Search results for " social work."
showing 10 items of 103 documents
Loneliness of seniors in long-term care institutions and COVID-19 restrictions
2022
The ageing of society is a significant social and economic challenge in the 21st century Europe. The article analyses loneliness and social isolation among seniors in long-term care (LTC) institutions, as well as how COVID-19 restrictions influence their social isolation. Loneliness and social isolation are different phenomena, but they are interconnected. The feeling of loneliness is a person’s psychological state, but it is especially exacerbated among seniors. Loneliness is closely linked to the deficit of social relations. The study employs a mixed methods approach: a survey using the UCLA Loneliness Scale and semi-structured interviews with social workers in LTC institutions during the…
Parental Monitoring and Youth's Binge Behaviors: The Role of Sensation Seeking and Life Satisfaction
2019
Framed within an ecological perspective of the onset of adolescent problem behaviors, the current study explored the joint role of parent-adolescents’ relationships and youth's individual factors in binge eating and drinking. Firstly, in line with pieces of research highlighting the beneficial impact of effective parenting on youth development, the present paper sought to enhance the knowledge about the positive influence of parental monitoring on youth's binge drinking and eating. Moreover, since literature evidenced that the explanatory mechanisms of the association between parental monitoring and binge behaviors are not fully explored, the study focused on the potential intervening role …
Children’s Public Participation, Middle-Class Families and Emotions
2014
The article examines the activities of a municipal children's parliament (the TCP) in a middle-sized Finnish town. The article focuses on members of the TCP board and their parents and the emphasis is on parents' views as very little research exists on family background in relation to children's public participation. All the participating families were middle-class, both as self-defined and according to their socioeconomic background. The parents studied detailed different emotions they and their children experienced as members of the children's parliament. The article illustrates that being a middle-class child and participating in civic activities is not an uncomplicated description of pr…
Developing a programme theory for the Systemic Practice Model in children's social care : Key informants' perspectives
2021
Vague programme descriptions are known to impede implementation and evaluation. Yet social work change programmes often fail to describe in detail how they aim to provide better outcomes for children and families. This study focused on the Systemic Practice Model (SPM), which is a Finnish adaptation of Reclaiming Social Work, a practice model developed in England. The SPM aims to deliver systemic practice in children's social care and has recently been widely disseminated across Finland. However, research has found both considerable variation in its delivery and a lack of clarity about what it is. This study, applying realist evaluation, aimed to formulate a programme theory based on the pe…
Conflicts in Family Relations, Children's Emotions and Agency
2017
What kind of conflicts and tensions do children experience with other children and adults in the family? Content analysis of 32 thematic interviews with 10- to 13-year-old children revealed that while conflicts often concern daily actions, tasks and routines, they also relate to decision-making and fair treatment or to matters threatening the child's sense of emotional security. Parental conflicts and conflicts in child–parent relationships often arouse negative emotions that lead children to suppress their agency. However, conflicts, particularly those between siblings, may also open up possibilities for negotiation and agency.
The Line: committing and commemorating ‘the crime without a name’
2018
This article analyses Gina Shmukler’s verbatim play The Line (2012) and argues for another look at the testimonies captured from witnesses, survivors and perpetrators of the violence targeting foreign and perceived as foreign persons in South Africa that escalated in 2008 and in 2015. It is a narrative analysis of the play that uses Gregory H. Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide model and the United Nations Convention on Genocide to investigate the theatrical representation of the violence. This account argues that the events that are captured in the play and that inspired it should be reconsidered as acts of genocide. In the absence of an official acknowledgement of the events as genocide, pe…
Client information systems’ support for case-based social work : experiences of Finnish social workers
2021
In recent years, Finland has seen extensive development in the area of social and healthcare information management aimed at harmonizing client information systems (CISs) and ways of documenting client information. The developments aim to support the utilization of recorded information at different levels of service systems, including the level of social work practice. This article investigates the relationship between social work practice and the use of CISs by answering the following question: To what extent do CISs support case-based social work in Finland? Social work is approached as a knowledge-intensive practice in which CISs have become increasingly important for managing case work.…
Invited to labour or participate : intra- and inter-generational distinctions and the role of capital in children’s invited participation
2016
This paper applies aspects of Bourdieu’s conceptual toolkit related to capital, and analyses inter- and intra-generational relations of influence. Applying Bourdieu’s concepts to examples of case studies from a children’s parliament in Finland, and with reference to an adult resident forum, moments of continuity and disruption in the relatively stable patterns of distinction between children and adults emerge. Children in school councils (at times) are labourers for agendas set by teachers, but the children at the top of the structure’s hierarchy can benefit from cultural capital and a functional capital that enables them to set agendas and direct the work of others. The political capital o…
Economic crisis and child maltreatment in Spain: the consequences of the recession in the child protection system
2021
Purpose This study aims to examine the consequences of the last great recession on the child protection system (CPS) in Spain, to estimate whether there is any kind of relationship between the conditions of socio-economic crisis and its protective activity. Design/methodology/approach Data on child protection legal measures issued by the CPS and socio-economic data from 8 of the 17 regions of the country were cross-checked. Using the chi-square test, it was possible to determine the significance and intensity of the relationship between the different variables in each of the regions of the study. Findings During the crisis, the number of recorded cases fell most sharply in those regions wi…
Cross-country comparisons of trends in adolescent psychosomatic symptoms : a Rasch analysis of HBSC data from four Nordic countries
2018
BACKGROUND: To analyse the psychometric properties of the HBSC Symptom Checklist (HBSC-SCL) on psychosomatic symptoms with a focus on the operating characteristics of the items, and on the impacts of measurement distortions on the comparisons of person measures across time and between countries.METHODS: Data were collected in 1993/94, 1997/98, 2001/02, 2005/06, 2008/09, 2013/14 in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden as part of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study. Data comprised 116,531 students 11, 13 and 15 years old. Rasch analysis was conducted of the HBSC-SCL consisting of eight items with a focus on Differential Item Functioning (DIF) and item threshold ordering. …