Not just social work academics : the involvement of others in the assessment of social work students

University regulations typically assume that the assessment of students is essentially a task for paid academic staff. However, this is a far cry from much of the current literature about assessment in social work education, of which one of the distinguishing features is the not infrequent references to stakeholders beyond the individuals who are to be assessed and the academic staff employed to teach them. This paper reviews some of the recent literature on the involvement of persons other than social work academics, including students, practice teachers and service users, in assessing students studying in social work programmes. Implications for programme providers of using non-academic assessors are explored.

Ignatian spirituality and the rebuilding of self-esteem

Of all the relationships in my life, one that has been among the most difficult is the relationship with myself; overcoming low self-confidence is an ongoing struggle. One might contend that self-denigration is a form of self-mutilation, and at times it has been a powerfully destructive force in my life. All too often, low self-esteem has limited the opportunities available to me, and has had an impact on the relationships with significant others in my life, including God. It has even been suggested that it has been one of the inordinateattachments from which I have needed liberating (Exx 23). While the problem is now much less severe than it has been, maintaining a functional level of self-esteem requires ongoing effort. In this paper, it is my aim to tell of my own journey into Ignatian prayer, using illustrations from my own journals, and to explain why it has become important in my efforts to preserve a sense of my own value.

Spontaneous comparisons with others in gay men´s judgements of HIV risk

In studies on ‘unrealistic optimism’ (UO), when people are asked questions designed to make them compare their risk of experiencing an undesirable event with that of the average person, they tend to respond that their risk is lower. This study investigated whether comparisons of own and others’ risk also occur spontaneously, unprovoked by such questions. Gay men uninfected with HIV (n¼50) were asked to think aloud about their risk of becoming infected; their comments were audiotaped and analysed. Over half the men added comments relating to others’ risk. The phrasing of these comments and the reported basis for them are described. The men represented others’ risk as relatively high, own risk as relatively low. In the case of onethird of the men, it seemed possible to be confident that a comparison was being made. The findings suggest that comparisons of own and others’ risk do occur spontaneously and that, while the judgements made in UO studies do not capture all the characteristics of those made spontaneously, they resemble them in important ways.

Predicting prosocial personality from attachment facets: are some facets more critical than others?

Research across various countries and relationship contexts suggests that attachment anxiety and avoidance are associated with people’s prosocial feelings, tendencies, and behaviors (e.g., Gillath et al., 2005; Karantzas, Evans, & Foddy, 2007). In the present paper we extend the two dimensional model of attachment to include a series of nested facets. Doing so allowed us to examine whether the multifaceted nested factor model provides a better explanation of the associations between attachment and the components of prosocial personality as compared to the bi-factor model (attachment anxiety and avoidance). Three hundred and eighty participants, aged 18 to 33 years completed self-report measures of adult attachment and prosocial personality. Data were fitted to various models – as expected the nested model provided a better fit to the data and explained a significantly larger proportion of the variance in prosocial tendencies than the bi-factor model. The attachment facets were found to make distinct contributions to prosocial personality beyond the broad attachment dimensions (e.g., the preoccupied facet was uniquely associated with personal distress). Implications for the revised attachment structure across various prosocial contexts are discussed, as are the limitations of using the Experience in Close Relationships Scale (ECR; Brennan et al., 1998) to test a multifaceted attachment model.

Dice-rolling games : yahtzee, poker dice and others

Provides information on some dice rolling games and the social need for mathematical information on gambling. Pass the pig; Heads, tails or odds; Yahtzee.