Social Work and Vulnerable Families: Economic Hardship, Protective Factors, and Service Success

Articles in this issue concern our nation's most vulnerable families--their problems, protective factors, and predictors of program success. The problems these articles address--economic hardship, substance abuse, run away youths--reflect the range of issues social workers care about, document through their research, attempt to prevent, and tackle through service design and delivery. Ernst's study of child maltreatment examines family functioning within the context of suburban neighborhoods. Rates of child maltreatment investigations were found to be higher in economically disadvantaged and in unstable neighborhoods--as they are in urban areas. The findings suggest that neighborhoods characterized by economic hardship and residential mobility lack critical sources of support needed by families and that these stresses may exacerbate the family's own vulnerabilities. Beverly's article, focusing on material hardship among U.S. families, has both methodological and substantive significance. Her article uses data from a large, nationally representative survey and uses direct measures of poverty that reflect actual consumption levels in relation to accepted conventions of minimum needs--food, shelter, utilities, and medical care. Her findings, although perhaps not surprising, are disturbing--nearly 11 percent of the U.S. population or almost 24 million people--experienced at least one of these basic hardships in the year studied. These hardships persist in the face of relevant social programs--health insurance, food stamp benefits, housing subsidies, and utility assistance. Studies such as this serve an important function by documenting social work-relevant needs in the population at large (Proctor & Rosen, 2000) and underscoring the importance of efforts to develop, implement, and test social policy and programs aimed at reducing the hardships that persist among our nation's most vulnerable members. The documentation of human need has been a cornerstone of social work's agenda. Social welfare and professional priorities should be guided by evidence of the most prevalent and most pressing problems. Therefore, we need carefully constructed population surveys, whether representative of the nation, subgroups at high risk, or social work clientele. This journal welcomes prevalence studies that document need; the social, individual, and family costs of unmet need; and associative factors that can help inform interventions to remedy those problems. In this issue's Note on Research Methodology, Rodgers-Farmer and Davis address the implications of survey data for data management and analysis. When surveys use complex probability sampling procedures, such as stratification, multiple states of selection or over- or undersampling of population subgroups. I encourage prospective authors submitting to this journal to provide details about not only the particulars of their sampling strategy and design, but also through data management and analysis, how their data are handled. Hodge, Cardenas, and Montoya's article addresses two topics--substance abuse and spirituality--that are high priorities for social work, health, and behavioral science research. In 2001 the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) established Social Work Research Development Programs in two schools of social work to stimulate and strengthen research in alcohol and substance abuse. The need for increasing the quantity and quality of social work research in substance abuse research is obvious: Social workers responding to the NASW's Practice Research Network (PRN) (NASW, 2001) estimated that drug abuse is the primary diagnosis of about 9 percent of clients and a co-occurring diagnosis in one in five clients. Hodge and colleagues explore the roles of spirituality and religious participation as protective factors against substance abuse among a sample of rural and largely Hispanic and America Indian adolescents. Their data indicate that spirituality was associated with lower probabilities of using marijuana and hard drugs, whereas alcohol use was lower among those who participated in religious events. …