A Call for Self-Compassion in Social Work Education

Many social work students approach the end of their formal training unprepared to utilize self-care approaches to prevent burnout. Providing students more comprehensive self-care training can help address this issue. One approach to fostering self-care and addressing stress and burnout in social work students is the attitude and practice of self-compassion (SC; i.e., compassion directed inward). Training in SC can be helpful, as it has been shown to be effective in addressing stress and burnout, as well as enhancing practice. This article explores the benefits of integrating an SC approach within professional social work education. A definition, review of the SC literature, and a conceptual sketch for integrating SC approaches in social work education are presented.     

A relatedness analysis of government regulations using domain knowledge and structural organization

The complexity and diversity of government regulations make understanding and retrieval of regulations a non-trivial task. One of the issues is the existence of multiple sources of regulations and interpretive guides with differences in format, terminology and context. This paper describes a comparative analysis scheme developed to help retrieval of related provisions from different regulatory documents. Specifically, the goal is to identify the most strongly related provisions between regulations. The relatedness analysis makes use of not only traditional term match but also a combination of feature matches, and not only content comparison but also structural analysis.Regulations are first compared based on conceptual information as well as domain knowledge through feature matching. Regulations also possess specific organizational structures, such as a tree hierarchy of provisions and heavy referencing between provisions. These structures represent useful information in locating related provisions, and are therefore exploited in the comparison of regulations for completeness. System performance is evaluated by comparing a similarity ranking produced by users with the machine-predicted ranking. Ranking produced by the relatedness analysis system shows a reduction in error compared to that of Latent Semantic Indexing. Various pairs of regulations are compared and the results are analyzed along with observations based on different feature usages. An example of an e-rulemaking scenario is shown to demonstrate capabilities and limitations of the prototype relatedness analysis system.

Discursive Strategies of Civil Disagreement in Public Dialogue Groups

This case study investigates how participants in public dialogue sessions engaged in what they term “civil disagreement.” These sessions encouraged participants to explore a wide range of policy options on a public issue and consider diverse perspectives and possibilities for action. Using Action Implicative Discourse Analysis, we examine civil disagreement as a discursive problem. We argue that “civil disagreement” in public dialogue sessions is temporally bound, involves extended engagement in disagreement, and is viewed as productive by group members. Group members use discursive strategies such as challenging through questions, rearticulating claims while acknowledging other perspectives, and editing or reframing. Group members also use silence to demonstrate listening or to indicate their assessment of the situation as finalized. These discursive strategies demonstrate aspects of participants' situated ideals about public dialogue, which are related to their role in the disagreement and their construals of time. We offer practical implications for facilitators' use of guidelines, discussion of timing, and awareness of the multiple meanings of silence during disagreement.     

Organizing collective action amid the ripple effects of change: narratives of crisis,disaster, and opportunity

This study examines how narrative is used by remote stakeholders to cope with organizational change. Specifically, I focus on the public narratives of community leaders because these narratives often function as a rhetorical resource to attract businesses, receive grants, and retain local residents. Public stories announcing, explaining, and managing the ripple effects of organizational change warrant deeper analysis in order to refine our ability to respond to these effects at a community level. This in-depth case study analysis of one community's efforts to respond to the loss of its largest employer suggests that naming a change event as a crisis, disaster, or opportunity positions actors differently within narratives, creating powerful implications for social action. Specifically, crisis narratives call for punishment of the causal agent and legislation of responsibility; disaster narratives call for assistance to affected communities and legislation of support; and opportunity narratives create an unclear policy mandate and demand transformational leadership to mobilize action.