‘What you need to do is …’: social work students’ reflections on an advice giving audit exercise

This paper reports on qualitative research investigating the advice giving behaviours of social work students. Second-year students, who were enrolled in an interpersonal communication skills course, were required to undertake an ‘advice-giving audit’ exercise across 6 days, with the aim of strengthening their awareness of the interactive nature of advice giving. Students then wrote a diary entry about the frequency of their everyday advice giving behaviour, its intent and reception. Nineteen students provided these reflections for analysis. Findings included three themes pertaining to advice-giving: (i) Giving advice as a natural, comfortable and unconscious way of communicating; (ii) Power and position influences advice dissemination, and (iii) Withholding advice opens, deepens and confuses norms of communication. A fourth theme pertained to the insights that students reported from engaging with the exercise. These findings illustrate the complex interactional process associated with professional advice giving. The research also suggests that experiential activities, which are conducted outside of the classroom, have significant potential to promote the critical examination of embedded communicative practices.     

Amassing rural power in the fight against fracking in Maryland: A report from the field

ABSTRACT

Social workers can mobilize vulnerable populations to shape policy decisions about industrial practices that could have adverse impacts on their wellbeing. One such practice is hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” to extract oil and natural gas from shale rock deposits. There is scant social work literature on mobilizing opposition to fracking despite a proliferation of literature from other disciplines. This article documents the campaign in Maryland that led to the adoption of the first legislative ban on fracking in a U.S. state with shale gas reserves, using social movement theory to identify factors that led to this successful outcome.     

Integrating self-care into clinical practice with trauma clients

ABSTRACT

Self-care is recognized as an important aspect of social work practice. Beginning in educational settings, developing social workers are encouraged to learn about and practice self-care. However, self-care is typically promoted through strategies and approaches outside of the practice context. Social workers are oftentimes encouraged to use individualized self-care plans, which often feature a variety of relaxation and secondary techniques; focus on self-awareness and self-reflection; and have proper use of supervision. Although these strategies are invaluable, they do little to directly benefit the social worker during direct practice or while in session with a client which is a time period when clinicians are particularly vulnerable to distress or burnout. The importance of real-time self-care strategies is particularly critical for clinicians, especially those who engage in trauma work, given the sensitivity of topics that clients may have endured or benefit from assistance in processing. Further, little information has been published on the use of self-care techniques during a session with a client or in a clinical context. The purpose of the present paper is to discuss self-care strategies that can be useful both outside of and within a clinical setting and present a model of such strategies that focus on integrating self-care in clinical practice particularly for those engaging in trauma work. The paper will conclude by discussing the relevancy of the developed model in practice.     

The disaster relief and social work after the Wenchuan earthquake in Mainland China

ABSTRACT

This paper mainly focuses on the development of disaster social work in Mainland China and the intervention of social work in disaster relief. Before the Wenchuan earthquake and in the initial stage of post-earthquake, disaster social work was mainly based on individual psychotherapy; from the earthquake to the year of 2012 in which post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction was completed, the disaster relief began to emphasise community building and integration, while the basic framework for disaster social work was also established. Social workers begin to explore the new mode of developmental and localised disaster social work. By combining with the practical experiences from disaster social work, this paper tries to highlight the dilemmas confronting disaster relief in Mainland China and put forward some corresponding countermeasures and suggestions, which could improve the future disaster relief system in Mainland China.     

Remote Work in Library Technical Services: Connecting Historical Perspectives to Realities of the Developing COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The concept and practice of remote work in library technical services is not new, but the scale and speed of the transition to remote work for many libraries due to the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented. This column provides an overview of pre-pandemic literature on remote work in library technical services and briefly examines the history, planning, case studies, technology and equity concerns, challenges, and potential benefits of remote work. Initial connections are drawn between existing literature and the impact of the pandemic on remote work, and future directions for research and discussion are offered.     

Estimation for seasonal fractional ARIMA with stable innovations via the empirical characteristic function method

Seasonal fractional ARIMA (ARFISMA) model with infinite variance innovations is used in the analysis of seasonal long-memory time series with large fluctuations (heavy-tailed distributions). Two methods, which are the empirical characteristic function (ECF) procedure developed by Knight and Yu [The empirical characteristic function in time series estimation. Econometric Theory. 2002;18:691–721] and the Two-Step method (TSM) are proposed to estimate the parameters of stable ARFISMA model. The ECF method estimates simultaneously all the parameters, while the TSM considers in the first step the Markov Chains Monte Carlo–Whittle approach introduced by Ndongo et al. [Estimation of long-memory parameters for seasonal fractional ARIMA with stable innovations. Stat Methodol. 2010;7:141–151], combined with the maximum likelihood estimation method developed by Alvarez and Olivares [Méthodes d'estimation pour des lois stables avec des applications en finance. Journal de la Société Française de Statistique. 2005;1(4):23–54] in the second step. Monte Carlo simulations are also used to evaluate the finite sample performance of these estimation techniques.     

Evidence-based practice in Chinese social work: overcoming language and developmental barriers

This scoping review followed Cochrane guidelines to comprehensively assess the use and understanding of Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) in Chinese social science literature. We conducted a research across three electronic databases and three major social science journals for the studies published between 2004 and 2016. Chinese social work literature demonstrates a precise understanding of EBP defined as a process, but it lacks comprehensive discussions about EBP that extend beyond basic principles and process definitions. We identified language barriers and developmental issues for social work in China that contribute to these incomplete discussions. We examined the importance of broadening and enriching the discussions around EBP, especially for Chinese educators, researchers, and clinicians involved with empirically supported treatments. We also consider the implications of our findings for the development of social work in China.