1,721,037 research outputs found
The visibility of the child in multiprofessional meetings - Italian welfare units collegial discussion under scrutiny
No full textBackgrounds -
The child wellbeing is a central issue for social workers and professionals in family welfare services.Child protection decision are often made after consultation in multi-professional teams. With differences according to child protection systems existing in each country, teams have diverse functions and purposes. Nevertheless some topics are commonly debated, one of which is the visibility of the child and the child view when decisions and transitions in the protection project are at stake. Referring to the Italian context, this study aims to highlight how social workers in Italian local welfare units represent children and their view, especially when child protection decisions are discussed.
Method -
In order to answer to the research questions ten multi-professional meetings in social services (statutory, health and no-governmental) in different Italian regions are investigated through participant observation. The meetings have been recorded and transcribed to capture child protection practices and the nature of child representation with specific regard to child view. A qualitative thematic data analysis has been implemented through NVIVO software. The study is part of a wider research project promoted by CNOAS (National Professional Social Work Order) and FNAS (National Foundation of Social Work) to Investigate qualities and problems of the work of social workers in the field of child protection
Findings -
Results show that social workers and professional discuss child protection cases for different and concomitant reasons i. e. share professional knowledge and experience to promote understanding and decision making, request for professional contribution and support. The study highlights various levels of representation of child conditions and family life, also adverse experiences are described. It emerges however a limited representation of the child view in collegial discussions.
Conclusions and implications -
The research highlights the need to improve the capacity to bring the child’s view and to promote competent engaging and listening with children and youth. In some cases, social workers experience challenges in interviewing children due to resistance and stereotypes related to their authoritative functions such as enacting children’s out-of-home placement. Moreover, the study indicates how the organisational nature of professional groups and their aim in the service system influence the professionals discussion, stressing the necessity of the collaboration among social and health service
professionals together with teachers and third sector practitioners.
References -
Bastian Carmela (2020) the child in child protection: invisible and unheard, Child and Family Social Work, 25, pp. 135 - 143.
Nybom Jenny (2005) Visibility and child view in the assessment process of social work: cross national comparisons, International Journal of Social Welfare, 14, pp. 315 - 32
Italian social workers' opinion on their margins of discretion and power towards clients
No full textThis paper aims at exploring the issue of social worker’s power in their relation with clients in the opinion of the social workers themselves. The theme is relevant as professional social workers are involved with clients on a day-to-day basis. They implement social services and sometimes even compulsory measures representing the interface between the welfare state and citizens’ needs and problems. Accordingly they often have to balance and mediate between public welfare and politics and the uniqueness of every human situation, and they do it with a considerable margin of discretion.
The following research questions will be answered:
1) How do Italian social workers view their margins of discretion and power towards clients?
2) What explains similarities and differences among Italian social workers and which role does the welfare model play?
By including a comparison with social workers in the Nordic countries the relevance of welfare regimes can be explored. Other factors explored are age and education of the social workers, the field of specialisation (e.g. child protection, disability and addiction), the working sector and more general values such as views on the causes of poverty. The paper presents results from a survey directed towards social workers in four Nordic countries and Italy. The survey was answered by in total 7 569 social workers (Sweden N= 2809, Norway N= 703, Denmark N=743, Finland N= 1299 and Italy N=2718).
Preliminary results indicate important differences between Italian and Nordic social workers. For example, 45 per cent of the Italian social workers express that they do not have great power towards clients compared to less than 20 per cent for the Nordic social workers
L'esperienza dei genitori di bambini con disturbo dello spettro autistico - Una riflessione per il servizio sociale
No full textIl disturbo dello spettro autistico è una disabilità dello sviluppo che affligge migliaia di famiglie in Italia. La legge 134/2015 ha stabilito che le prestazioni relative alla diagnosi, le cure e il trattamento dell’autismo rientrino nei livelli minimi di assistenza e conferma il diffondersi di una coscienza collettiva in merito all’esistenza del fenomeno.
Un contributo significativo al processo di riconoscimento collettivo dell’autismo è stato dato dalle famiglie mediante il racconto della loro esperienza attraverso i media. Ogni genitore desidera che il proprio figlio sia sano e cresca in buona salute; quando questo non avviene, il progetto familiare collegato alla nascita subisce un drastico e doloroso ridimensionamento.
Le ripercussioni sui genitori che vivono l’esperienza di vedere riconosciuta la sindrome al proprio figlio interessano diversi piani: identitario, emotivo, sociale e sono state ancora poco studiate nel loro insieme per orientare i servizi sanitari e sociali nel loro intervento. I genitori, in quanto principali care-givers, sono oggi ritenuti essenziali nella promozione del benessere del bambino con disturbo nello spettro autistico.
La ricerca origina nel contesto del Servizio Sociale ed indaga il vissuto di sedici famiglie, individuate mediante la tecnica dello snowball-sampling, in merito al riconoscimento della sindrome e all’esperienza dell’inserimento scolastico dei propri figli. L’esperienza dei genitori, raccolta mediante un questionario a domande aperte, ha consentito di focalizzare le criticità e i bisogni percepiti al fine di orientare qualitativamente gli interventi di
sostegno promossi dalla rete dei servizio socio-sanitari nella fase di valutazione e nel rapporto con la scuola.
I risultati hanno messo in luce la solitudine di alcune famiglie e allo stesso tempo la determinazione e la tenacia di altre nell’affrontare gli eventi e le difficoltà. Si evidenzia al contempo la necessità di affiancare professionalmente i genitori, sin dalle prime fasi diagnostico/valutative: sono infatti dominati dalla preoccupazione rispetto alla salute del figlio e dallo smarrimento rispetto all’incertezza del futuro. I genitori e i care-givers trarrebbero beneficio da un sostegno fondato sulla sinergia e la stretta collaborazione fra i servizi sociali, sanitar
L'esperienza dei genitori di fronte alla diagnosi di autismo dei figli
No full textOgni genitore desidera che il proprio figlio sia sano e cresca in buona salute; quando questo non avviene il progetto familiare collegato alla nascita subisce un drastico e doloroso ridimensionamento. Le ripercussioni sui genitori che vivono l’esperienza di vedere diagnosticato un disturbo dello spettro autistico al proprio figlio interessano i piani identitario, emotivo e sociale e sono state ancora poco studiate per orientare la relazione degli operatori dei servizi sanitari e sociali con i genitori. La ricerca origina nel contesto del servizio sociale ed esplora il vissuto di sedici famiglie in merito alle cause e al riconoscimento della sindrome dei propri figli. Le testimonianze dei genitori, raccolte nel 2013, vengono proposte per favorire la comprensione dell’esperienza del genitore e dei famigliari: il supporto dei genitori del bambino autistico, in quanto care-giver principali, dovrebbe essere un obiettivo centrale per la rete socio-sanitaria
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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