经济赋能与社区融合—以一个西部地区的反贫困实践为例

文章基于陕西省白水县的农村反贫困实践探索,从发展性社会工作视角探讨经济赋能与社区融合干预对于残疾人脱贫发展的意义。 这一反贫困实践案例显示,贫困者的生计发展嵌入在其家庭及社区的关系性脉络中,依托于残疾人互助合作社的社区融合介入,有助于残疾人的经济与社会的双重赋能,提升残疾人生计发展的内生动力。 同时,本地社会组织在残疾人反贫困中发挥关键作用,社会组织的能动性发展促进了多主体合作参与的贫困治理,也带动了社会工作专业理念和方法在反贫困实践中的运用。     

Engaging leader – Engaged employees? A cross-lagged study on employee engagement

The goal of this study is to provide a cross-lagged examination of the relationships between engaging leadership, job resources and employee work engagement. We propose a mediation model and we postulate that engaging leadership can increase perceptions of three specific job resources (i.e. autonomy, support from colleagues and opportunities for learning and development) which theoretically correspond to the three facets of engaging leadership (i.e., inspiring, connecting and strengthening, respectively). Subsequently, in keeping with the extant body of Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) research, we link job resources to employee work engagement. Our hypotheses were tested on data collected at two time-points – T1 (N = 759) and T2 (N = 273) –from employees working for a hotel chain in the Netherlands. In line with our expectations, engaging leadership showed a significant cross-lagged relationship with autonomy and support from colleagues, but did not predict learning opportunities and work engagement across time. While we formulated specific hypotheses, we also tested reversed causation relationships. We found no direct effect from engaging leadership on employee work engagement, however, the reversed effect was significant; employee perceptions of engaging leadership were shaped by their own engagement experiences. Importantly, engaged employees at T1 reported more job resources at T2. By providing a cross-lagged examination of our model, we showed that engaging leaders as well as employees’ positive affective state of being engaged, are essential to shaping a resourceful work context. A comprehensive view on the triggers and outcomes of work engagement and engaging leadership is needed, as the traditional unidirectional cause-effect rationale fails to explain how these concepts relate to one another and to employee experiences of job resources.     

Social work students' conception on roles within the family in Greece

The present article is based on a small-scale research that took place with third-year students in the department of social work at Technological Educational Institute of Patras. During class the students, who undertake the laboratory course ‘Social Work with Families’, were asked to discuss family roles and depict them on drawings. Analysing their drawings in a qualitative approach the findings suggest that students adopt traditional views on family issues and the family roles. Various gender stereotypes and prejudices were reflected in students' drawings and this is alarming for both social work education and practice.     

Feminist and empowerment theory and social work practice

Feminist and empowerment theories are especially important to the understanding of individual and sociopolitical levels of social work assessment and intervention. Incorporating feminist and empowerment approaches in practice will provide social workers with the knowledge, values and skills most likely to promote human rights and social justice. In this paper, we present an overview of both theories and illustrate them with a case example.     

Coalition for a Healthier Community: Lessons learned and implications for future work

The Coalition for a Healthier Community (CHC) initiative was implemented to improve the health and well-being of women and girls. Underpinning CHC is a gender-based focus that uses a network of community partners working collaboratively to generate relevant behavior change and improved health outcomes. Ten programs are trying to determine whether gender-focused system approaches are cost-effective ways to address health disparities in women and girls. Programs implemented through coalitions made up of academic institutions, public health departments, community-based organizations, and local, regional, and national organizations, are addressing health issues such as domestic violence, cardiovascular disease prevention, physical activity, and healthy eating. Although these programs are ongoing, they have made significant progress. Key factors contributing to their early success include a comprehensive needs assessment, robust coalitions, the diversity of populations targeted, programs based on findings of the needs assessments, evaluations taking into consideration the effect of gender, and strong academic–community partnerships. A noteworthy impact of these programs has been their ability to shape and impact public, social, and health policies at the state and local levels. However, there have been challenges associated with the implementation of such a complex program. Lessons learned are discussed in this paper.     

An approximation of logarithmic functions in the regression setting

We consider a method of moments approach for dealing with censoring at zero for data expressed in levels when researchers would like to take logarithms. A Box–Cox transformation is employed. We explore this approach in the context of linear regression where both dependent and independent variables are censored. We contrast this method to two others, (1) dropping records of data containing censored values and (2) assuming normality for censored observations and the residuals in the model. Across the methods considered, where researchers are interested primarily in the slope parameter, estimation bias is consistently reduced using the method of moments approach.     

Responsibilisation,social work and inclusive social security in Finland

ABSTRACT

In this article responsibilisation in social work is studied by analysing two Finnish state-level policy documents (called final report and research report) which concern a current activation initiative called inclusive social security (ISS). It is asked how social workers and clients are constructed as responsible subjects in these documents. Responsibilisation refers to the advanced liberal mode of governmentality, which aims to strengthen citizens’ abilities to self-governance through various techniques that include the intertwined elements of surveillance and empowerment. It is demonstrated that the policy documents construct the social workers’ and the clients’ responsibilities partly in different ways. The final report leads activation to be based on shared responsibility and social work to be more community-based, whereas the research report strengthens more individual-based responsibility of clients and social workers. For the clients, the interpretation of ISS based on shared responsibility would probably be less stigmatising and paternalistic than the one based on individual responsibilities, i.e. approaching long-term unemployed citizens as being personally ‘at risk’ and thus a justified target group of individualised techniques for activation. For social workers and clients, future activation appears to be a wide mix of different techniques, moral expectations and possible ways of being a responsible subject.     

Changes in work and care trajectories during the transition to motherhood

In most mid- and high-income countries, there have been significant demographic, structural, and cultural changes in the past decades. However, we know little about how these changes have shaped women's work patterns during a key life stage: the transition to motherhood. Using longitudinal data from Chile, covering over 30 years of employment histories and three periods of first births (1980–2010), I conduct sequence analysis to identify women's work-care trajectories during an eight-year period of the transition to motherhood. Over time, I find that continuous care work at home has declined, for which education plays a key role, while the chances of working continuously have not changed over time. Instead, I find an increasing trend of unsteady paths that combine paid work with either caretaking or unemployment. I discuss how these changes, as well as their association with education, have important implications for both gender and social inequality.