Perspectives on Social Care Practice in Romania: Supporting the Development of Professional Learning and Practice

This paper examines the authors’ experiences of developingand delivering training for workers in social care servicesin Romania, through a European Union PHARE¹ funded project.The authors use their experiences to draw on the past and currentpractices of those social workers who were participants in thetraining and to explore their understanding of the emergingissues and themes for social work in Romania. There is alsoan exploration of the potential opportunities for the furtherdevelopment of professional social work learning and practicewithin Romania. The case is made that learning and developmentof social workers could be supported through the encouragementof participatory networks and ‘communities of practice’.     

A unified approach to proving parametric bootstrap consistency for some goodness-of-fit tests

Because model misspecification can lead to inconsistent and inefficient estimators and invalid tests of hypotheses, testing for misspecification is critically important. We focus here on several general purpose goodness-of-fit tests which can be applied to assess the adequacy of a wide variety of parametric models without specifying an alternative model. Parametric bootstrap is the method of choice for computing the p-values of these tests however the proof of its consistency has never been rigourously shown in this setting. Using properties of locally asymptotically normal parametric models, we prove that under quite general conditions, the parametric bootstrap provides a consistent estimate of the null distribution of the statistics under investigation.