Postcards from the Edge of the Color Line: Images of African Americans in Popular Culture, 1893–1917

This paper examines visual representations of African Americans on postcards from 1893 to World War I. Caricatures of African Americans found on these popular cultural artifacts frequently employ the visual metaphor of other-as-beast. To map the discursive features of this form of racist ideology, attention is paid to the icono-graphic and linguistic strategies employed to depict African Americans as physically, intellectually, and temperamentally distinct and inferior. While no oppositional readings to this racist discourse were located in the flip-side messages of the senders, resistance was located in the contemporaneous popular culture of African Americans.     

What Drives Advocacy? An Exploration of Value,Mission, and Relationships

How advocacy is interpreted and how it fits into an organization’s strategy are areas in need of additional study. Moreover, because nonprofit organizations are believed to have advocacy-based missions that drive their activities and services, the connection between an organization’s mission and its advocacy activities also needs further study. In an effort to address these issues, the purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how advocacy is interpreted in the context of an organization’s mission and how advocacy activities are viewed within human service NPOs. Five themes were identified, all providing support for findings in previous advocacy research.     

Assessing comprehension in a survey of public reactions to complex issues

This paper reports results of research to develop householdinterview procedures for obtaining reasonably informed publicjudgments about ethical issues in biomedical research. We describe(1) an interviewing strategy designed to enhance comprehensionamong survey respondents, and (2) a composite comprehensionindex based on three types of information from the interview.Using data from a cross-section sample, we identify subgroupsthat differ significantly with respect to scores on the comprehensionindex, and we then describe the observed levels of comprehensionin terms of the operations defining the index. The results demonstraleboth the feasibility and limits of obtaining informed ratherthan naive judgments about complex issues from lay respondents.     

Negotiated Orders: The Negotiation of Directives in Paramedic-Nurse Interaction

Whereas the “negotiated order approach” emphasizes the importance of communicative events in the constitution of organizational settings, there has been little attempt to formally describe the properties of talk that occur in these settings. This article demonstrates that detailed examination of the temporal unfolding of negotiative processes contributes to our understanding of the bundle of tasks which comprise organizational settings. Through close analysis of the negotiation of directives in paramedic calls for emergency field orders, I demonstrate that negotiation is more than a metaphor for describing organizational order; real-world negotiations are complex interactional processes which can be described in their rich detail.     

Mission and Advocacy Structure: A Perspective from Human Service Organizations

Nonprofit organizations are expected to advocate for the needs of their clients. However, advocacy is often not part of organizational structure, which can create reactive rather than proactive responses. To explore this issue, this qualitative study examined the macro advocacy practices of a small group of organizations committed to advocacy. Using a mission-driven perspective, results showed that they had a common perception of advocacy, advocacy was implicit in their mission, and that while structure was elusive, decision making around advocacy was clear and issue selection was broadly informed. Recommendations such as harnessing the value placed on advocacy to create structures that can ensure it takes place and giving the charge to do advocacy to a specific staff person are included.     

Civic Literacy and Social Work Education: Results From a Multi-Site Study

Given the decline in civic literacy among Americans, social work educators can no longer assume that students come prepared with the civic knowledge necessary for competent advocacy or policy practice. This article examines rates of civic knowledge among social work students at four social work education programs across the United States (U.S.). Findings indicate that although social work students score higher than the general U.S. adult population, their civic knowledge scores are still low, with nearly a third of these students falling in the failing range. Results suggest that social work students need additional content on civic knowledge.     

Strengthening Advocacy Coalitions: Lessons for Structure,Engagement, and Effectiveness from an IPV Coalition

Social workers who are active in the area of intimate partner violence (IPV) must understand how to structure their coalitions for maximum effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to examine the communication strategies, organizational structures, and relationships between one IPV coalition and its membership to glean recommendations for the field. The authors purposively sampled ten subjects from one state, including staff from the state IPV advocacy coalition (N = 2) and staff from the state coalition's member agencies (N = 8). After completing phone interviews with the subjects, the authors utilized directed content analysis to derive themes from the data. Study findings point to different perceptions regarding access to the coalition, flow of information to and from the coalition, the shaping of the IPV movement, and coalition structure. These differences occurred between executive versus direct practice staff, and nearby versus distant member agencies. Executives and those in nearby regions were more likely to describe a reciprocal relationship between member agencies and the coalition than were direct practice staff or those working in distant agencies. Future research should address the benefits and drawbacks of coalitions cultivating centralized versus decentralized relationships with member agencies, particularly in terms of impact on member agency social service delivery.