Browse

Applied Cross-Cultural Data Analysis for Social Work is a research guide which provides a hands-on approach for learning and understanding data analysis techniques for examining and interpreting data for the purpose of cultural group comparisons. This book aims to provide practical applications in statistical approaches of data analyses that are commonly used in cross-cultural research and evaluation. Readers are presented with step-by-step illustrations in the use of descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate statistics to compare cross-cultural populations using large-scale, population-based survey data. These techniques have important applications in health, mental health, and social science research relevant to social work and other helping professions, especially in providing a framework of evidence to examine health disparities using population-health data. For each statistical approach discussed in this book, we explain the underlying purpose, basic assumptions, types of variables, application of the Stata statistical package, the presentation of statistical findings, and the interpretation of results. Unlike previous guides on statistical approaches and data analysis in social work, this book explains and demonstrates the strategies of cross-cultural data analysis using descriptive and bivariate analysis, multiple regression, additive and multiplicative interaction, mediation, and SEM and HLM for subgroup analysis and cross-cultural comparisons. This book also includes sample syntax from Stata for social work researchers to conduct cross-cultural analysis with their own research.

Community social work practice has made tremendous progress in reaching out to marginalized groups in urban and rural areas of the country, with social work scholars bringing many of the key concepts underlying community practice into fields like health promotion, fostering approaches ranging from involving beauticians in providing domestic violence services, to developing community gardens to address food security and educational initiatives. The role and importance of assessment in development of health and social services are well accepted in the field and represent the fundamental building blocks for the creation of any form of social intervention. Needs assessments are, without question, the most common form of assessment in these fields. They typically, however, result in a rather narrow view of a community that stresses disease risk profiles and lists of various social problem categories. Nevertheless, unlike needs assessments, asset assessments bring a range of factors and considerations to the creation of an intervention that are guided by participatory democratic principles and processes. Although needs assessments can also be guided by participatory principles, they generally are professionally-driven and do not stress capacity enhancement in the process. The emphasis on participatory democracy during asset assessments distances them from their needs counterpart through the use of values, the language used to communicate, and how research methods get conceptualized and carried out. Community asset assessments can be viewed as a goal, a strategy, a set of guiding principles, a method, and a process. These different perspectives make a consensus definition of a capital difficult to arrive at in both scholarly and practice realms. Consequently, it is best to view asset assessments from an evolutionary point of view in order to appreciate the variety of perspectives, tensions, and potential for achieving positive social change. In essence, these assessments are both an instrument of discovery as well as an intervention to achieve community change.

Technological advancements are poised to completely transform the financial system, making it unrecognizable in just a few short decades. Banks are increasingly using financial technologies, or “fintech,” to deliver products and services and maximize their profits. Technology enthusiasts and some consumer advocates laude fintech for its potential to expand access to banking and finance. If history is any indication, however, fintech stands to reinforce digital forms of redlining and enable banks’ continued racialized exploitation of Black and Brown communities. Banking on a Revolution takes the perspective that the financial system needs a revolution—and not the impending revolution driven by technology. Studying various ways the financial system advantages whites by exploiting and marginalizing Black and Brown communities, Terri Friedline challenges the optimistic belief that fintech can expand access to banking and finance. Friedline applies the lens of financialized racial neoliberal capitalism to demonstrate the financial system’s inherent racism, and explores examples from student loan debt, corporate landlords, community benefits agreements, and banking and payday lending. She makes the case that the financial system needs a people-led revolution that centers the needs, experiences, and perspectives of those it has historically excluded, marginalized, and exploited.

Much has been made of the complex social arrangements that girls and women navigate, but little scholarly or popular attention has focused on what friendship means to men. Drawing on in-depth interviews with nearly 400 men and 125 women, the author takes readers on a guided tour of male friendships, explaining what makes them work, why they are vital to the health of individuals and communities, and how to build the kinds of friendships that can lead to longer and happier lives. The interviews with women help map the differences in what men and women seek from friendships and what, if anything, men and women can learn from each other. The guiding feature of the book is Greif's typology of male friendships: he dispels the myth that men don't have friends, showing that men have must, trust, just, and rust friends. A must friend is the best friend a man must call with earthshaking news. A trust friend is liked and trusted but not necessarily held as close as a must friend. Just friends are casual acquaintances, while rust friends have a long history together and can drift in and out of each other's lives, essentially picking up where they left off. Understanding the role each of these types of friends plays across men's lives, from youth to advanced age, reveals developmental patterns, such as how men cope with stress and conflict, and how they make and maintain friendships. We also learn how notions of masculinity and the women in their lives shape their friendships, and how their friends keep them active and happy. Through the words of the men themselves and detailed profiles of men from their twenties to their nineties, readers learn what friendships offer men and how to work on their own friendships.

The world of today is aging and is doing so at a great speed. People are living longer and this represents one of the greatest achievements of the past century, but often an extension of life expectancy does not correspond with an extension of healthy lives. Aging populations, particularly those with a high percentage of oldest old, are often burdened with chronic conditions that require extended long-term care. Who is going to provide this care and in what forms are key problems that will soon affect a growing number of postindustrial and mid-income countries. This book explores the organization of long-term care in Italy, a country already in the midst of an eldercare crisis. There the answer to this problem has taken the shape of home eldercare assistance, an arrangement whereby long-term care services are bought in the market in the form of private and individualized assistance by families sometimes with economic support provided by the state. The providers of these services, commonly known as badanti (minders), are, for the most part, immigrant women, less often men, coming from different areas of the world. Caring for a Living analyzes the global, regional, and local processes that participated in the development of this new organization of care, paying close attention to the role that the state, Italian families, and the workers themselves play in shaping and in defining it.

This book examines the relationship between adolescents’ passage to adulthood and community adaptation, resiliency, and survival. It reviews the literature on initiation and rites of passage along with relevant concepts from community psychology, especially the notion of a psychological sense of community. Cross-cultural ethnographies and case studies offer examples of traditional initiation rites. Elements central to a psychological sense of community and community-oriented rites of passage are explored. Social service paradigms that promote independent programs designed to “fix” people are challenged. This book sets forth guiding principles and clear methods for putting into practice a whole-systems approach to youth development through rites of passage that involves connecting and enhancing environments and building competencies, which promote the positive development of children and youth in their families, in their schools, among their peers, and in their community, and with a strong connection to the natural world. Rites of passage language weaves a common story that links techniques for clinical practice in prevention with identification, treatment, and maintenance. When members of all sectors of a community, for example, professionals, parents, youth, and so forth, join together in learning the language of initiation and rites of passage they can collectively use this common language and shared techniques to improve interventions and therapy with adolescents and their families and integrate many different approaches, such as developmental assets, character education, asset-based community development, the social development model of youth development, academic and social-emotional learning, resiliency, and all education and youth development approaches.

Community social work practice based on a capacity enhancement model offers tremendous potential for unifying communities consisting of groups from very different cultural backgrounds, and in the process of doing so, make physical changes in the community. This book emphasizes community and urban social work and explains how to create positive community environments in marginalized urban-based communities. The use of murals, gardens, playgrounds, and sculptures, for example provide social workers with an opportunity to identify, engage, and plan services with communities. These projects, in turn, are based upon a community's strengths and represent an effort at developing a community's capacity to help itself with assistance from professionals.

This book presents innovative interventions for youth with severe emotional and behavioral disorders. The book is designed to fill a gap between the knowledge base and clinical practice through its presentation of theory, practice parameters, training requirements, and research evidence. Featuring community-based and state-of-the-art services for youth with severe emotional and behavioral disorders and their families, this book describes each intervention in depth, along with the supporting evidence for its utility. Most chapters present a single intervention as an alternative to institutional care. Shared characteristics of these interventions include delivery of services in the community (homes, schools, and neighborhoods) provided largely by parents and paraprofessional staff. The interventions are appropriate to use in any of the child human services sectors and have been developed in the field with real-world child and family clients. In addition, they offer a reduced cost in comparison to institutional care. Several chapters address diagnostic-specific psychosocial and psychopharmacological treatments, which are likely to be provided as adjunctive treatment in a clinical setting.

The growth of the criminal justice system poses a number of significant problems that require ongoing research efforts by scholars across multiple disciplines. Despite the impact that the criminal justice system has on client populations served by social workers and related professions, there are few practical sources available to guide research in these settings. Conducting Research in Juvenile and Criminal Justice Settings: Strategies and Issues fills this gap and represents a cutting-edge yet user friendly book that will be of interest not only to researchers but also to graduate students and agency administrators. This book covers major issues in conducting field research with adults and juveniles and using extant and administrative data sources on criminal justice populations. In particular, the chapters explore the many challenges that often arise in criminal justice settings and offer practical strategies to issues such as how to gain and maintain IRB approval, how to manage a project across multiple agencies, courts, and institutions, and how to maintain relationships with key stakeholders. Furthermore, discussion of issues related to planning a research project in adult and juvenile justice settings, including research designs, recruitment, and retention, are delineated. An extensive bibliographic description of data sources, case studies, and research forms and letters is included.

School social work practice research finds that consultation is among the most frequently performed practice tasks. Yet these studies never define the term or classify types of consultation. In addition, there little professional social work literature on consultation and even less on school social work consultation. This book adapts the consultation theory and practice framework put forward by June Gallessich (1982) that defines consultation in specific terms and proposes that there are six models of consultation: Organizational consultation, program consultation, education and training consultation, mental health consultation, behavioral consultation, and clinical case consultation. They are distinguishable according to their problem focus, outcome goal, intervention methods, change processes, power base, and value system. Consultation services are an important pathway to help school systems fulfill their educational mission and to help school personnel become more effective in their professional work. It is consistent with current educational policy that recommends macro, mezzo, and micro interventions or multilevel responses to school needs, known as Response to Intervention (RtI). The overarching goal of the book is to provide school social workers with the knowledge, skill, and confidence to implement consultation services. Consultation is a powerful method to “realize the promise of the whole-school approach” and to help homes, schools, and communities promote school success and student well-being.

Creating Trauma-Informed Schools: A Guide for School Social Workers and Educators provides concrete skills and current knowledge about trauma-informed services in school settings. Children at all educational levels, from Early Head Start settings through high school, are vulnerable to abuse, neglect, bullying, violence in their homes and neighborhoods, and other traumatic experiences. Research shows that upward of 70% of children in schools report experiencing at least one traumatic event before age 16. The correlation between high rates of trauma exposure and poor academic performance has been established in the scholarly literature, as has the need for trauma-informed schools and communities. School social workers are on the front lines of service delivery through their work with children who face social and emotional struggles in the pursuit of education. They are in a prime position for preventing and addressing trauma, but there are scant resources for social workers to assist in the creation of trauma-informed schools. This book will provide an overview of the impact of trauma on children and adolescents, as well as interventions for direct practice and collaboration with teachers, families, and communities. Readers of this book will discover valuable resources and distinct examples of how to implement the ten principles of trauma-informed services in their schools to provide trauma-informed care to students grounded in the principles of safety, connection, and emotional regulation. They will also gain beneficial skills for self-care in their work.

This book provides a practical, step-by-step, hands-on guide for social work researchers, doctoral students, and professionals who are interested in conducting culturally competent research with diverse populations and groups. This book adopts ethnography as a meta-framework for conducting culturally competent research. Since its inception as an academic discipline, anthropology has developed theories, concepts, methods, and a significant body of substantive studies for the purposes of guiding cultural research, describing cultural groups and processes, and providing data needed for cross-cultural research and theory-building. Ethnography as a meta-framework for research suggests the following components of culturally competent research: (1) A collaborative social relationship with the study group and community; (2) Use of firsthand, long-term participant observation; (3) Use of self as research instrument; (4) Researcher as learner; (5) A contextual view of phenomena; (6) A holistic perspective; (7) An interactive-reactive research process; (8) A cross-cultural frame of reference; and (9) A spirit of discovery. This pocket guide describes each phase of research incorporating these components from framing and designing the study; to data collection, management, and analysis; to final analysis and report writing; and to dissemination to a variety of audiences. Inclusion of these elements ensures that the research is conducted with and close to the lived experience of the study groups. Culturally Competent Research provides a methodological framework for developing a rigorous social work knowledge base for research in an increasingly diverse and global society. Culturally competent research will help the social work profession understand the lived experiences of diverse populations, which will in turn help to shape social work practice and policy to the benefit of all.

This workbook is intended for school social workers and others who find themselves in positions either in a school or school district, working in the area of attendance improvement and dropout prevention and recovery. It is intended as a practical guide to going about actually doing this complex, multifaceted, and very important job. Many books and articles have been written regarding why students drop out of school, along with numerous suggestions for how to address this nationwide problem, but none has provided detailed directions for actually going into a school and beginning the task of tackling this challenging problem.

Marking 50 years since the passage of the Fair Housing and Civil Rights Acts, this collection both builds on and departs from two generations of scholarship on urban development and inequality. The volume’s contributors provide historical context for patterns of segregation in the United States and present arguments for bold new policy actions ranging from the local to the national. Evidence for the negative effects of segregation and concentrated poverty in America’s cities now exists in abundance. Poor and underrepresented communities in segregated urban housing markets suffer diminished outcomes in education, economic mobility, political participation, and physical and psychological health. Many of the aggravating factors underlying this inequity have persisted or even grown worse in recent decades. Yet the level of energy and attention devoted to them by local and national policymakers has ebbed significantly from the levels that inspired the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. This book refocuses our attention on achievable solutions by providing not just an overview of this timely subject but a roadmap forward, as the twenty-first century assesses the successes and failures of the housing policies inherited from the twentieth century. Instead of introducing new theories or empirical data sets describing the urban landscape, the book’s editors have gathered the field’s first collection of prescriptions for what ought to be done. Topics discussed include community development, the Community Reinvestment Act, education triage, housing choice vouchers, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, mixed-income development, and tax increment financing.

Family Engagement with Schools: Strategies for School Social Workers and Educators provides evidence-based strategies for school social workers and educators to engage families in their children’s education by building on the strengths of families. Forty years of research confirms that family engagement with schools is critical for student success. School social workers and educators can help to build family-school-community partnerships that will increase student success. This book begins with a review of both the research and the current policy mandates for engaging families in their children’s education. The book discusses the difference between parent participation, parent involvement, and the preferred term of family engagement. Family engagement with schools is an intentional reframing of the role that families can and should play in their children’s education. Based on concepts such as the social systems perspective, social capital, community, cultural responsiveness, and the strengths-based approach, social workers will see a clear alignment with their roles, competencies, and values. This practical guide provides school social workers and educators with strategies to use both directly with families and in partnership with schools, families, and communities to build strong, sustainable family engagement in education programs. Using the new Department of Education’s Dual Capacity-Building Framework, the book provides concrete suggestions for reframing our vision of families as leaders and decision-makers. The new paradigm is on using the strengths-based approach to work together with families to build capacity and sustainability for the future.

As financial issues are currently a major concern for families, scholars, and practitioners, students have increased their interest in knowledge and skills for practice that addresses finances. Unfortunately, social workers and other helping professionals often lack preparation, knowledge, and skills to tackle increasingly complex financial problems facing their clients. This volume fills a significant gap by assembling the latest evidence about financial education and financial capability in low-income households, and linking it to education, policy, and practice for helping professionals. Financial capability, or the ability of people to understand and act in their best financial interest, includes financial knowledge or “financial literacy” and access to beneficial financial services. This volume builds on theoretical, research, policy, and program developments over the past two decades. This book develops the idea and presents evidence that financial capability has a viral role to play in social work research, education, policy, and practice. It examines recent work by scholars who are generating knowledge and understanding about the role of financial capability on individual, family, and community well-being. The volume also reviews initial efforts to build professional capacity in social work to address the financial issues of low- and moderate-income and other vulnerable households and develops an agenda for future research and education.

Fostering Accountability presents a model of child welfare decision-making that holds public officials answerable for the integrity and validity of the actions they take on behalf of the children and families in their care. It operationalizes the concept of results-oriented accountability, which demands that administrators and practitioners show valid evidence of their success in improving child and family outcomes, not do not merely demonstrate mechanical procedural compliance. Drawing on the experiences of directors, staff, and evaluators, this timely and practical book describes the emergence of results-oriented accountability in child welfare with a special focus on the editors' role in establishing a university-agency research partnership under a federal consent decree. Chapters elaborate on the five successive stages of the results-oriented accountability framework — outcomes monitoring, data analysis, research review, evaluation, and quality improvement — and provide examples of applications of each stage for agency managers. By re-focusing the emphasis on developing policies based on agency data, instead of purely reactive approaches that grasp at solutions and often fall short, Fostering Accountability guides administrators in monitoring outcomes, using evidence to select interventions to enhance results, and applying management strategies to evaluate and improve these efforts. The result is a pragmatic implementation guide for administrators seeking to bring safety, stability, continuity, permanence, and well-being to the lives of abused and neglected children in the United States.

Using a case example of how Pennsylvania Blue Shield trained, hired, and retained several hundred welfare recipients on its work force, this book offers a success story and a broad discussion of welfare reform, public policy, and corporate social responsibility. It also offers a practical explanation of the specific steps needed to establish such a program, including corporate tax incentives, business and government collaborations, and the special needs of welfare recipients. The book demonstrates that it is possible for corporate America to combine bottom-line goals with socially responsible goals.

India has been a major recipient of international aid since its independence on account of its developmental gaps and wide income disparity; yet it also ranks among the top four nations in the world in terms of the number of billionaires. How and what do these fabulously wealthy Indians contribute to the development of their own society? What is the nature of Indian philanthropy? Has the phenomenal wealth creation in recent decades seen an increase in altruistic spending in social development, and what role does the Indian state play in promoting or restraining the act of giving? Making an important distinction between charity and philanthropy, Giving with a Thousand Hands argues that while charity is alive and well in India, the country is short on philanthropy defined as altruistic giving on a large enough scale to bring about transformative social change. The author in this book offers a vision for the future of Indian philanthropy, maintaining that it has a vital role to play in the country and needs to be encouraged through various measures.