Family support in practice: voices from the field

This paper revisits core family support messages for social work practice in working with children and families, linking to findings from high-profile child protection cases in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Drawing on a comparative study where these identified practice messages were explored through the lens of testimony of family support workers in the UK and Ireland, these core messages are examined. Operating with hard-to-engage children and parents, we hear how families and family support worker colleagues now view the core functions of child and family work across both jurisdictions (Ireland and England). The authors argue that by naming a more detailed set of practices that are deemed as most useful by families, based on the benefits and challenges of intensive family support work, key messages arise that have major resonance for social work and multiagency practice into the future. A basic message from this study is that valuable lessons on engagement and intervention with families can be drawn for professionals by examining the practice elements of this group of paraprofessionals in the child and family arena. This paper adds to debates on the role of support and intervention in social work and family support work.     

The disorganized family: institutions,practices and normativity

This paper considers the value of a normative account of the relationship between agents and institutions for contemporary efforts to explain ever more complex and disorganized forms of social life. The character of social institutions, as they relate to practices, agents and norms, is explored through an engagement with the common claim that family life has been de‐institutionalized. The paper argues that a normative rather than empirical definition of institutions avoids a false distinction between institutions and practices. Drawing on ideas of social freedom and creative action from critical theory, the changes in family life are explained not as an effect of de‐institutionalization, but as a shift from an organized to a disorganized institutional type. This is understood as a response to changes in the wider normative structure, as a norm of individual freedom has undermined the legitimacy of the organized patriarchal nuclear family, with gender ascribed roles and associated duties. Contemporary motherhood is drawn on to illustrate the value of analysing the dynamic interactions between institutions, roles and practices for capturing both the complexity and the patterned quality of social experience.     

Towards intensive parenting? Changes in the composition and determinants of mothers' and fathers' time with children 1992–2006

Contemporary expectations of good parenting hold that focused, intensive parental attention is essential to children's development. Parental input is viewed as a key determinant in children's social, psychological and educational outcomes, with the early years particularly crucial. However, increased rates of maternal employment mean that more parents are juggling work and family commitments and have less non‐work time available to devote to children. Yet studies find that parental childcare time has increased over recent decades. In this paper, we explore the detail of this trend using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS), 1992 and 2006. To investigate whether discourses on intensive parenting are reflected in behaviour, we examine a greater range of parent–child activities than has been undertaken to date, looking at trends in active childcare time (disaggregated into talk‐based, physical and accompanying care activities); time in childcare as a secondary activity; time spent in the company of children in leisure activities; and time spent in the company of children in total. We also investigate whether the influence of factors known to predict parental time with children (gender, education, employment status and the age of children) have changed over time. We contextualize our analyses within social and economic trends in Australia and find a compositional change in parental time, with more active childcare occurring within less overall time, which suggests more intensive, child‐centred parenting. Fathers' parent–child time, particularly in physical care, increased more than mothers' (from a much lower base), and tertiary education no longer predicts significantly higher childcare time.     

Exposure to Traffic and Risk of Hospitalization Due to Injuries

Research on the risk of motor vehicle injuries and their relationship with the amount of travel has been only partially analyzed. The few individual exposure assessments are related to very specific subsets of the driving and traveling populations. This study analyzes the relationship between kilometers traveled and hospitalization due to motor vehicle injuries. Twelve thousand three hundred and sixty nine Spanish university graduates from the Seguimiento Universidad de Navarra multipurpose cohort study were evaluated. They had not been hospitalized due to motor vehicle injuries at baseline and were followed up to eight years. Biannual questionnaires allowed for self‐reporting of kilometers traveled in motor vehicles, together with incidence of hospitalization. Covariates in the Cox regression models included age and gender and baseline use of safety belt while driving, driving a vehicle with driver‐side airbag, driving a motorcycle, and drinking and driving. There were 49,766 participant‐years with an average yearly travel of 7,828 km per person‐year. Thirty‐six subjects reported a first hospitalization event during this time. The adjusted hazard ratio per additional kilometer traveled was 1.00005 (95% confidence interval 1.000013 to 1.000086). Even the smallest of reductions in the amount of kilometers traveled (from an average of 3,250 km per year to 1,000) has a statistically significant protective effect on the likelihood of sustaining hospitalization due to motor vehicle injury (aHR 0.9, 95% CI 0.78 to 0.98). In light of current policies aimed to reduce motorized traffic due to environmental concerns, it may be appropriate to consider the additional health benefit related to reductions in injuries.     

Model selection for probabilistic clustering using cross-validated likelihood

Cross-validated likelihood is investigated as a tool for automatically determining the appropriate number of components (given the data) in finite mixture modeling, particularly in the context of model-based probabilistic clustering. The conceptual framework for the cross-validation approach to model selection is straightforward in the sense that models are judged directly on their estimated out-of-sample predictive performance. The cross-validation approach, as well as penalized likelihood and McLachlan's bootstrap method, are applied to two data sets and the results from all three methods are in close agreement. The second data set involves a well-known clustering problem from the atmospheric science literature using historical records of upper atmosphere geopotential height in the Northern hemisphere. Cross-validated likelihood provides an interpretable and objective solution to the atmospheric clustering problem. The clusters found are in agreement with prior analyses of the same data based on non-probabilistic clustering techniques.     

How Does Relative Income and Variations in Short-Run Wellbeing Affect Wellbeing in the Long Run? Empirical Evidence From China’s Korean Minority

Cognitively appraised life satisfaction is relatively stable over time and can be considered as reflecting subjective wellbeing in the long run. Affect is transitory and can be considered as reflecting subjective wellbeing in the short run. Using the Personal Wellbeing Index to measure cognitively appraised life satisfaction and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule to measure positive and negative affect we examine how income relative to one’s comparator group and variations in short run wellbeing impact upon wellbeing in the long run. We do so for China’s Korean ethnic minority. We find that affective state has an effect on wellbeing in the long run and that a negative shock to affectivity is more persistent than a positive shock. We also find that relative income, rather than absolute income, matters for wellbeing in the long run and that the results are consistent with a status effect.     

The Roots of Community Development in Colonial Office Policy and Practice in Africa

This paper looks at the origins of ideas about community development as they emerged during Britain's administration of its African colonies from the 1920s to the 1950s. Significant influences on development policy and practice include changing ideas about state intervention within the British government, international scrutiny from international organizations, US interest in Africa, ideas and activities of missionary societies, technological developments, great leaps forward by key individuals, examples of state‐sponsored mass education schemes in Russia, colonial disturbances, and cataclysmic events such as the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler, and pre‐eminently, the Second World War itself. The evolution of community development ideas in Colonial Office practice will chiefly be illustrated through instructional films. Those which illustrate the argument are a striking example of community development in action because they are a visual medium in a visual age; they were seen as having a pivotal role in mass education schemes; they illustrate through their topics and scenarios what were seen as the hot development issues of the day; they capture the flavour of the period; and because they are a concrete illustration of the continuity of community development schemes in Africa in the colonial and post‐colonial eras.     

What Determines the Extent to which Employers will Comply with their Social Security Obligations? Evidence from Chinese Firm‐level Data

This article aims to extend understanding of employer responses to social protection regulations enacted by government to ensure the well‐being and security of employees. By utilizing firm‐specific data collected from Shanghai we explore the relationship between firm characteristics, employer behaviour, and the effectiveness of compliance mechanisms that have been adopted to contain contribution evasion by employers. We offer empirical evidence about the impact of the size of the firm, ownership structure, and incidence of risk on employer evasion behaviour in social protection payments. These results should enable enforcement agencies to improve compliance levels and also contribute to building theory as regards the significance of social policies to employers and the impact of social protection on human resource policy.     

Acknowledgements

This article explores whether it is possible to understand the perspectives of people with whom we find it difficult or impossible to empathise, because their moral and political views are very different to our own. Focusing on our dilemmas in carrying out qualitative research with conservative evangelicals and anti‐abortion activists, we take issue with the assumption that understanding is connected with the presence of rapport and empathy in research interviews. This article argues instead that a reflexive approach, which considers researchers’ orientations towards their subject and their respondents and their emotional journeys through the research process, will enable more comprehensive interpretation of our research material.     

EXPONENTIAL DISPERSION MODELS AND THE GAUSS-NEWTON ALGORITHM

It is known that the Fisher scoring iteration for generalized linear models has the same form as the Gauss-Newton algorithm for normal regression. This note shows that exponential dispersion models are the most general families to preserve this form for the scoring iteration. Therefore exponential dispersion models are the most general extension of generalized linear models for which the analogy with normal regression is preserved. The multinomial distribution is used as an example.