Helping social workers address the educational needs of foster children

OBJECTIVE: The main aim was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Education Initiative, an intervention program in one of the largest urban counties in the US seeking to increase the responsiveness of social workers to the educational needs of foster children. METHOD: A pre-post test control group design was used. Data from case files and social workers were examined at the start of the project and 18 months later to determine changes in social workers' (a) knowledge and practices regarding school programs and services and (b) maintenance of educational records for children on their caseloads. RESULTS: Data were analyzed from approximately 300 case files and over 200 questionnaires completed by social workers. Findings indicated that social workers who received training and had access to an education liaison (1) increased their knowledge about the school system and (2) were more likely to gather current educational data and comment on schooling needs in the case files. On questionnaires measuring knowledge and practices, supervisory social workers showed no gains while case workers increased their levels of knowledge and involvement. CONCLUSIONS: Evaluative data from both sources support the effectiveness of this collaborative model between the school and child welfare agency for addressing the educational needs of foster youth. Social workers in the pilot offices knew more and focused more on the school experience of youth on their caseloads than workers in the control offices. They reported more educational information in the case files and solicited current progress reports from the schools. Discrepancies between worker and school reported performance data raise questions as to whether social workers by themselves are the most effective advocates for foster children.     

BDSM Disclosure and Stigma Management: Identifying Opportunities for Sex Education

While participation in the activities like bondage, domination, submission/sadism, masochism that fall under the umbrella term BDSM is widespread, stigma surrounding BDSM poses risks to practitioners who wish to disclose their interest. We examined risk factors involved with disclosure to posit how sex education might diffuse stigma and warn of risks. Semi-structured interviews asked 20 adults reporting an interest in BDSM about their disclosure experiences. Most respondents reported their BDSM interests starting before age 15, sometimes creating a phase of anxiety and shame in the absence of reassuring information. As adults, respondents often considered BDSM central to their sexuality, thus disclosure was integral to dating. Disclosure decisions in nondating situations were often complex considerations balancing desire for appropriateness with a desire for connection and honesty. Some respondents wondered whether their interests being found out would jeopardize their jobs. Experiences with stigma varied widely.     

Book review essay

THE MYTH OF PSYCHOTHERAPY: MENTAL HEALING AS RELIGION, RHETORIC, AND REPRESSION. By Thomas Szasz. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978, 236 pages, $8.95.

SCHIZOPHRENIA: THE SACRED SYMBOL OF PSYCHIATRY. By Thomas Szasz. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1976, 204 pages, $10.00.     

Learning for democracy: The politics and practice of citizenship education

It is now two decades since the Advisory Group on Citizenship, commissioned by the newly elected Labour government, recommended the introduction of statutory citizenship education. On the twentieth anniversary of the eponymously named ‘Crick Report’, this article presents the findings of a rigorous mixed‐methods study of citizenship educators in the UK. This research suggests that teachers continue to lack a shared understanding of citizenship, conceptually and pedagogically, and also reveals an emphasis amongst teachers upon individualistic notions of good citizenship that are reflective of national, and increasingly global, political discourse. The findings are analysed using a new conceptual framework—the declarative–procedural paradigm—which is developed here to understand the relationship between political and normatively driven visions of democratic citizenship and classroom pedagogy. In doing so the article adds, theoretically and substantively, to the specific research pool of citizenship studies and broader debates about political disengagement.     

科学能够解释一切吗?

作者在文中反驳了科学只能描述不能解释的观点,并结合物理学背景阐释了科学解释的含义。在文章的最后,作者指出了科学解释的限度,像偶然事件、道德规范、终极理论,都超出了科学解释的能力。     

The relationship between term specificity in MeSH and online postings in MEDLINE

Hierarchically structured thesauri--including MeSH--were studied to test the assumption of an inverse relationship between term specificity and the number of postings in online databases. It was suggested that this assumption holds only for peripheral terms and that the opposite is true for the central terms of a discipline. The Environment tree structure of MeSH was used to test the "peripheral" hypothesis, which was supported at a .05 level of significance, but the scattergram on the Endocrine Diseases tree, which was run to test the "central" hypothesis, had an even better level, .02. The commonly held belief that specific terms are added to a thesaurus when more general ones get too many postings was also tested. The relationship between specificity and dates was supported in MeSH (.015). The corollary--that terms with later dates have fewer postings--was supported at a .001 level of significance. The results for MeSH were much more significant than for other hierarchically structured thesauri, which indicates that thesaurus development at NLM involves interaction with MEDLINE to preclude an excessive number of postings to any one term.