1,720,955 research outputs found
Work-life Balance: An Essential Capability for Social Workers’ Well-being in Free State, South Africa
No full textSocial workers in South Africa and internationally promote the welfare of individuals, families, groups, and communities by attending to their social issues and needs. The advancement of this goal is intricately connected to professionals’ well-being. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in one of South Africa’s provinces, the Free State, and deploying the capability approach and work-family border theory, this study examines social workers’ conceptualisation of their well-being and the significance of a work-life balance in attaining well-being. It explores the many challenges faced by social workers in sustaining a balance between their personal and professional lives. A purposive sample of 18 participants consisting of eight practising social workers and ten student social workers was selected. Data was collected through individual semi-structured interviews. The findings from the study suggest that social workers understand their well-being in quite broad terms. Besides their physical and mental health, they conceive their well-being with regard to the satisfaction that comes with the accomplishment of various professional (work) and private (life) functionings. They, for instance, cherish growing as professionals, being effective helpers, having control and autonomy over their work, being supported by organisational structures, and having ample time for their private lives and families. However, in South Africa, working conditions characterised by a lack of resources, high caseloads, and poor salaries cause work-life imbalance and interfere with the achievement of social workers’ valued life goals and overall well-being
ACHIEVEMENT OF WELLBEING AMONG SOUTH AFRICAN SOCIAL WORKERS: CONSTRAINTS AND ENABLERS
Full text linkThe achievement of wellbeing among social workers or their ability to flourish, has a bearing on their capacity to contribute towards sustainable social, economic and human development. Enhancing wellbeing among social workers is therefore important in ensuring successful client interventions. Understanding what constitutes and constrains social workers’ wellbeing is important in enhancing it. Using the capabilities approach as a theoretical lens, this qualitative study examines the various conversion factors limiting or enabling wellbeing achievement among social workers. It uses a cross-sectional design. A non-probability, purposive sampling method was used to recruit and select 18 participants consisting of practising social workers and final-year social work students from a South African university. Semi-structured interviews were used as data-collection instruments. The main findings suggest that professional wellbeing is multifaceted. Social workers define professional wellbeing in terms of effective helping and professional growth, among other functionings. Various structural, organisational and personal factors can detrimentally affect the way that social workers can achieve and sustain these professional functions. These include persistent poverty and inequality, extreme resource constraints, and lack of supportive supervision and experience, amongst other factors
Understanding Social Workers’ Well-Being through Their Valued Aspirations
No full textRecent studies across various contexts have shown that social workers’ well-being or lack thereof affects their ability to advance social well-being. This is even more marked in a context such as South Africa in which social workers often function with very few resources and in contexts of extreme poverty. Using the capability approach, this qualitative study deals with the question of social workers’ well-being. It focuses on social workers’ aspirations, the ideals to which they aspire as a window to understanding their well-being as professionals. Drawing from interviews with practising social workers and social work students from a South African university, the study (a) examines social workers’ understanding of professional well-being, (b) identifies social workers’ aspirations and their connection to well-being achievement, and (c) outlines the necessary opportunities for the achievement of social workers’ valued aspirations. By paying particular attention to social workers’ aspirations, this article proposes a much broader understanding of social workers’ well-being than is possible when we focus on individual aspects of professionals’ well-being such as physical health or positive psychological functioning. The findings suggest that, apart from physical and emotional wellness, social workers understand their well-being in terms of achieving their valued aspirations, namely, effective helping, professional growth, personal growth, and material achievements. The study identifies several capabilities necessary for social workers’ professional well-being
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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