Social Work

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.

Measures that are reliable, valid, and can be used across diverse populations are vital to social work research, but the development of new measures is an expensive and time-consuming process. An array of existing measures can provide a cost-effective alternative, but in order to take this expedient step with confidence, researchers must ensure that the existing measure is appropriate for the new study. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is one of the ways to do so. CFA has four primary functions—psychometric evaluation of measures, construct validation, testing method effects, and testing measurement invariance. This book provides an overview of the method, step-by-step guides to creating a CFA model and assessing its fit, and explanations of the requirements for using CFA, as well the book underscores the issues that are necessary to consider when using multiple groups or equivalent and multilevel models. Real-world examples, screenshots from the Amos software program that can be used to conduct CFA, and reading suggestions for each chapter form part of the book.

With the Conservative Party breaking new ground in forming a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, this book examines the development and content of the Conservatives' approaches to social policy and how they inform the Coalition's policies. Chapters cover the development of Conservative Party social policy and specific policy areas.

Which underlying problems pose the greatest threat to British society in the twenty-first century? A hundred years after its philanthropist founder identified poverty, alcohol, drugs and gambling among the social evils of his time, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation initiated a major consultation among leading thinkers, activists and commentators, as well as the wider public. The findings have now been brought together in this fascinating book. Individual chapters range across the political spectrum but the book also reports the results from a web survey and consultation with groups whose voices are less often heard. The results suggest that while some evils — like poverty — endure as undisputed causes of social harm, more recent sources of social misery, such as an alleged rise in selfish consumerism and a perceived decline in personal responsibility and family commitment, attract controversy.

The poverty rate is one of the most visible ways in which nations measure the economic well-being of their low-income citizens. To gauge whether a person is poor, European states often focus on a person's relative position in the income distribution to measure poverty while the United States looks at a fixed-income threshold that represents a lower relative standing in the overall distribution to gauge. In Europe, low income is perceived as only one aspect of being socially excluded, so that examining other relative dimensions of family and individual welfare is important. This broad emphasis on relative measures of well-being that extend into non-pecuniary aspects of people's lives does not always imply that more people would ultimately be counted as poor. This is particularly true if one must be considered poor in multiple dimensions to be considered poor, in sharp contrast to the American emphasis on income as the sole dimension. The book provides detailed discussions of specific issues from a European perspective followed by commentary from American observers. The volume considers current standards of poverty measurement in the European Union and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, challenges in extending those measures to account for the value of the provision of in-kind and cash benefits from the government, the interaction of poverty measures with social assistance, non-income but monetary measures of poverty, and multi-dimensional measures of poverty.

This book represents the first full-length critical and interdisciplinary assessment of Loïc Wacquant's work in English. Wacquant's challenging critique of the neo-liberal government of crime and the punitive culture has recently shaken mainstream criminology to its foundations. In a bold political analysis he describes how the US-led revolution in law and order has dismantled the welfare state, replacing it with a disciplinary and penal state. Wacquant's analysis details the spread of neo-liberal crime control measures and the underpinning ‘pornographic’ discourses of crime across the developed world, although critics have questioned the extent to which this model of criminal justice really is gaining the worldwide dominance alleged. Written by criminologists and policy analysts, the book offers a critical but constructive application of Wacquant's ideas. The contributors welcome the opportunity presented by Wacquant's work to re-engage with a radical politics of law and order, criminalisation and marginality, whilst raising issues of gender, resistance, conflict and history which, they argue, help to enrich and further develop Wacquant's analyses and the discipline of criminology itself. The book concludes with a chapter from Professor Wacquant responding to the commentaries upon his work. It fills an important gap in the existing literature and will be exciting reading for academics and students of criminology, social policy and the social sciences more broadly.

This original book explores the importance of geographical processes for policies and professional practices related to childhood and youth. Contributors from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds explore how concepts such as place, scale, mobility and boundary-making are important for policies and practices in diverse contexts. Chapters present both comprehensive cutting-edge academic research and critical reflections by practitioners working in diverse contexts, giving the volume wide appeal. The focus on the role of geographical processes in policies and professional practices that affect young people provides new, critical insights into contemporary issues and debates. The contributions show how local and national concerns remain central to many youth programmes; they also highlight how youth policies are becoming increasingly globalised. Examples are taken from the UK, the Americas and Africa. The chapters are informed by, and advance, contemporary theoretical approaches in human geography, sociology, anthropology and youth work, and will be of interest to academics and higher-level students in those disciplines. The book will also appeal to policy-makers and professionals who work with young people, encouraging them to critically reflect upon the role of geographical processes in their own work.

This collection draws together experiences and perspectives on user involvement from user activists, academics and practitioners. It includes chapters that focus on autonomous collective action by disabled people, mental health service users and others; action within the health and social care service delivery system to influence services; and user-led and collaborative research designed to promote ways of understanding the world from service users' perspectives. The book includes examples relating to the involvement of young people, young mothers, older people, people living with cancer and woman with alcohol problems, in addition to the experiences of disabled people and mental health service users. Chapters offer conflicting views, for example on the issue of whether the impacts of involvement can and should be ‘measured’. Some chapters offer a historical perspective, arguing for the need to understand both autonomous action and official involvement as interconnected processes of social change. The book highlights both the official acceptance of user involvement as a mainstream activity and the continuing challenges experienced by those seeking not only to have a voice, but also to achieve recognition for their knowledge and understanding. It concludes with a discussion of the continuing need for ‘critical perspectives’, both in the conduct of user involvement and in analyses of it. The book also argues for the necessity of including different perspectives in this process.

The purpose of the book is to provide researchers with a framework to conduct research in a culturally sensitive manner with individuals, families, and communities in diverse cultural settings in the United States, as well as in a global context within the context of three aims: (1) To understand and describe the nature and extent to which a particular problem occurs; (2) To understand the etiology or potential factors associated with the occurrence of a particular problem; (3) To evaluate programs or interventions designed to ameliorate or eliminate a problem. For each of these three aims, applications of different research methods with various population groups are discussed with considerable detail. The work presented falls into different sides of the emic–etic continuum, with some studies taking a more emic perspective (i.e., Chapter 2, a mixed methods study with American Indian populations), others presenting more of an etic approach (i.e., Chapter 3, a multicountry study of drug use in Central America), and yet others presenting an emic–etic distinction that is less salient (i.e., Chapters 4–6, a longitudinal studies of ecological factors and drug use in Santiago, Chile; a longitudinal study of ecological factors and PTSD in the City of Detroit; and a randomized clinical trial and community-based participatory research project both also conducted in Detroit). Two central themes that guided this work are that culture is not static, rather it is fluid and changing, and that cross-cultural researchers should avoid making sweeping generalizations that risk taking on essentialist characteristics. The book concludes with a call for anyone conducting cross-cultural research to include an intersectionality lens, one that encompasses a broader range of multiple identities, into their work.