British Journal of Social Work - current issue

Editorial

Lymbery, M. — 2008-04-25

Beyond Assessment: Social Work Intervention in Family Court Enquiries

Mantle, G., Williams, I., Leslie, J., Parsons, S., Shaffer, R. — 2008-04-25

Most parents or carers who separate or divorce are able to make arrangements themselves about where their children will reside and how the children’s contact with the non-resident parent will be managed. A further group of parents or carers are able to come to agreement with the assistance of community- or court-based dispute resolution/ mediation services. There are times, however, when disputes cannot be resolved without recourse to the courts and, when this happens, the court will normally request that a welfare report be prepared by a CAFCASS (Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service) practitioner. While the boundary between assessment and intervention in social work is often less than clear, the commissioning of a court welfare report in family proceedings strongly suggests an assessment focus and appears to carry little expectation that the practitioner should intervene in order to meet the needs of the children or adults involved. This article presents recent research findings that illustrate ways in which CAFCASS practitioners do go beyond the assessment role expected of them in the course of the enquiries they undertake. Implications for policy and practice in this area of social work are then discussed.

Preventive Services for Adolescents: Exploring the Process of Change

Biehal, N. — 2008-04-25

This paper reports on a quasi-experimental study which compared outcomes for young people referred to specialist family support teams with those for others referred to mainstream social work teams. Although there was no evidence that the specialist service was more effective in promoting changes in child and family functioning, nevertheless, many young people in both groups showed improvement in this respect. This paper explores how, why and in what circumstances these positive changes occurred. The factors which moderated or mediated the effectiveness of interventions included both risk and protective factors for emotional and behavioural problems and aspects of the interventions themselves. The paper explores the mechanisms whereby these factors interacted to help or hinder workers’ efforts to promote change. Child and family attributes and histories, the duration of child and family difficulties, motivation and optimism all moderated the impact of interventions, making change more, or less, likely to occur. Aspects of the interventions themselves also mediated their effectiveness, such as their ecological approach, the strategies used to change child behaviour and parenting style and the development of a therapeutic alliance. These moderators and mediators of change had a stronger impact on the outcome of interventions than differences in service type.

Community Intervention with Jewish Israeli Mothers in Times of Terror

Itzhaky, H., Dekel, R. — 2008-04-25

The article examines the effectiveness of a community programme designed for Jewish Israeli mothers who have been exposed to terrorism. The aim of the intervention was to empower the women and increase their sense of belonging to the community, and to reduce stress symptoms, mainly by encouraging and facilitating their participation in community activities. Thirty-eight women, all residents of the same terror-ridden community, participated in intensive workshops over a six month period designed to help them to become active in the community. The workshops provided the women with the information and skills required for activity in the community projects in which they were interested. A qualitative evaluation reveals that, at the end of the programme, most of the women reported that they felt better and more secure, and all of the women were participating in at least one activity in the community. The quantitative evaluation revealed lower levels of distress, higher levels of empowerment and no change in the feelings of belonging to the community. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of the persistence of terror and theories of community intervention.

Black African Children and the Child Protection System

Bernard, C., Gupta, A. — 2008-04-25

This paper explores black African children’s experiences of the child protection system in the UK. The central focus of the paper is a review of the available literature on the social circumstances and environmental influences affecting many black African families involved in the child protection system; specific parenting practices and care-giving environments; and their experiences of social work and other professional interventions aimed at safeguarding and promoting the needs of African children. This paper examines these themes to elucidate the factors that contribute to the provision of effective, culturally competent interventions with black African children at risk of significant harm. It suggests that there are a number of tensions inherent for professionals in working with culturally diverse African families such as reconciling different beliefs and behaviours concerning child-rearing practices; affirming the parenting practices of these families in the engagement process; adopting a strengths-based orientation whilst at the same time safeguarding and promoting the welfare of vulnerable children. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for practice.

Grounding Constructions of Carers: Exploring the Experiences of Carers through a Grounded Approach

Burton, M. — 2008-04-25

Social and political constructions of carers have been criticized for undervaluing the complexities of the experiences of carers. However, relatively little research has attempted to generate more meaningful constructions of carers by drawing these considerations together. The purpose of this article is to begin addressing this need. To accomplish this, the article is presented in two sections. First, an overview is provided on the current constructions of carers and suggested considerations for research. Second, with this overview as its context, a study, taken from the author’s academic dissertation, is presented. The study sets out to generate more meaningful constructions of the caring experience through a grounded approach. The findings are based on a focus group and interviews with fourteen carers in total. A diverse range of participants were involved, in order to generate categories that would hold more relevance across caring experiences. Four common categories for carers emerged, along with properties that explained differences in experiences. The categories of when carers start to care, circumstances change over time, justifying the use of support and using support are subsequently discussed in relation to current constructions, practice and policy.

Preventing Suicide: A Neglected Social Work Research Agenda

Joe, S., Niedermeier, D. — 2008-04-25

Social workers encounter suicidal clients; however, little is known about social work’s empirical knowledge base for suicide assessment and treatment. In the first comprehensive study of social work’s contribution to the suicide literature, the authors conducted systematic electronic and manual searches for suicide research published in peer-reviewed journals by social work investigators for the period 1980–2006, with the purpose of ascertaining the state of clinical knowledge related to suicide risk factors and effective treatments. These findings reveal that despite recent increases to the study of suicide by social work researchers, they have contributed limited evidenced-based knowledge in the last twenty-six years on the treatment or prevention of suicide or suicide-related behaviours. The article outlines the risk factors for suicide and discusses the implications for clinical social work practice and research.

Accountability to Welfare Service Users: Challenges and Responses of Service Providers

Leung, T. T. F. — 2008-04-25

Influenced by the consumerist sentiment in New Public Management, the last decades have witnessed a revival of the call for accountability to service users in the public service sector. As an act of accountability, social care and health care professionals are increasingly obliged to involve their service users in the service planning and monitoring process. Despite the popularity of this accountability and user involvement rhetoric, critics have, however, been skeptical of the prevailing user involvement initiatives as an effective measure of accountability to service users (Barnes and Wistow, 1994a, 1994b; Bowl, 1996; Peck et al., 2002; Rea, 2004). Based on a study of user involvement in the welfare sector of Hong Kong, this paper argues that the discourse of accountability to the service users can be a source of unrest for welfare professionals, in the manifestation of accountability as a power relationship. Their ensuing response is to accommodate the ensuing challenge arising from the demand for accountability to service users by manoeuvring the accountability discourse. It is the contention of this paper that the institutional inclusion of welfare service users into a discursive space is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the realization of a mandate of accountability to welfare service users.

Practitioners' Documentation of Assessment and Care Planning in Social Care: The Opportunities for Organizational Learning

Foster, M., Harris, J., Jackson, K., Glendinning, C. — 2008-04-25

This paper analyses practitioners’ documentation of social care assessments and care plans for disabled adults of working age. The data were collected in the course of an innovative project that introduced new outcome-focused documentation into routine social care assessment, care management and review processes. The project aimed to encourage practitioners to focus during these processes on the full range of outcomes that individual disabled adults might seek to achieve; and identify the appropriate services for realizing those outcomes. Analysis of the new documentation provides insights into the diverse range of priorities and outcomes that service users aspire to achieve as a result of receiving services, and the service inputs that were agreed between practitioners and service users. However, despite the new documentation, the majority of both outcomes and services that were recorded tended to cluster around a fairly narrow range of conventional social care service functions. Moreover, the emphasis of both outcomes and service inputs differed between different groups of social care professionals. In the context of current policies to make social care services more individualized and outcome-focused, each of these findings has major organizational implications. The opportunities for using routine practitioner documentation to identify areas of organizational and professional change and learning are discussed.

Liquid Social Work: Welfare Interventions as Mobile Practices

Ferguson, H. — 2008-04-25

This paper re-examines the nature of social work from the perspective of movement and ‘mobilities’. It shows that social work is at all times ‘on the move’, yet theory and analyses of policy and practice largely depict it as static, solid and sedentarist. The paper draws on the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006), through which a concern with flows and movements of people, objects, information, practices, speed and rhythm, with complexity, fluid images and liquid metaphors, is moving to the centre of social theory. An understanding of the ‘liquid’, mobile character of social work means producing accounts which are much closer to what its practices are, how and where they are performed and experienced by service users and professionals, and the opportunities and risks inherent to them. Three key domains of practice—the home visit, the car journey and the office/organization—are examined in terms of the movements that go on in them. Viewed through systemic and complexity theories, it is shown that social work interventions in late-modernity are best understood in terms of a flow of mobile practices between public and private worlds, organizations and the home, at the heart of which is the sensual body of the practitioner on the move.

Calling Social Work

Coleman, N., Harris, J. — 2008-04-25

New Labour has promoted the use of information and communication technology. Call centres are a key development in this strategy and are now in use for accessing social services. In official policy, the use of call centres is presented as an aspect of attempts to change the relationship between service users and the purchasers and providers of services. In contrast, we suggest that the use of call centres in social care does little to shift the balance of power. Call centres bring together four dimensions of New Labour discourse: learning from the private sector, cutting costs, technology and consumerism. Three issues emerge from their development: the undermining of social work’s sense of place; the circumscribing of service user participation; the rationalization of social workers. The call centre serves as a signifier of what, it is claimed, the combination of New Labour’s consumerism and technology can achieve. This signification disguises call centres’ properties of efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. Contrary to the rhetoric that accompanies them, call centres may be curtailing service user participation, as well as delimiting the social work role. Accordingly, their use has important, but as yet largely unresearched, implications for service users and social workers.

Working with Black Young People, Momodou Sallah and Carlton Howson (eds), Lyme Regis, Russell House Publishing, 2007, pp. 242, ISBN 978-1-905541-14-0, {pound}24.95

Soroya, B. — 2008-04-25

Child Neglect: Identification and Assessment, Jan Horwath, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 281, ISBN 1-4039-3346-4, {pound}20.99

Scott, D. — 2008-04-25

Globalisation and Child Welfare: Some Lessons from a Cross-National Study of Children in Out-of-Home Care, June Thoburn, Norwich, University of East Anglia, Social Work Monographs, 2007, pp. 70, ISBN 9781857841268, {pound}8.00

Broadhurst, K. — 2008-04-25

Multicultural Aspects of Disabilities: A Guide to Understanding and Assisting Minorities in the Rehabilitation Process, 2nd edn, Willie V. Bryan, Springfield, IL, Charles C. Thomas Publisher Ltd, 2007, pp. xii + 336, ISBN 978 0 398 07708 2, US$69.95

Lucas, J. — 2008-04-25

Experiences of Mental Health In-Patient Care: Narratives from Service Users, Carers and Professionals, Mark Hardcastle, David Kennard, Sheila Grandison and Leonard Fagin (eds), Routledge, The International Society for the Psychological Treatments of Schizophrenias and Other Psychoses (ISPS), pp. xxviii + 218, ISBN 9700415410823, {pound}19.99

Rapaport, J. — 2008-04-25

Social Work in the 21st Century: An Introduction to Social Welfare, Social Issues and the Profession, Morley D. Glicken, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 2007, pp. 493, ISBN 1 4129 13160, US$64.95

Beddoe, L. — 2008-04-25

In Black and White, Nathalie Seymour, British Association for Adoption and Fostering, 2007, pp. iii + 154, ISBN 978 1 905664 10 8, {pound}7.95

Dunworth, M. — 2008-04-25

Non-Accidental Head Injury in Young Children, Cathy Cobley and Tom Sanders, London, Jessica Kingsley, 2007, pp. 192, ISBN 184310-360-5, {pound}19.99

Lister, P. G. — 2008-04-25

Racism and Racial Identity: Reflections on Urban Practice in Mental Health and Social Services, Lisa V. Blitz and Mary Pender Greene (eds), Binghamton, Haworth Press, 2006, pp. xv + 279, ISBN 7890-3109-4, US$36.00

Allan, R. — 2008-04-25

Negotiating Death in Contemporary Health and Social Care, Margaret Holloway, Bristol, The Policy Press, 2007, pp. viii + 216, ISBN 978 1 86134 722 0, {pound}19.99

Richards, S. — 2008-04-25

Books Received

2008-04-25