1,721,050 research outputs found
Parental joblessness, financial disadvantage and the wellbeing of parents and children
Full text linkThis paper used Longitudinal Study of Australian Children data to analyse links between parental employment and the wellbeing of families.The study found that jobless families and families with short part-time hours (fewer than 21 hours) were at considerable financial disadvantage compared to families with full-time or long part-time hours of employment.Of the children in the study, 5 per cent were living in a family with short part-time hours, and 11 per cent lived in a jobless family – this figure includes half of the children of single parents. Developmental outcomes for these children were lower than those for children in families working more than 21 hours. Joblessness and short part-time hours contributed to these poor outcomes for children through the effect of financial stress on parents.Authored by Jennifer Baxter, Matthew Gray, Kelly Hand, and Alan Hayes
Exclusion or inclusion - or both?
No full textLabor’s social inclusion agenda is an exciting development, writes ILAN KATZ, but it will be a while before we know whether it will fulfil its promise.
THE election of the Rudd government has, inevitably, begun to change the lexicon of social policy. Every government has its own catch phrases and politically acceptable nomenclature, and this one is no exception. We seem to be moving from the era of Social Capital to the era of Social Inclusion. Already it has become de rigueur for any significant social policy conference to be themed around the concept of social inclusion, and I have no doubt that there will be a spate of special journal editions, edited books and the like.
Academics love this sort of transition because it opens up whole new areas of work - not only because new subjects of enquiry are encouraged, but also because new buzz words such as social inclusion need debate, refinement and discussion.
Social exclusion (as opposed to inclusion) has been studied in the European context since the early 1990s and is generally seen as a more productive construct than poverty. Firstly, it is multi-dimensional rather than relying on one threshold for its definition. Secondly, it includes analysis of the forces that exclude marginal groups such as ethnic minorities, mentally ill people and homeless people from mainstream society, rather than focusing exclusively on the characteristics of the excluded. Thirdly, it incorporates the dynamics and processes of inclusion and exclusion. It also has a number of different definitions and narratives. The most well-known analysis of these different connotations was provided by Ruth Levitas, who divided social exclusion into three discourses:
• the social inclusion discourse (SID);
• the redistribution discourse (RED); and
• the moral underclass discourse (MUD).
Thus it would seem that the Rudd government, by preferring the term social inclusion, has downplayed both the redistribution and the moral underclass discourses. It remains to be seen whether this will continue. In the UK the Blair government, which introduced the social exclusion discourse into the mainstream, did not take long to single out undesirable groups in the population (so-called dole bludgers, bogus asylum seekers, hoons etc) for official opprobrium.
Interestingly the term social inclusion, while a lot warmer and fuzzier than social exclusion, lacks the connotation of exclusionary forces. It therefore implies a much stronger policy focus on helping the excluded to participate in mainstream society, without examining what it is about that society that excluded them in the first place.
From a research point of view, the social inclusion agenda opens up a raft of opportunities to study aspects of social policy that were previously de-emphasised, particularly the effects of government policy on marginalised groups.
One of the fascinating aspects of academic social policy research and analysis is that many of the basic aspects of society and policy that we are addressing are very simple to understand on the surface, but are fiendishly difficult to operationalise and define accurately. Poverty, care, disability, child abuse, social capital and social inclusion are cases in point. Any intelligent member of the population will be able to easily grasp the essence of these terms, and yet none of them has been defined accurately or adequately. On the contrary, acrimonious debates and tensions amongst scholars have been engendered by disagreements over their definitions. Whilst these debates have engaged academics (and bureaucrats) over long periods of time, the groups of people who are subject to the actual policies don’t tend to care much about these arguments.
Social capital, for example, has spawned a veritable industry of definition, measurement, comment and analysis. The Australian Bureau of Statistics produced a guide to measuring social capital with a complicated diagram. I wonder where all of this will go now, given that social capital has been superseded in the political lexicon. In my view social inclusion/exclusion contains a much richer set of concepts than social capital. Although social capital has a very powerful, simple and common-sense narrative at its core - people function better in the context of networks of support and trust than as individuals - it has become an overburdened and tired expression with little meaning, and it is tainted by its vaguely right-wing connotations.
It would be a pity if the focus on social inclusion became mired by definitional issues. Social inclusion is intentionally an inclusive definition and hard to define accurately. There is another approach to the problem, which the government seems to be taking. That approach is based on the model set by the Social Exclusion Unit in the UK and followed by the Social Inclusion Board in South Australia. It is to identify a number of severe social policy problems that are known to require a multi-departmental approach and to set up processes to deal with these issues. Typically these problems include homelessness, substance abuse, mental illness, and young people not in education or employment.
This approach has the advantage of not having to address the definitional complexities of social inclusion. Instead it can narrow the focus on specific and hopefully achievable objectives rather than promoting social inclusion as a positive-sounding but fairly meaningless goal. On the other hand this approach is very programmatic and narrowly focused. It presumes that complex problems can be addressed relatively easily by short-term interventions. The UK experience with this approach has been mixed. Homelessness seems to have genuinely fallen, but other problems such as youth crime and drug abuse have been much less successfully addressed. This is a new and exciting phase in Australian social policy, but it will be a while before we know whether it will fulfil its promise. •
Ilan Katz is Director of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. This article first appeared in the SPRC’s latest newsletter (PDF).
Photo: Ren© Mansi/iStockphot
National evaluation (2004-2008) of the Stronger Families and Communities Strategy 2004-2009
No full textThis report covers three of the Stronger Families and Communities Strategy initiatives - Communities for Children (CfC), Invest to Grow and Local Answers. It examines service provision, service coordination, Indigenous families and children in CfC sites, factors that facilitate or hinder service provision and outcomes, and sustainability.Many research participants compared the SFCS 2004–2009 model favourably with other funding models noting that it gave service providers considerable control over the types of services they could provide and the way they could deliver them. Programs benefited greatly from consultations and partnerships with Indigenous organisations and community members, but effective community engagement takes considerable time, especially in rural and remote areas.
Partnerships, better coordinated services, and a focus on early childhood may be long-term outcomes of the SFCS 2004–2009 initiative in some areas. However, without ongoing funding, it is unlikely that SFCS 2004–2009 programs will be sustainable. Short-term interventions can fuel resentment and mistrust. Furthermore, preliminary positive program outcomes may diminish, and potential benefits remain unrealised without sustained funding.
The evaluation was undertaken over four years by a consortium comprising the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, supported by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. This report is written by Kristy Muir, Ilan Katz, Christiane Purcal, Roger Patulny, Saul Flaxman, David Abelló, Natasha Cortis, Cathy Thomson, Ioana Oprea, Sarah Wise, Ben Edwards, Matthew Gray and Alan Hayes
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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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