构建医学课堂教学质量监控体系

课堂教学质量监控是保证教学工作正常、高效进行的有效手段。锦州医学院在这方面做了有益的探索,建立了以教学督导室、教学信息反馈员等环节为主的环形课堂教学质量监控体系;同时,建立了三级听课制,年轻教师试讲制;加强了考试对教学的指导作用,形成了课堂教学质量监控的良性循环。其做法值得借鉴和思考。     

论我国消费信贷业务存在的问题及其对策

改革开放以来,我国的消费信贷活动出现了一般消费信贷明显减少,特种消费信贷发展较快和消费心理、消费习惯发生了变化等三个新的特点。面对消费信贷活动迅速发展的新特点,银行开展的消费信贷业务却面临着业务量所占的比重小、品种少,对开展消费信贷业务的作用认识不足和缺少一套完善的消费信贷制度等问题,这些问题的存在既不能满足消费信贷活动迅速发展的需要,也束缚着我国和西方发达国家在消费信贷业务方面的竞争。为了克服这些问题,在竞争中处于有利地位,必须提高认识,突出重点,完善机制,努力提高人     

试论提高农村居民生存质量的途径

中国 6 4 %以上的人口在农村 ,没有农民的小康就不会有全国人民的小康。目前 ,我国城乡居民收入差距账面上看是 3:1,实际差距可能已达到 6 :1。城乡之间长期存在的不同身份制度、教育制度、公共服务制度、公共财政制度等等是造成这种差距的根源。这种不公正的体制已严重妨碍了对农村人力资本的投资 ,妨碍了农村劳动力的转移 ,这是束缚我国农村社会生产力发展的最大的体制性障碍。从制度和政策层面改变现行城乡二元结构状态是提高农民生产、生活水平 ,促使城乡共同富裕 ,实现全面小康的最有效的途径。     

Putting the ‘public’ into public service delivery for social welfare in South Africa

Mubangizi BC, Gray M. Putting the ‘public’ into public service delivery for social welfare in South Africa Int J Soc Welfare 2011: 20: 212–219 © 2010 The Author(s), International Journal of Social Welfare © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of SocialWelfare. The privatisation of some essential services in South Africa has raised severe difficulties for those for whom the idea of fees for services is quite foreign and who, in any case, cannot afford to pay for services. The government has developed several initiatives to educate people about the need to pay for services provided by local government, the largest of which was the Masakhane fees‐for‐services campaign. This article describes two recent initiatives that seek to engage local citizen participation, namely, Integrated Development Plans and izimbizo (or traditional forums). These are examined along with the challenges faced by local government in promoting citizenship participation in service delivery within a decentralised system of governance. The article concludes with some recommendations on how citizen participation can be enhanced so as to make the ‘public’ visible in public service delivery and thus improve social welfare services.     

A tractable method to measure utility and loss aversion under prospect theory

This paper provides an efficient method to measure utility under prospect theory. Our method minimizes both the number of elicitations required to measure utility and the cognitive burden for subjects, being based on the elicitation of certainty equivalents for two-outcome prospects. We applied our method in an experiment and were able to replicate the main findings on prospect theory, suggesting that our method measures what it is intended to. Our data confirmed empirically that risk seeking and concave utility can coincide under prospect theory. Utility did not depend on the probability used in the elicitation, which offers support for the validity of prospect theory.

The impact of social transformation on the non-government welfare sector and the social work profession

This article examines changes to non-government social welfare, their impact on service delivery and on the social work profession. To redress the legacy of the past and the consequent inequalities in social welfare, in the first decade of democracy the government allocated the bulk of its welfare resources to transforming the social security system at the expense of social service delivery. As a result, South Africa has a costly social security budget with social services on the brink of collapse, leaving social workers and other social service professionals with low morale in the face of the huge challenge of providing welfare services with scarce resources, especially in the non-government sector. Nevertheless, social work remains an important role player in social development. From its marginalised position in the first decade of democracy, in the second decade it is repositioning itself as a recognised contributor to reconstruction and development in South Africa.     

Enhancing Student Gerocompetencies: Evaluation of an Intergenerational Service Learning Course

This article describes the development and evaluation of an intergenerational service-learning course designed to promote social work gerocompetencies. Service-learning opportunities were structured into the course, including an optional evidence-based falls prevention program, for older adults, entitled A Matter of Balance (MOB). Significant differences between pre- and posttest scores on the Geriatric Social Work Competency Scale (GSWCS) were noted for students in the service learning course (n = 13). Once MOB was introduced as an independent variable, the MOB participants scored the highest mean posttest scores for 2 GSWCS domains: values, ethics, and theoretical perspectives; and intervention. The benefits of utilizing social work gerocompetencies to guide course objectives, content, and student outcomes are discussed.     

Ratio-Scale Measurement with Intransitivity or Incompleteness: The Homogeneous Case

In the homogeneous case of one-dimensional objects, we show that any relation that is positive and homothetic can be represented by a ratio-scale and a unique and constant biasing factor. This factor may favor or disfavor the preference for an object over another. In the first case, preferences are complete but not transitive and an object may be preferred even when its value is lower. In the second case, preferences are asymmetric and transitive but not negatively transitive and it may not be sufficient for an object to have a greater value to be preferred. In this manner, the biasing factor reflects the extent to which preferences may depart from a maximization process.     

Conjuncture and cultural reproduction in the process of embedding: social work practice in the context of government purchase of services in China

This paper focuses on the Chinese government’s policy of purchasing social services and discusses how relevant organisations provide social work and develop it within local socio-political and cultural contexts. An ethnographic research method was adopted for the study by the first author while participating in social work development in Q City. We argue that the policy of purchasing social services succeeded in achieving “embedded development” but also created a “conjuncture structure” in cultural reproduction. However, due toprofessional social workers in China have, in practice, passively responded to the conjuncture there has been a failure to reproduce professional values of social work in the Chinese cultural context. Therefore, further development of social work in China needs to strengthen cultural reflection in practical actions, focus on the exploration of cultural connections between social work practice and local communities, and enhance the cultural capacity of social workers in the local cultural context.     

The prevalence and composition of asset poverty in Canada: 1999, 2005, and 2012

A household is considered asset poor if its assets (financial assets or net worth, taken separately) are insufficient to maintain well‐being at a low‐income threshold for 3 months. We provide the first national‐level estimates of asset poverty for Canada, using the 1999, 2005, and 2012 cycles of the Survey of Financial Security, and juxtapose these estimates with income poverty. The analysis provides new insight into economic insecurity by showing that asset poverty rates are consistently two to three times higher than income poverty rates. In addition to the prevalence of asset poverty across socio‐demographic groups, we analyzed how the composition of the poor change over time. Age and geography shape the risk for asset poverty in distinct ways. We found that while education appears to play a comparable role in shaping both income poverty and asset poverty, immigration places Canadians at a relatively higher risk of income poverty but not asset poverty. Key Practitioner Message: ? Practitioners ought to consider assets as well as income in assessing economic vulnerability; ? Asset poverty levels are 2–3 times higher than income poverty levels; ? Certain groups (e.g., immigrants) may be income poor but maintain sufficient assets.