflict between separated parents are among the most challenging cases to handle. Few studies however have focussed on how social workers themselves experience and meet with parents involved in hostile martial interactions. This article reports on a qualitative study involving 31 social workers and provides an analysis of their experiences and dilemmas in working with such families. Findings demonstrate that social workers struggle to find ways to help high‐conflict families and often find themselves at an impasse. Parents involved in such conflict are highly resistant to change, and social workers struggle to engage with them over concerns about their children. Furthermore, findings suggest that social workers lack organizationally allotted time to assist the parents. I conclude by discussing ways in which emotional support, empowering interventions, and strength‐based approaches enable social workers to manage relationships with high‐conflict families. More research on this topic is needed to support and promote better practices for social workers to be more effective in assisting high‐conflict families.     

Responding to Adolescent Violence in the Home – A Community Mental Health Approach

Family violence perpetrated by adults is increasingly understood as a health issue, and we argue that this pertains even more strongly to violence by adolescents. The co-dependence of the parent–child bond, lack of maturity in the adolescent, and often related issues of disability or mental illness make these young people both complex and also vulnerable. This research paper reviews the current literature relating to adolescent violence in the home, identifies known best practice, and evaluates the importance of taking a family-focused, therapeutic approach to adolescent family violence, in place of a punitive one. It describes the use of a co-design workshop to unpack gaps in service provision and develop a potential family focused model of care to address the needs both of young people who use violence, and their families. The findings indicate that an inclusive family approach is a key element in addressing adolescent violence in the home across a spectrum of behaviours and mental health care needs. The use of a coordinated, family-inclusive response through mental health care services is recommended to address the complexity of this issue, as well as to provide support both to adolescents and to their families and carers.     

The exponentiated power exponential regression model with different regression structures: application in nursing data

We define the exponentiated power exponential distribution and propose a regression model with different systematic structures based on the new distribution. We show that the new regression model can be applied to dispersion data since it represents a parametric family of models that includes as sub-models some widely-known regression models. It then can be used more effectively in the analysis of real data. We use maximum likelihood estimation and derive the appropriate matrices for assessing local influence on the parameter estimates under different perturbation schemes. Some global-influence measurements are also investigated and simulation studies are performed to evaluate the accuracy of the estimates. We provide an application of the regression model with four systematic structures to nursing activities score data in the Unit of the Medical Clinic of University of São Paulo (USP) Hospital.