Social Work

Multivariate procedures allow social workers and other human services researchers to analyze complex, multidimensional social problems and interventions in ways that minimize oversimplification. This book provides an introduction to four procedures for the analysis of multiple dependent variables: multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA), multivariate multiple regression (MMR), and structural equation modeling (SEM). Each procedure is presented in a way that allows readers to compare and contrast them in terms of appropriate research context; required statistical assumptions, including levels of measurement of variables to be modeled; analytical steps; sample size; and strengths and weaknesses. This book facilitates course extensibility in scope and depth by allowing instructors to supplement course content with rigorous statistical procedures. The book provides detailed annotated examples using Stata, SPSS (PASW), SAS, and Amos. It also gives additional resources, discussion of key terms, and a companion website.

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.

The complexity of social problems necessitates that social work researchers utilize multivariate statistical methods in their investigations. Having a thorough understanding of basic statistics can facilitate this process as multivariate methods have as their foundation many of these basic statistical procedures. In this pocket guide, the authors introduce readers to three of the more frequently used multivariate statistical methods in social work research—multiplelinear regression analysis,analysis of variance and covariance, and path analysis—with an emphasis on the basic statistics as important features of these methods. The primary intention is to help prepare entry level doctoral students and early career social work researchers in the use of multivariate statistical methods by offering a straightforward and easy to understand explanation of these methods and the basic statistics that inform them. The pocket guide begins with a review of basic statistics, hypothesis testing with inferential statistics, and bivariate analytic methods. Subsequent sections describe bivarate and multiple linear regression analyses, one-way and two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and covariance (ANCOVA), and path analysis. In each chapter, the authors introduce the various basic statistical procedures by providing definitions, formulas, descriptions of the underlying logic and assumptions of each procedure, and examples of how they have been applied in the social work research literature. The authors also explain estimation procedures and how to interpret results. Each chapter provides brief step-by-step instructions for conducting these statistical tests in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and AMOS (SPSS, Inc. 2011), based on data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS: 88). Finally, the book offers a companion website that provides more detailed instructions, as well as data sets and worked examples.

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.

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.

In 1995 New York City had one of the worst child welfare systems in the United States. The city’s system struggled under 20 class-action lawsuits and 11 court orders or stipulations resulting from these suits. Elisa Izquierdo, a 6-year old girl involved in the child welfare system, was killed by her mother while other families struggled without help until their situation exploded. The city’s response was to place children into foster care at an unprecedented rate, reaching 50,000 children in care in the early 1990s. Less traumatic and less expensive interventions could have protected many of these children and kept them safely within their families. In response to that situation, David Tobis and an anonymous donor created the Child Welfare Fund, which helped nurture a movement of parent organizers to reform New York’s child welfare system. For the first time in the history of the United States, a movement developed of parents who have been embroiled in the child welfare system. Their efforts, working with their allies including courageous and visionary commissioners, brought about unprecedented and long-lasting improvements including legal representation for parents, assistance to struggling children and families, and fewer than 14,000 children in New York City’s foster care system today. The parents in this story were victims of domestic violence, homelessness, and poverty. Some became dependent on drugs. They all had the crushing, enraging, and at times transforming experience of having their children taken from them and put into foster care by child protective services. Many of these parents entered drug treatment programs, left abusive relationships, got jobs, filed lawsuits, and were reunited with their children. Some took the next step and were trained as parent organizers. They learned how to fight effectively against child welfare policies and programs that left families victimized by a system that was supposed to help them. This book focuses on the lives of six mothers who had been pariahs and then became partners with child welfare commissioners, social workers, lawyers, foundation officers, and child welfare agency executives. It recounts how their courage and resilience brought about the most significant changes in the history of New York’s child welfare system.

Employment is the highest priority for many people with severe mental illness and it is a central aspect of recovery. Over the past two decades, the Individual Placement and Support (IPS) model of supported employment has emerged as the prominent evidence-based approach to vocational rehabilitation. This book synthesizes the research and experience on IPS supported employment: historical context, core principles, effectiveness, long-term outcomes, non-vocational outcomes, cost-effectiveness, generalizability, fidelity, implementation, policy, and future research. This book relates to areas of work with populations with psychiatric disabilities and in community mental health and social service settings. In tracing the evolution of IPS, readers are equipped with an elegant example of the transition from needs assessment, to model development, to testing, and to dissemination.

This book proposes what, to many professionals in the child welfare field, will appear a radically different explanation for society's decisions to protect children from harm and for the significant drop in substantiated child abuse numbers. At the center of this conceptual and analytic approach is the contention that social outrage emanating from horrific and often sensationalized cases of child maltreatment plays a major role in CPS decision making and in child outcomes. The ebb and flow of outrage invokes three levels of response that are consistent with patterns of the number of child maltreatment reports made to public child welfare agencies, the number of cases screened-in by these CPS agencies, the proportions of alleged cases substantiated as instances of real child abuse or neglect, and the numbers of children placed outside their homes. At the community level, outrage produces amplified surveillance and a posture of “zero-tolerance” while child protection workers, in turn, carry out their duties under a fog of “infinite jeopardy.” With outrage as a driving force, child protective services organizations are forced into changes that are disjointed and highly episodic; changes which follow a course identified in the natural sciences as abrupt equilibrium changes. Through such manifestations as child safety legislation, institutional reform litigation of state child protective services agencies, massive retooling of the CPS workforce, the rise of community surveillance groups and moral entrepreneurs, and the exploitation of fatality statistics by media and politicians evidence is found of outrage at work and its power to change social attitudes, worker decisions and organizational culture.

This is the third in a trilogy of books that chronicle the revolutionary changes in our mental health and human service delivery systems that have conspired to disempower staff and hinder client recovery. Creating Sanctuary documented the evolution of the Sanctuary Model therapeutic approach as an antidote to the personal and social trauma that clients bring to child welfare agencies, psychiatric hospitals, and residential facilities. Destroying Sanctuary detailed the destructive role of organizational trauma in the nation's systems of care. This book is a user-friendly manual for organizational change that addresses the deep roots of toxic stress and illustrates how to transform a dysfunctional human service system into a safe, secure, trauma-informed environment. At its heart, the Sanctuary Model represents an organizational value system that is committed to seven principles, which serve as anchors for decision making at all levels: non-violence, emotional intelligence, social learning, democracy, open communication, social responsibility, and growth and change. The Sanctuary Model is not a clinical intervention; rather, it is a method for creating an organizational culture that can more effectively provide a cohesive context within which healing from psychological and socially derived forms of traumatic experience can be addressed. Chapters are organized around the seven Sanctuary commitments, providing step-by-step, realistic guidance on creating and sustaining fundamental change. This book presents a roadmap to recovery for our nation's systems of care. It explores the notion that organizations are living systems themselves and as such they manifest various degrees of health and dysfunction, analogous to those of individuals. Becoming a truly trauma-informed system therefore requires a process of reconstitution within helping organizations, top to bottom. A system cannot be truly trauma-informed unless the system can create and sustain a process of understanding itself.

This book describes an approach to developing and testing effective community-based programs for at-risk children and youth. Elements of risk and resilience, positive youth development, and organizational collaboration are used to develop a comprehensive intervention framework called the Integrated Prevention and Early Intervention (IPEI) Model. The IPEI is applied to a community-based after-school program called the Bridge Project to illustrate how an integrated intervention framework can be used to prevent childhood and adolescent problems and improve academic achievement. Findings from an evaluation of Bridge Project intervention components are presented. Recommendations for advancing policy and practice for high-risk youth in community-based programs are described.