Negotiating the Dependency/Nurturance Tightrope: Dilemmas of Motherhood and Disability*

La féminité normative place les mères dans une situation difficile, entre la dépendance et la tendance à se dévouer; d'un côté, les bonnes mères devraient être dépendantes dans une relation avec un mäle pourvoyeur. Inversement, elles devraient fournir de bons soins par un maternage actif, habile ainsi que par leur engagement. Cette condition pose des défis aux femmes ayant une incapacité et dont la dépendance à l'égard d'un partenaire masculin peut entrainer de la vulnérabilite par rapport à l'abus, alors que de la dépendance envers l'Etat peut découler de la pauvreté et de la surveillance. L'auteure explore les dilemmes que les mères handicapées rencontrent pour concilier leur position de dépendance par rapport aux besoins de leurs enfants d'etre maternés. Compliquant les conceptions négatives de la dépendance, plusieurs femmes ont décrit comment certaines relations de dépendance leur ont apporté, a elles et à leurs enfants, des réseaux positifs de soutien. Normative femininity offers mothers a tightrope of nurturance and dependency. On the one hand, good mothers should be dependent through a relationship with a male provider. Conversely, they should provide nurturance through active, involved and expert mothering. This tightrope poses challenges to women with disabilities whose dependency on male partners can bring vulnerability to abuse, while dependency on the state can result in poverty and surveillance. This article explores the dilemmas disabled mothers face, reconciling their position of dependency against their children's need for nurturance. Complicating negative conceptions of dependency, many women described how some relations of dependency provided them and their children with positive networks of support.     

PROBING "DONT KNOW" ANSWERS: EFFECTS ON SURVEY ESTIMATES AND VARIABLE RELATIONSHIPS

Don't Know responses to survey questions are ambiguous becausethe same words are used by respondents to mean different things—ignorance,indecision, or uncertainty about the meaning of the questionasked. In order to clarify the meaning of such answers, surveyinterviewers are frequently trained to probe Don't Know answersat least once before the answer is considered final. We arguethat unconditional probing of Don't Know answers may not bea desirable practice, particularly as regards knowledge items.Large unintended effects on responses to four knowledge itemsresulted when two groups of interviewers, who administered thesame survey questions, probed Don't Know responses at differentrates. Strong evidence is provided in the article that the probingof Don't Know answers encouraged guesswork on the part of uninformedrespondents, giving rise to significant distributional differencesand differences in means across half samples for the affectedvariables. However, relationships between variables appear tobe largely unaffected by probing effects. In order to formulatevalid probing guidelines for interviewer training, further researchis needed to establish whether the findings for knowledge questionsgeneralize to factual questions.     

Worker Participation and the Social Service Agency

Summary Is there real sharing of decision-making responsibility withinsocial service agencies? What hope is there for participationby the consumer of services if the agency worker nearest andmost relevant to him has little voice or leverage within theorganization? This paper examines the notion of worker participationwithin the context of the social services department and theprobation service, noting the imperfections of the ‘publicmandate’ behind the authority structure of these organizations.Above all it looks for continuity between the values socialservice agencies publicly represent and the values in theirday-to-day dealings with their own staff and clients. Currenttrade union proposals for worker representation at committeelevel are considered, and Dutch experience in extending theworkers' council from the industrial to the social welfare sphereis presented as one alternative model.     

On the Trail of a Radical Pedagogy for Social Work Education

Correspondence to Dr William De Maria, Department of Social Work and Social Policy, The University of Queensland, Brisbane 4072, Australia. Summary This article uses a general decade by decade approach to notethe emergence (1970s), decline (1980s), and re-emergence (1990s)of radical social work. An issue for this 1990s'-type radicalsocial work will become one of attending to its own teachingmission. A range of radical pedagogic principles is presented:cause-sensitive action, tailoring, contradiction-based learning,de-monopolized values, radical analysis, polemic storytelling,and centring marginality.     

Intrinsically Dynamic Multistate Models

Multistate life table models, which follow persons through more than one living state, have found increasing use in demographic analyses. Multistate stable populations, however, are infrequently used because the constant rate assumption is quite strong and such populations can take centuries to approach stability. Dynamic models, that is models where the rates can change over time, are examined to derive a new solution for the size and composition of a multistate population in terms of the sequence of underlying population projection matrices (PPMs). Constraints on the subordinate eigenvalues and the subordinate eigenvectors of the time-varying PPMs produce a model population that grows according to the dominant eigenvalues of each time-specific PPM and has a state composition that depends only on the most recent PPM. The two living state model is examined in detail, relationships between the PPM elements and the size and composition of the model are explored, and two illustrative applications of the model are presented.