我国经济欠发达地区农村社会养老保险制度的构建

与发达地区相比,我国经济欠发达地区农村养老保险发展十分缓慢,覆盖面极其有限。实际上,经济欠发达地区的农民最需要社会养老保险,因为他们的基本生活需求没有保证,这些地区未富先老特征更为明显,传统的保障功能在弱化。然而,源于农民收入低,增长慢,支付保险费的能力弱;集体经济薄弱,无法为农民养老保险提供资金支持;地方财力单薄,难以全面提供以政府为主的养老基金融资;经济欠发达地区农民获得社会养老保险能力又最弱。为此,应将经济欠发达地区农村社会养老保险作为建设覆盖城乡居民社会保障体系的推进重点,变政府扶持为财政拨款,并向经济欠发达地区倾斜;大力进行宣传教育,让农民充分了解参加社会养老保险的必要性。     

西部地区社会保障体系的模式设计与理论创新

西部地区的经济发展需要社会保障制度为其构筑一道“安全网”。回顾西部地区社会保障的发展历史,从社会保障中几个重要指标出发对西部地区社会保障制度作出绩效评估、分析其原因,并且提出西部地区建立覆盖城乡居民的社会保障体系的基本框架、实现路径、步骤与措施。     

“乌”族词的文化内涵

“乌”族词的形成源于乌鸦的外形特点和生活习性,又蕴含了汉民族的哲学思想、道德观念、价值观念。“乌”族词可以分为形象词语和象征词语两部分。形象词语又以视觉形象居多。象征词语包括借物征取义和借谐音取义两类。     

Children's Experiences of Time When a Parent Travels for Work

This qualitative study focuses on the different ways time is experienced by children in families who face time challenges because of a family member's job that required work travel. Data are from a family‐level study that includes interviews of all family members older than age 7. Using grounded theory methodology, this study illustrates the ways in which job demands and family processes interact. The analysis centers on 75 children's perspectives from 43 families. Holding together assessments of having enough time while wanting more time with their parents, children express emotion, generally unrecognized by parents, around the topic of family time. Children's experience of time with parents is rushed or calm, depending on the activities done in time and the gender of the parent with whom they spend time. Findings are interpreted through a feminist social constructionist lens.     

Relatives in Residence: Relatedness of Household Members Drives Schooling Differentials in Mozambique

Children typically receive investments from their fathers, but absent fathers often invest at low levels. In a father's absence, what types of nonfathers invest heavily in children? This article investigates educational participation as a reflection of childhood investments on Ibo Island, Mozambique, where only one third of school‐aged children live with their biological fathers. Father‐present children generally attended school at the highest rates. Stepchildren and father‐absent relatives (e.g., grandchildren, nieces) attended school at comparably high rates if any coresiding children were father‐present. This may signal high altruism among present fathers toward some nonoffspring. Consistent with this result, a fixed effects model indicates that, within the same household, adult males invested equally in their own children, relatives, and stepchildren. Prejudicially lower investments were made in children who were unrelated to the household's adult males, however; this result has strong negative implications for the well‐being of African children fostered by nonrelatives.     

The Palestinian Family in Israel: Simultaneous Trends

In this article, I seek to present the spectrum of contemporary family structures in Palestinian society in Israel, focusing on those that emerge in various contexts of changes in education, employment and place of residence. To enable attention to the multiplicity of identities engendered by intersection of the positions of gender/class/nationality and to assess the family patterns that maintain them and are shaped by them, I evaluate relations between two concepts: Connectivity, as proposed by Joseph (1999) and translocational positionality conceived by Anthias (2008). The former relates to the development of a feminine identity that develops in a patriarchal gender context, while the latter refers to the constant negotiation that women conduct with the contexts of their sense of belonging and the manner in which they use various resources. Those concepts help determine whether the process that Palestinian in Israel have been undergoing are accompanied by a greater variety of family patterns.

The article will be based on a study in which I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Palestinian mothers in Israel. The data were subjected to intersectional analysis from a feminist perspective, enabling study of the group under examination families of Palestinian women –separately from its surrounding society and also revealing the various subgroups comprising this social category.     

The Aging Semantic Differential in Mandarin Chinese: Measuring Attitudes toward Older Adults in China

ABSTRACT

The Aging Semantic Differential (ASD) is the most widely used instrument to measure young people’s attitudes towards older adults. This study translated the ASD to Mandarin and examined its psychometric properties. The Mandarin-ASD contains three latent factors (Personality and Mental Health, Societal Participation, and Physical) that have high internal reliability and reasonable discriminate validity. Social work researchers, practitioners and allied professionals may utilize the ASD-Mandarin instrument to measure young people’s attitudes towards older adults in China. We issue a call for a universal-ASD that can be applied across different cultural contexts.     

Contact between birth parents and children in kinship care in a sample from Spain

Within the context of kinship care, the main objectives of this work are to study the characteristics of contact between foster children and their birth parents, and their relationship with key variables of fostering, the children and their kinship caregivers. The sample included 189 children from Spain and their kinship families. A semi‐structured placement interview and two scales relating to the child–caregiver relationship and child's psychological adjustment were used with the kinship families. The results revealed a significant percentage of foster children who had no family contact. Various visit types, frequencies and durations were described. Kinship care with contact, compared with placements without contact, was frequently characterized by the absence of professional supervision, and an affectionate child–caregiver relationship; moreover, children with contact were perceived to have fewer serious behaviour and socio‐emotional problems and a greater probability of family reunification. The regression analysis showed that the main predictors for how caregivers assessed contact were the children's emotional reaction during visits and the quality of the relationship between the kinship families and the birth parents. These results suggest the need for further research about contact, which will certainly have a major impact on professional intervention with these families.     

Collecting feedback as a tool to reduce care paralysis: something for family group conferencing coordinators?

Family group conferencing (FGC) coordinators in public mental healthcare are confronted with clients who have little faith in professionals and organizations, who hold off decisions in their family life, who avoid care and who sometimes behave in a hostile manner. A lack of initiative to deal with their situation is not only reserved for clients – all bystanders, including professionals, can suffer from it. The multiplicity and severity of the client's problems lead to a situation wherein everyone involved waits for the initiative of the other. The independence of the FGC coordinator – a fellow citizen, who is free of organizational loyalties and comes to assist other citizens in establishing a plan – seems to work well with the client group of the public mental healthcare. However, the coordinator cannot always prevent deferral or failure of conferences. Drawing on empirical and theoretical findings, this paper considers the possibility of collecting feedback as a way to contribute positively to the alliance between FGC coordinators and those for whom a conference is deployed. We highlight findings from three case studies that centred on multiproblem families. The findings indicate the importance of feedback theory for FGC coordinators in enhancing trust and engagement.