bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Psychopharmacology in the Context of Systems of Care
Authors: Pumariega Andres J. , Del Mundo Amor S. , Vance Booney
Published: January 2009

This chapter discusses psychopharmacological treatment for children's emotional and psychiatric disorders. It considers approaches to the selection of pharmacological agents. It then reviews the current state of psychopharmacological treatment with children and adolescents, focusing on pharmacological agents for the treatment of established psychiatric diagnoses and psychopharmacological agents selected to control or treat behaviors experienced by the child regardless of the presence of a clear diagnosis.
Facilitating Communication
Authors: Perlmutter Felice Davidson , Bailey Darlyne , Netting F. Ellen
Published: January 2009

This chapter focuses on the importance of the use of language, both verbal and written. It provides direction for how managerial supervisors may better understand communication and what strategies can be used to enhance this critical aspect of organizational culture. It begins with a brief overview of the importance of communication, then focuses more specifically on understanding and skill building.
Back to Back
Authors: Brown Joseph Epes , Cousins Emily
Published: January 2009

This chapter discusses the growing interest in Native North American heritage among both Native and non-Native Americans alike. Underlying many Native Americans' renewed interest in their own traditions is their increasing disenchantment with a society that for centuries has been presented as the ultimate model of true civilization. Paralleling the disenchantment of Native Americans is the non-Native Americans' questioning of many of the basic premises of their own civilization. The chapter highlights some problems that can arise when non-Natives attempt to adopt Native American traditions without fully understanding them. It also argues that approaches taken to Native American religious traditions should be rigorous and scholarly in the best Western sense. But, in addition to such reification of the subject, it is also essential to understand these traditions as they are lived by human individuals.
Changeless at the Heart of Change
Authors: Brown Joseph Epes , Cousins Emily
Published: January 2009

This chapter focuses on Native American concepts of time and process. Western culture often perceives time as a linear progression that advances from past to present to future in a straight line. In contrast, many Native American cultures observe that the rhythm of the world is circular, as is the life of all beings and forms. In these cultures, time tends to be experienced as cyclical and rhythmic, rather than linear and progress oriented. Most Native American languages, for instance, do not have past and future tenses; they reflect instead a perennial reality of the present. These differing perceptions of time have contributed to the misunderstandings that characterize so many interactions between Native and non-Native Americans.
Psychoeducation with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
Authors: Corcoran Jacqueline
Published: January 2009

This chapter describes the use of psychoeducation for the problem of ADHD in a child. Background information on psychoeducation with families and then the rationale for its application to ADHD is provided. The case application is used to illustrate the main components of a psychoeducational approach: joining, which includes recognition of parenting; education about ADHD (a description of the disorder, its prevalence, and a discussion of its causes); education about medication; and information on risk factors for the disorder and strategies to ameliorate risk.
Cognitive-Behavioral Intervention with Physical Abuse
Authors: Corcoran Jacqueline
Published: January 2009

This chapter takes a cognitive-behavioral approach to intervention with parents who have physically abused their children. A description of the theoretical basis for such an approach is explored, followed by available empirical support. Behavioral parent training and other cognitive-behavioral techniques — problem-solving, self-talk, and cognitive-re-structuring — are presented and applied to a case example.
Cognitive-Behavioral Marital Therapy with Depression
Authors: Corcoran Jacqueline
Published: January 2009

This chapter covers behavioral marital therapy for depression. The rationale for a couples modality for the treatment of depression is described, as well as indications for its use. The stages of treatment are described, along with techniques at each stage, and applied to a case study in a step-by-step fashion.
Solution-Focused Therapy
Authors: CORCORAN JACQUELINE
Published: January 2009

This chapter provides an overview of solution-focused therapy, an approach that emphasizes the strengths people bring and how these can be applied to the change process. The theoretical roots of solution-focused therapy, the underlying assumptions of the approach, and the research on solution-focused therapy are discussed. The main focus of the chapter is on solution-focused techniques, such as the purposive use of language, joining with the client to foster collaborative work, exploring non-problem situations for solutions, creating a future without the problem, and scaling interventions for goal-setting and measuring progress.
Cognitive-Behavioral Theory and Intervention
Authors: CORCORAN JACQUELINE , WALSH JOSEPH
Published: January 2009

This chapter provides a brief overview of cognitive-behavioral therapy, a broad class of present-focused interventions with a shared focus on changing cognition (thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions about the world), changing behavior, and building clients' coping skills. Cognitive theory focuses on the rationality of one's thinking patterns and the connections between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Behavior theory is not concerned with internal mental processes but rather how human behavior, whether adaptive or problematic, is developed, sustained, or eliminated through its external reinforcement. The nature of change in cognitive-behavioral theory is apparent in its hyphenated term. That is, clients can be helped to change in three ways: 1) cognitively, by teaching them how to identify and change distorted thinking; 2) behaviorally, by offering skills training to improve coping capability; and 3) experientially, by helping clients set up natural experiments so they can test the extent to which their beliefs about an event are rational. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is used in the strengths- and skills-based model when people are ready to take action toward their problems and when it appears that a lack of knowledge or skills represent a barrier to more effective functioning.
Learning the Model
Authors: CORCORAN JACQUELINE
Published: January 2009

This chapter demonstrates the strengths- and skills-building model — its principles and practice techniques. All examples are drawn from social service work in a hospital setting, leading to the secondary purpose of the chapter — illustrating how the strengths- and skills-building model can be used in medical social service in which the practitioner has few client contacts and focuses on needs assessment, discharge planning, and referral.
Depression
Authors: CORCORAN JACQUELINE , PHILLIPS JANE HANVEY
Published: January 2009

This chapter discusses how to apply the strengths- and skills-building model to the problem of depression with an emphasis on solution-focused and cognitive-behavioral therapies. The purpose is to empower the client with a focus on what is going well and to take concrete steps to a depression-free future. Specific techniques from solution-focused therapy include the use of idiosyncratic language, normalizing, coping questions, orienting toward the future, exception-finding, externalizing, and scaling. Techniques from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) include social skill training, feeling identification and management, and cognitive-restructuring. However, a strengths orientation pervades the application of CBT techniques to continue the positive and hopeful thrust of solution-focused therapy to the problem of depression.
Enhancing Motivation, Strengths, and Skills of Parents in the Child Welfare System
Authors: HOHMAN MELINDA , KLEINPETER CHRISTINE , LOUGHRAN HILDA
Published: January 2009

This chapter describes the use of the strengths- and skill-building model in child welfare settings. This model allows child welfare workers and other helping professionals involved with child welfare clients to draw on different types of interventions, depending on the goal of the interview and the needs of the client. Motivational interviewing engages involuntary clients by tapping into their internal motivation to change. Solution-focused techniques highlight clients' strengths and resources, helping them envision their preferred future and determine their goals. Cognitive behavioral work focuses on clients identifying high-risk situations and practicing skills that may be used to cope with these various situations. In this way, workers can build collaborative relationships, relying on the capacities parents bring, as well as enhancing their skills so that child safety is protected.
Measures for Assessment and Accountability in Practice With Families From a Strengths Perspective
Authors: EARLY THERESA J. , SEAN NEWSOME W.
Published: January 2009

Most measurement tools designed for assessment and evaluation focus on problems and deficits. This chapter describes tools that have been designed to elicit strengths. Specifically, it provides information about strengths-based measures targeted for children and parents, including psychometric information and information on how to obtain the tools. Because so few instruments have been constructed exclusively from a strengths perspective, the chapter also includes those that elicit strengths and problems in relatively equal measure. For both types of instruments, the focus is on how to use them in a solution-generating way.
Violence in the Home: An Introduction
Authors: Kurst-Swanger Karel , Petcosky Jacqueline L.
Published: January 2009

This chapter introduces the reader to the complex phenomenon of family violence. It explores the conceptual framework from which the subject matter is approached and working definitions of family and family maltreatment are provided. It provides a rationale for the addition of pseudo families to the discourse on family violence. It discusses the reasons why family violence is a critical issue to study and outlines the multidisciplinary perspectives which guide researchers and intervention strategies. Common themes identified in abusive families are introduced as well as some of the cultural factors which encourage and reinforce abusive behaviors, such as violent social models, social conditions, cultural and ethnic heritage, and religious traditions.
Hidden Violence in the Home: Siblings, Parents, Animals
Authors: Kurst-Swanger Karel , Petcosky Jacqueline L.
Published: January 2009

This chapter examines abuse most often ignored in the discourse on family violence — sibling, parent, and animal abuse. These forms of violence often exist within the context of other forms of maltreatment. Forms of sibling abuse are reviewed including emotional, physical, and sexual abuse; fratricide, and sororicide. The chapter also examines the issues that are related to its occurrence such as issues of power and control, lack of supervision and non-intervention, family dysfunction, and social conditions. Research related to the consequences of sibling abuse is discussed. The abuse of parents is also examined including the issue of parricide. The chapter establishes the link between animal abuse and other forms of family violence and explores the different forms of animal abuse including physical and sexual abuse, neglect, and peticide. Signs of animal abuse are explored as is the future of prevention and intervention of this type of family violence.
Elder Abuse
Authors: Kurst-Swanger Karel , Petcosky Jacqueline L.
Published: January 2009

This chapter explores the unique characteristics of violence against family elders. It reviews the trends that have guided the salience of elder abuse throughout history and provides an overview of the risk factors that make the elderly a vulnerable population for victimization, such as the physical and cognitive changes associated with aging and illness. The role of caregiver stress, ignorance, and impairment, and various cultural factors and social conditions are explored. The chapter investigates the issues associated with measuring elder abuse as a social problem and explores the various forms such abuse takes including physical, emotional, financial, and sexual abuse; neglect, self-neglect, abandonment, and the violation of rights. The consequences of elder abuse are reviewed including fatalities and the physical, psychological, economic, and legal effects.
Intervening in Violent Homes
Authors: Kurst-Swanger Karel , Petcosky Jacqueline L.
Published: January 2009

This chapter examines a number of intervention strategies intended to identify, intervene in, and treat violence in the home including state level interventions such as mandatory reporting mechanisms, protective agency service laws, criminal sanctions, protective orders, and specialized courts. Services for crime victims are reviewed including crime victim compensation programs, safe housing, crisis intervention, therapy, and advocacy as well as specific treatment programs for offenders.
THE JEWISH VILLAGE: MUSIC AT THE BORDER OF MYTH AND HISTORY
Authors: Bohlman Philip V.
Published: January 2009

This chapter is the first of several in the first section of the book (“Places of Jewish Music”) that locate Jewish music on the landscapes of European modernity. Rather than treating the village as an isolated place, in which folk music was limited only to Jews, the chapter reveals processes of change and transition. Jewish folk music facilitated and was the product of border crossing, particularly from a concern with the mythical past and to an historical engagement with the present. Jewish folk music practices and repertories were vastly different across Europe, weaving vernacular languages and myths together, while conveying distinctive cultural identities. The chapter includes numerous case studies of Jewish villages in the German Rhineland, on the borders of France, Germany, and Switzerland, and in rural Moravia and Romania. The “Seven Holy Cities” (sheva kehillot) of Burgenland, border region shared by Austria and Hungary, provide at rich set of specific case studies.
THE PEOPLE WITHOUT MUSIC HISTORY: REDISCOVERING JEWISH MUSIC IN THE MEDITERRANEAN
Authors: Bohlman Philip V.
Published: January 2009

This chapter explores the historical meaning of Jewish music in the Mediterranean, particularly as a metaphor the historical past and the Jewish Diaspora. The Jewish music of the Mediterranean provided links to the past and presumably to a world of authenticity and origins. As modern scholars and travels began to experience Mediterranean Jewish music and to bring it in collections to Europe, they recognized that it had undergone changes. Jewish music from the Mediterranean therefore entered modern history and allowed European Jews to intensify cultural links to the Levant and to eretz yisrael, the “land of Israel.” Timelessness in Jewish music was replaced by history. The great scholarly activities of Robert Lachmann (1892–1939) and Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882–1938) provide the empirical material for the chapter.
SELF-REFLECTING-SELF: JEWISH MUSIC COLLECTING IN THE MIRROR OF MODERNITY
Authors: Bohlman Philip V.
Published: January 2009

Collecting music to provide mirrors for the reflection of self-identity had become a passion for modern Jews by the beginning of the twentieth century. Transforming the earlier storage chamber (geniza) used by synagogues to gather community records into archives, libraries, and museums, cantors and folklorists alike recontextualized the music of the past so that it would have modern meanings. Specific collectors provide a series of linked narratives for the chapter. Eduard Birnbaum collected sacred music in Königsberg, Max Grunwald and Friedrich Krauss collected Jewish folklore and folk music in Vienna, and Konrad Mautner and A. Z. Idelsohn aestheticized and modernized the technologies of representation locally in the Austrian Alps and globally in the Jewish Diaspora. The great collections of the early twentieth century have surveyed until the present, as Jewish museums and Jewish memory work in the era following the Holocaust.
Introduction
Authors: Farr Thomas F.
Published: January 2009

The book begins with an apostasy trial in democratic Afghanistan. The episode reveals a serious deficit in U.S. foreign policy: in a world increasingly influenced by religion, American diplomacy lacks the policy mandate, habits of thought, training or bureaucratic structure to engage religious ideas and actors. Beset by confusion, and despite supposedly clarifying events such as the 9/11 attacks, the foreign affairs establishment routinely acts in a “secularistic” fashion, instinctively removing religion from the policy table. The disarray does not admit of easy solution; it is fed by attitudes from across the ideological spectrum of American society. There is, however, a potentially fruitful remedy at hand: the U.S. policy of promoting international religious freedom. Properly refurbished and energized, that policy could dramatically increase the capacity of American diplomacy to advance vital U.S. interests abroad and at home. A key to success will be promoting religious freedom properly understood.
4 The Legislative Campaign against Religious Persecution
Authors: Farr Thomas F.
Published: January 2009

The passage of the 1998 International Religious Freedom (IRF) Act seemed to presage a new chapter in U.S. foreign policy—in effect, the elevation of America's “first freedom” to what many considered its rightful ascendancy in the nation's human rights policy. In retrospect, however, the fault lines in the law's conception and implementation have been quite significant. This chapter examines those weaknesses, including the desire of IRF supporters to bypass the State Department, the perception that the law is Christian-centered, and the concern by liberals that religious freedom should not be elevated to the top of a “hierarchy of human rights.” In describing the hierarchy objection the chapter analyzes the controversial but critical issues of proselytization, and the distinction between religious tolerance and religious freedom. The net result of these and other problems is that U.S. IRF policy has been narrowly construed, ignored by its supporters, and largely ineffective.
5 The Lion's Den at Foggy Bottom
Authors: Farr Thomas F.
Published: January 2009

Robert Seiple, a Republican evangelical, was chosen by President William Clinton to lead his administration's religious freedom initiative. Initially the administration hoped that Seiple's appointment would forestall the IRF Act itself. When the Act was passed anyway, Seiple became the first IRF Ambassador at Large, a position established by the Act. Within the Department, however, the bureaucracy reverted to its default position of isolating the new initiative within the bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, itself out of the mainstream of foreign policy. Seiple fought for a permanent staff but ultimately acquiesced in functional and bureaucratic isolation, choosing instead to travel widely. His legacy lies in the dens of persecution abroad, and with his having won the “battle over China,”—i.e., convincing Secretary Madeleine Albright to designate China as a “country of particular concern” under the IRF Act. Seiple also began the “Islamic Roundtable” at State, a prescient idea whose time was yet to come.
9 Islam and the American Opportunity
Authors: Farr Thomas F.
Published: January 2009

Chapter 9 explores how U.S. IRF policy might help undermine Islamist extremism and transnational terrorism. It describes the various forms of extremism, both Sunni and Shiite, and how traditional U.S. foreign policy assumptions have misunderstood the threat from both. It analyzes mistakes made by American diplomacy since the 1970s, including the assumption that political Islam is synonymous with Islamist extremism. It shows how the Kemalist model of privatized Islam in Turkey has beguiled and misled U.S. policymakers. It then engages creative arguments made by U.S. analysts from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rand Corporation to show how even forward-looking analyses have missed the mark. The chapter concludes with a set of principles and strategies for U.S. policymakers as they attempt to advance American interests in the Muslim world, and in other nations where religion is playing an increasing role.
10 Riding the Dragon
Authors: Farr Thomas F.
Published: January 2009

China is the largest and, arguably, the most consequential nation for American interests. It has a huge conventional and nuclear military establishment, is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, is a major economic power, and has enormous influence in the Far East, especially in North Korea. Its explosion of religious devotion has disoriented Chinese officials, leading to quixotic attempts at control and management of religious communities. Such efforts, in turn, routinely lead to persecution of Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims and Christians. This chapter, centered on the author's travels in China, describes the religious landscape and offers new ways to “think with the Chinese” about their religious “problem.” For American diplomacy, the solution lies in the economy, law, scholarship, education and civil society. The stakes are high: if China cannot come to see the growing percentages of religious adherents as resources rather than threats, the result could be catastrophic—for China, its religious citizens, and U.S. interests.
Conclusion
Authors: Farr Thomas F.
Published: January 2009

The book ends with a brief story that revisits major themes of the book: the secularistic culture at the Department of State and its aversion to thinking about religion; the threat to the American homeland of Islamist terrorism; the promotion of “freedom” in the Middle East without religious freedom; the limited value of set piece face-to-face diplomacy; the need for public pressure on the U.S. foreign policy establishment; enduring skepticism among some in the West about the motives of religious people; the American opportunity in the lands of Islam and in China; and, finally, the potential role of religious actors in civil society, in the pursuit of justice, and in the principle that lies at the very heart of religious freedom: the dignity of the human person.
Crosscutting Theoretical and Practice Themes
Authors: Delgado Melvin , Staples Lee
Published: January 2009

This chapter discusses the similarities, or crosscutting themes, of youth-led organizing with other organizing campaigns. It identifies fifteen crosscutting themes which fall into four categories: (1) purpose of organizing; (2) recruitment and support; (3) group structure; and (4) youth and adult roles.
Epilogue
Authors: Delgado Melvin , Staples Lee
Published: January 2009

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. It discusses the future directions of youth-led organizing. It argues that the movement will continue to grow and increase its social impact in the years ahead.
The Making of Buddhist Modernism
Authors: McMahan David L.
Published: January 2009

This book elucidates the complex cross-cultural genealogy of themes, ideas, and practices crucial to the creation of a new hybrid form of Buddhism that has emerged within the last 150 years. Buddhism modernism is not just Buddhism that happens to exist in the modern world but a distinct form of Buddhism constituted by cross-fertilization with western ideas and practices. Using primarily examples that have shaped western articulations of Buddhism, the book shows how modern representations of Buddhism have not only changed the way the tradition is understood, but have also generated new forms of demythologized, detraditionalized, and deinstitutionalized Buddhism. The book creates a lineage of Buddhist modernism that includes liberal borrowing from scientific vocabulary in reformulations of Buddhist concepts of causality, interdependence, and meditation. It also draws upon Romantic and Transcendentalist conceptions of cosmology, creativity, spontaneity, and the interior depths of the human being. Additionally, Buddhist modernism reconfigures Buddhism as a kind of psychology or interior science, drawing both upon analytic psychology and current trends in neurobiology. In its novel approaches to meditation and mindfulness, as well as political activism, it draws heavily from western individualism, distinctively modern modes of world-affirmation, liberal political sensibilities, and modernist literary sources. The book also examines this uniquely modern Buddhism as it moves into postmodern iterations and enters the currents of global communication, media, and commerce.
Modernity and the Discourse of Scientific Buddhism
Authors: McMahan David L.
Published: January 2009

This chapter shows, with attention to the social, political, and polemical contexts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the ways Buddhists and Buddhist sympathizers attempted to align Buddhism with scientific rationalism. A discourse of scientific Buddhism emerged in the context of two intertwined crises: the Victorian crisis of faith in the West and the crisis of colonialism and western hegemony in Asia. In Ceylon, Anagarika Dharmapala promoted the image of Buddhism as scientific to counter denigrations of Buddhism by colonialists and missionaries and to assert its superiority to Christianity. Paul Carus, who through science had lost his faith in traditional Christianity, presented Buddhism as a part of a triumphal vision of science that would eventually lead to a universal “religion of science.” Henry Steel Olcott saw Buddhism as representing an “occult science” aligned with Theosophy and spiritualism.
Meditation and Modernity
Authors: McMahan David L.
Published: January 2009

The meaning, purpose, and social significance of Buddhist meditation has changed in important ways due to its encounter with modernity. While often seen as the central practice of Buddhism, it has in some contexts also become detraditionalized, privatized, and unmoored from institutional authority and tradition. In places like psychologists’ offices and health clubs it has taken on a life independent of Buddhism altogether. This transformation is largely due to its encounter with the discourses and practices of western modernity, especially scientific rationalism, Romanticism, and psychology. Through them, meditation has been drawn into the orbit of the “subjective turn” in Europe and North America. Meditation has claimed a place within this turn by being construed as a spiritual technique aspiring to universal truth, as an empirical “inner science,” as a method for the enhancement of the individual’s freedom from social influence, and as a method for excavating the unconscious.
From Modern to Postmodern?
Authors: McMahan David L.
Published: January 2009

What are the implications of Buddhist modernism as it moves into the postmodern age? Democratization, the increasing roles of women, and further hybridity and dialogue with other religions and with secular cultures are certainly important. So are tensions between radically detraditionalized Buddhism and those re-embracing tradition, between Buddhism as privatized spirituality and socially engaged Buddhism, and between localized and globalizing forms of the dharma. The globalization of Buddhism is leading to increased heterogeneity, on the one hand, and to a common transnational language of Buddhism on the other. The disembedding of Buddhism from its indigenous cultures and its re-ebedding in a wide variety of cultures and contexts produces constant transformation. A new “global folk Buddhism,” which has largely accommodated itself to the cultural assumptions of modernity now exists in tension with other forms of Buddhism, like engaged Buddhism, that still have the capacity to challenge these assumptions.
Search for Best Available Evidence
Authors: Macgowan Mark J.
Published: January 2009

This chapter presents the second stage of evidence-based group work (EBGW). The first part of the chapter describes the general principles of an effective and efficient search, describing where and how to look for group-based evidence. In describing where to look, the chapter describes how we should strive to find evidence with the strongest research merit, and distinguishes between whether a group worker needs an intervention/technique or a measure of change. A number of sources of research evidence on group-based interventions and measures are presented. In describing how to look for evidence, specific techniques are offered for searching databases for evidence related to the answerable practice question, including identifying search terms for locating group-relevant evidence. Two case examples are presented to illustrate how to search for evidence related to a question about an intervention, and a second that seeks evidence related to a question about a strategy for enhancing group processes.
Undertake a Critical Review of the Evidence: Evaluate Its Rigor, Impact, and Applicability
Authors: Macgowan Mark J.
Published: January 2009

This chapter describes the third stage of evidence-based group work. It offers guidance and tools for critically evaluating the group-based evidence collected from the search completed in stage two. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first provides a discussion of the critical review system, which includes eight guides for evaluating evidence from quantitative (grouped and single-case designs) and qualitative studies, authorities, multiple studies/reports, literature reviews (systematic and non-systematic), and group-based measures. Each guide is divided into three areas in which group workers make an assessment, yielding an overall determination of the evidence's quality (yielding best available evidence). The first is the evidence's research merit, or its validity or rigor. The second is the evidence's impact; that is, how powerful and in what direction are the findings. The third is the evidence's applicability, its practice relevance and appropriateness. The second section of the chapter includes case examples illustrating how the guides are used.
Context Grounding
Authors: Delgado Melvin
Published: January 2009

This chapter begins with a discussion of problems emerging from the increase in Latino populations in the United States. It then presents the primary goals of the book, which include providing an updated social demographic profile of the Latino community, highlighting significant trends with direct implications for social work, and identifying the challenges typically faced by social workers in reaching and serving this community. Author qualifications, outline of the book, and definitions of key concepts used in the book are presented.
Profile of Latinos’ Health
Authors: Delgado Melvin
Published: January 2009

This chapter examines the health needs of Latinos. Any effort to understand the challenges Latinos face in seeking and obtaining health services to meet their needs must take into account the role of several considerations: (1) rural or urban setting; (2) legal status in this country; (3) command of the English language; (4) gender; (5) social-economic status; and (6) formal educational attainment. The chapter seeks to interject these considerations as an important factor in any effort to assess needs at an individual or community level. It is divided into two main sections: health care, and racism and discrimination.
Best Practices with Latinos
Authors: Delgado Melvin
Published: January 2009

This chapter discusses best practices with Latinos. Topics covered include the importance of social relationships, bilingual and bicultural concerns as united in the conceptualization of best practice, stressing of cultural values, incorporation of Latino strengths and assets, fostering ethnic identity, and mediating the effects of acculturation.
Practice Applications and Considerations
Authors: Delgado Melvin
Published: January 2009

This chapter integrates the content covered in Chapters 4–7, devoted to best practice findings and principles, cultural values, and the Latino cultural assets paradigm itself. Case vignettes are used to illustrate the applicability of a Latino cultural assets paradigm in social work practice. Although case examples and illustrations have been integrated throughout this book, the chapter is specifically devoted to providing the reader with more in-depth examples to illustrate the various stages of a Latino cultural assets framework that brings to life the paradigm, and opens the door for creative thinking about other ways it can be utilized at the local level.
Informing Child Welfare: The Promise and Limits of Empirical Research
Authors: Pelton Leroy H.
Published: January 2009

This chapter examines the relevance and irrelevance of research on public child welfare, focusing on issues such as child removal, family preservation, and child protection. This is done against the background of the four levels of the child welfare system: its programs and services; the structure of the child welfare system itself; child welfare policies; and cognitive and emotional factors such as conceptions of justice. The fundamental discrepancy between research and practice is explored: the focus of child welfare practice on individual child and family, and the emphasis of most social science research on aggregate data.
Providing More Effective, Ethical Services: The Philosophy and Process of Evidence-Based (-Informed) Practice
Authors: Gambrill Eileen
Published: January 2009

The process and philosophy of evidence-informed practice and its utility in the helping professions including child welfare practices and policies is described in this chapter. This is distinguished from the view of evidence-based practice as using empirically based practices — the EBPs approach. The role of clinical expertise in integrating information from multiple sources such as characteristics of clients and their circumstances including their preferences and actions as well as research evidence is highlighted. Hallmarks of evidence-informed practice are reviewed and the implications of the philosophy of evidence-based practice described. Hallmarks include moving away from authoritarian practices and policies, honoring ethical obligations, making practices, policies, and their outcomes transparent, maximizing knowledge flow and using a systemic approach for integrating practical, ethical, and evidentiary issues that attends to organizational variables including funding patterns. Objections, controversies and barriers regarding evidence-based practices are reviewed.
The Influence of an Adoption Experiment on Social Policy
Authors: Festinger Trudy
Published: January 2009

This chapter presents research results that provided the rationale for the adoption of legislation in New York State in 2005, which, among other things, improved the handling of adoption cases by the courts. The central question that propelled the study was whether keeping a case before the same judge and on the court calendar from termination of parental rights (TPR) through adoption would speed up the process of adoption for children in foster care. To answer this question, an experimental approach was used to test the effect of a little-used New York state law that permits the filing of an adoption petition while the TPR is pending. As a result, the adoption proceeding remained on the court calendar and with the same judge who presided over the freeing.
Improving Social Work Practice Through the Use of Technology and Advanced Research Methods
Authors: Schwartz Ira M. , Jones Peter R. , Schwartz David R. , Obradovic Zoran
Published: January 2009

This chapter focuses on the application of technology and advances in research to social work practice. It examines the strengths and limitations of risk determination models, and highlights the many myths and misconceptions held by child welfare practitioners about decision-making tools. It is argued that advances in technology have the potential to change the quality of service provision in child welfare.
The Future of Child Protection Revisited
Authors: Waldfoge Jane
Published: January 2009

At least twenty five states in the US now have some kind of alternative response in place alongside the more traditional investigative response. The evidence thus far suggests that differential response does as well, or better, than traditional responses at promoting child safety, preventing maltreatment recurrence, and delivering services to families. However, the evidence also points to challenges. Even with a more assessment oriented response for the lower risk cases, the challenges of working with families referred to CPS remain. Differential response requires well-trained staff, good relations with community-based agencies, and funding for services for low-risk as well as higher-risk families. But, even so, the evidence suggests that differential response may offer an improved response for lower risk families, without jeopardizing children’s safety in either low or higher-risk cases.
Comparing Welfare and Child Welfare Populations: An Argument for Rethinking the Safety Net
Authors: Courtney Mark E. , Dworsky Amy , Piliavin Irving , McMurtry Steven
Published: January 2009

This chapter uses data from two ongoing studies in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, to provide empirical evidence supporting the claim that workfare and child welfare programs serve increasingly similar populations with similar needs. It begins with a history of the separation of income maintenance from social services, then briefly describes the current situation. It is shown that workfare and child welfare programs serve increasingly similar populations with similar needs. However, despite the similar needs of these populations, indeed, even a large overlap between the populations, these two systems continue to operate largely independently, if not at cross-purposes. These findings call into question both the structure of service systems in jurisdictions like Milwaukee and the federal welfare and child welfare policies that lead state and local policy makers to create such misaligned systems.
Child Welfare Research: An Introduction
Authors: Lindsey Duncan , Shlonsky Aron , McLuckie Alan
Published: January 2009

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of developments in child welfare research over the past half-century. It then presents an overview of the six parts of the book: (1) child welfare research; (2) evidence-based practice in child welfare; (3) research on adoption, guardianship, and family ties; (4) decision-making in child welfare; (5) evidence-based child welfare policy; and (6) international issues in child welfare research.
Existential Choices and Dislocations
Authors: Kupperman Joel J.
Published: January 2009

This chapter discusses existential choices and dislocations. Choices made by human beings can be fully appreciated only in the context of the agent's pattern of choice and the contextual factors that play a part in this. This is more obvious in some cases than in others. Those in which it is least obvious are the ones in which the choice to be made can present itself as sharply discontinuous from the rest of life up to that point. These are existential choices, which can occur as the result of dislocations of a variety of sorts. It is argued that we need to understand how some of these cases lend themselves to atomization of ethical thought in order to appreciate how artificial this is. This can lead us to understand better the ethical importance of the role that contextual factors, including those involved in the agent's previous pattern of behavior, typically play in choice.
The Evolution of Ethical Theories
Authors: Kupperman Joel J.
Published: January 2009

This chapter explores ways in which an ethical theory can develop through time, and in particular the variations in Kantian and consequentialist ethical theories. It argues that if offered a choice between (a) the case-by-case approach of act consequentialism, and (b) unswerving loyalty to what is (by some consequentialist standards) an optimal set of rules, we should reject both. It also discusses ways to move beyond act consequentialism and at the same time emphasize the power of the underlying consequentialist intuition.
A Modulated Case for the Primacy of Value
Authors: Kupperman Joel J.
Published: January 2009

This chapter charts the roles of consequentialist considerations within an acceptable ethical theory. It argues that quality-of-life (in the sense of what is valuable) considerations are decisive in the justification or criticism of a moral order. In this sense, the theory to emerge from this book claims a limited primacy in ethics for quality-of-life judgments. The primacy is limited in two respects. One is that it extends to justification and criticism of a putative moral order, but not to its discovery. The other is that there are other kinds of good reasons that typically play a role in justification or criticism of a putative moral order. Whatever force these have depends largely on how well they seem to point toward quality-of-life considerations.
Fact and Value
Authors: Dupré John
Published: January 2009

There is a view of science, as stereotyped in the hands of its critics debating with its advocates, that science deals only in facts. Values come in only when decisions are made as to how the facts of science are to be applied. Often it is added that this second stage is no special concern of scientists, though this is an optional addition. This chapter examines what sense can be made of the first part of this story—that science deals only in facts. It looks at the concept of rape in evolutionary psychology and inflation in economics.
Social Problems
Authors: Root Michael
Published: January 2009

This chapter examines the sociology of sociological problems. The first section describes the history of the sociological study of social problems. The second explains how the history has been shaped by Weber's views on value freedom. The third shows why a study of social problems cannot be silent on questions of right and wrong and, at the same time, be socially relevant, and the fourth section considers whether a study can be both value laden and objective or scientific.
Some Lessons Learned? A Case Study of Research Dissemination to Young People in Care
Authors: Emond Ruth , Gilligan Robbie
Published: January 2009

This chapter focuses on a research project aimed at exploring the experiences of children and young people in residential care with regard to education. In particular, it highlights the ways in which the two social arenas of school and institutional care are interconnected, and how these arenas and connections were managed by young people themselves. The chapter provides a respective account of undertaking non-commissioned research and the impact this has on the resulting dissemination strategy. Rather than presenting the findings of the study, it focuses on the process of producing dissemination materials targeted at research end users, in this case children and young people living in residential care in Ireland. It discusses the experience of conducting policy-oriented research without the active contribution of key policy stakeholders.
Prodigal Nation
Authors: Murphy Andrew R.
Published: January 2009

This book traces the emergence and development of the American jeremiad, a form of political rhetoric that laments the nation's decline from a virtuous past and calls it to repentance and renewal. Employed by Americans of all political persuasions since the earliest days of settlement, the jeremiad has proven to be a powerful way of invoking the American past in order to chart a brighter American future. Part I of the book focuses on three especially important episodes in the jeremiad's history: early New England, Civil War America, and the rise of the Christian Right. Part II provides a critical analysis of the jeremiad's role in the American “culture wars” and politics more generally. In seeking to place the American past in the service of the American future, the book argues, the jeremiad takes not one form, but two: a traditionalist jeremiad whose view of the past depends heavily on claims about how things used to be, and emphasizes the importance of preserving concrete aspects of the past as we move toward an uncertain future; and a progressive jeremiad, which views the past as a repository of emancipatory principles articulated at the founding but never fully realized in practice. Acknowledging that both traditionalist and progressive jeremiads are deeply entwined with the nation's history, the book concludes with a call for a revived progressive jeremiad as most compatible with the deep diversity—cultural, religious, political, philosophical—that characterizes American society at the dawn of the twenty‐first century.
One The American Jeremiad
Authors: Murphy Andrew R.
Published: January 2009

This chapter introduces the jeremiad, a form of political rhetoric that laments a degenerate present as compared to a virtuous past and calls the nation to reform and renewal. The chapter more specifically focuses on the American jeremiad, which nests the story of decline within a larger sacred story of an American “Chosen Nation” occupying a singular role in God's plans for human history. Thus the power of the jeremiad lies in its simultaneous lament over the present and the deep sense of hope in the nation's ultimate promise. The chapter lays out the scope and focus of the book's attention to the jeremiad, its special attention to early New England, the Civil War, and the Christian Right as especially significant in the history of the jeremiad in America.
Seven The Jeremiad and the Culture Wars
Authors: Murphy Andrew R.
Published: January 2009

In his noted book Culture Wars, James Davison Hunter referred to a series of linked disputes in late 20th‐century American society, disputes that involve government but are at their root about fundamentally conflicting moral worldviews. This chapter explores the role played by the jeremiad in the American culture wars. It opens by considering two participants in these culture wars—Pat Buchanan and Bill Moyers—and then moves on to a consideration of the ways that cultural politics provide compelling plots for American Jeremiahs to organize their narratives of decline and renewal.
Eight The Past, Present and Future of the American Jeremiad
Authors: Murphy Andrew R.
Published: January 2009

This chapter concludes the book by reflecting on the relationship between the American jeremiad and notions of American national identity, more particularly the idea of national chosenness. The chapter argues that the traditionalist jeremiad, while as deeply rooted in the American tradition as its progressive counterpart, is unable to do justice to the full citizenship of the broad and diverse American population of the 21st century, given its emphasis on concrete elements of the nation's past and its view of the past as model for the future. It concludes with a brief consideration of Sacvan Bercovitch's influential work on the American jeremiad, and a call for a reinvigorated progressive jeremiad as most compatible with an expanding notion of American promise as the nation moves into the 21st century.