The price of a loaf of bread: some conceptions of family support*

This paper reports on a case study of one local authority, and illustrates the different definitions of the term ‘family support’ employed by the different agencies within the authority. It provides a framework to analyse the contribution of the agencies according to the assumptions they make about methods and efficacy of intervention and access to and termination of intervention. It contrasts the findings from this framework with a needs based model of ‘family support’. Social work and health services tend to operate within a narrow, historically determined range, focusing most heavily on emotional support and behavioural change; whereas users and some of the other agencies are more likely to raise matters such as income maintenance, child care, leisure and education. The findings of the case study are discussed in relation to resources for families, key issues for the implementation of family support identified during the introduction of the Children Act, 1989, and the relevance of Social Services Inspectorate inspections to these issues. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The development of social work education in Russia since 1995

This article presents the findings of a four-year survey on the development of social work education in Russia from 1995 to the present day. Through a series of questionnaires, interviews and discussions with Russian academics, practitioners and students, the study looks at a variety of issues including the high rate of attrition. It focuses on aspects of students’ practice placements such as the type, length and quality of practice placements, the students’ workload and the supervision provided. It also looks at the contribution that international collaboration has made to the development of social work education in Russia.

The survey concludes that there is a need to enhance the overall package for social workers and raise the status of the profession in order to retain qualified personnel. Longer practice placements which start in the first year and are adequately funded and supervised are seen as the key to retaining new graduates. It concludes that although international projects have made a difference to those participating at the time, it is difficult to disseminate these benefits beyond the immediate region. Now that international funding to Russia has been reduced it is critical that any remaining funding is accurately targeted and properly coordinated.     

Armchair detectives and the social construction of falsehoods: an actor–network approach

ABSTRACT

This paper examines two large-scale cases ? the 2013 Boston bombing and the 2015 Bangkok bombing, each of which spurred an online investigation conducted by concerned citizens to find the bombers. While both bombing cases had different cultural discourses, the processes and outcomes of the online investigation were similar: there were rampant speculation and rumor-mongering, as well as false accusations and harassment of innocent suspects. The aim of the paper is to understand how such acts of mob justice happened. Using actor–network theory, a theoretical and methodological tool for mapping out the networks human and non-human interactions, I discuss two types of networks found in both investigations. The two network types demonstrate how a claim can be construed as fact or fiction through such networks of interaction. In light of debates on the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, the findings have implications for the current and precarious state of truth in today’s society.     

Population Density is a Key Factor in Declining Human Fertility

In studying the complex determinants of human fertility, social scientists have given little attention to population density, although reproduction has been shown to be density-dependent for a wide variety of other species. Using fixed effects models on the time series of 145 countries and controlling for key social and economic variables, we find a consistent and significant negative relationship between human fertility and population density. Moreover, we find that individual fertility preferences also decline with population density. These findings suggest that population density should be included as a variable in future studies of fertility determinants.

Alternate Definitions of the Uncovered Set and Their Implications

Different definitions of the uncovered set are commonly, and often interchangeably, used in the literature. If we assume individual preferences are strict over all alternatives, these definitions are equivalent. However, if one or more voters are indifferent between alternatives these definitions may not yield the same uncovered set. This note examines how these definitions differ in a distributive setting, where each voter can be indifferent between any number of alternatives. I show that, defined one way, the uncovered set is equal to the set of Pareto allocations that give over half the voters a strictly positive payoff, while alternate definitions yield an uncovered set that is equal to the entire Pareto set. These results highlight a small error in Epstein (Soc Choice Welf 15, 81–93, 1998) in which the author characterizes the uncovered set for a different definition of covering than claimed.     

Analysing partial ranks by using smoothed paired comparison methods: an investigation of value orientation in Europe

Summary. This paper introduces the paired comparison model as a suitable approach for the analysis of partially ranked data. For example, the Inglehart index, collected in international social surveys to examine shifts in post-materialistic values, generates such data on a set of attitude items. However, current analysis methods have failed to account for the complex shifts in individual item values, or to incorporate subject covariates. The paired comparison model is thus developed to allow for covariate subject effects at the individual level, and a reparameterization allows the inclusion of smooth non-linear effects of continuous covariates. The Inglehart index collected in the 1993 International Social Science Programme survey is analysed, and complex non-linear changes of item values with age, level of education and religion are identified. The model proposed provides a powerful tool for social scientists.     

A social choice theory of legitimacy

We develop a formal theory of legitimate collective choice. In our theory a policy choice is legitimate if the process through which the final choice was determined is consistent with some principle that can be used to (perhaps partially) rank the potential policy choices. The set of principles in any choice situation is taken to be exogenous, but a decision-making process is defined so as to deal with any nontrivial set of principles. Such a process is itself referred to as legitimate if it is guaranteed to select a legitimate outcome for each possible exogenous set of principles. We characterize the class of procedures that are legitimate, prove that legitimate policy decisions consistent with principles always exist and characterize the set of policy decisions that are legitimate for a any given set of principles. As we do not require the principles to be weak orders of the alternatives, our theory provides a notion of legitimacy that can be satisfied even when the guiding principles are potentially cyclic or incomplete. Accordingly, our theory illustrates one nontautological means by which majoritarian principles can be reconciled with legitimacy.     

GENDER DILEMMAS, GENDER QUESTIONS, AND THE GENDER MANTRA

This paper discusses the social constructions of gender and the problematic effects of these constructions-masculine/feminie-on intimate attachments. It summarizes the aspect of feminist scholarship which revised the traditional developmental paradigm to include a psychology of women and cites recent infant research which re-describes development as a process of increasingly complex forms of relatedness rather than as a progression from attachment to separation. The authors are influenced by the school of feminist revisionism which argues on behalf of the integration of male and female attributes in each person. Two clinical techniques are suggested-"gender questions" and the "gender mantra"-which identify the contradictions inherent in the social construction of gender and encourage alternative constructions that more adequately represent men's and women's actual psychological experience.