The work of psychologists in social policy in Brazil

This study verses on the meeting of psychology with the social policy area. The objective is to discuss how psychologists that work in the Basic Health Units and in the Social Assistance Reference Centers experience their daily practices. Using the interview and participant observation methods, we investigated the modes of action of 13 psychologists involved in these service units. The results indicate that because these contexts are adverse to the traditional forms of action, many professionals experience daily strangeness and discomfort, resulting from their encounters with limiting situations of difficult management. Furthermore, we observed practices and experiences that were marked by feelings of compassion, pity, and resentment. We consider, finally, that the encounter between psychology and social policies requires flexibility in traditional acting modes as well as the pursuit of strategies that consider cultural contexts characteristics, avoiding capture, fatigue and saturation process that stifle the worker.

Data interpretation in social housing management

The use of business management techniques in the public sector is not a new topic. However the increased use of the phrase "housing business management" as against that of "housing administration" reflects a change in the underlying philosophy of service delivery. The paper examines how data collection and use can be related to the operational requirements of the social landlords and highlights the problems of systems dynamics generating functionally obsolete data.

Effect of pair interactions on transition probabilities between inactive and active states: achieving collective behaviour via pair interactions in social insects

To understand the evolution of well-organized social behaviour, we must first understand the mechanism by which collective behaviour establishes. In this study, the mechanisms of collective behaviour in a colony of social insects were studied in terms of the transition probability between active and inactive states, which is linked to mutual interactions. The active and inactive states of the social insects were statistically extracted from the velocity profiles. From the duration distributions of the two states, we found that 1) the durations of active and inactive states follow an exponential law, and 2) pair interactions increase the transition probability from inactive to active states. The regulation of the transition probability by paired interactions suggests that such interactions control the populations of active and inactive workers in the colony.

Acknowledgement of client diversity and oppression in social work student supervision

An enduring theme of social work literature and education has been the need for workers to recognise and challenge oppressive structures and develop competence in working with diverse client groups. This paper reports the findings of a qualitative research project where student and field educator supervision sessions were recorded, with the view to examining how oppression and diversity were addressed in these sessions. The authors have used the term 'difference' to describe the breach between the student and client experiences. Examples of anti-discriminatory practice were identified in the recordings, however on occasions supervisors had difficulty in assisting students to acknowledge diversity and oppression in supervision. Four factors that related to addressing diversity emerged from the supervision material. These were: the struggle to unmask subtle themes of oppression; the use of questioning to raise student awareness and development of self-knowledge; using student biography to facilitate learning on 'difference'; and field educator use of self-disclosure during discussions on diversity. Successful approaches to anti-oppressive practice and responding to diversity are outlined.

Encouraging critical reflections on privilege in social work and the human services

Critical reflection is promoted by many progressive social work writers as a process for facilitating practitioners' capacity to reflect upon their complicity in dominant power relations. However. the critical social work literature tends to focus attention on those who are disadvantaged. oppressed and excluded. Those who are privileged in relation to gender. class. race and sexuality etc are often ignored. Given that the flipside of oppression and social exclusion is privilege. the lack of critical reflection on the privileged side of social  divisions allows members of dominant groups to reinforce their dominance. This article interrogates the concept of privilege and examines how it is internalised in the psyches of members of dominant groups. After exploring the potential to undo privilege from within. the article encourages social work educators to engage in critical reflections about privilege when teaching social work students about social injustice and oppression.

Losing innocence : finding the line between emotional bonds and boundaries in protective service work

This paper builds on existing literature on the notion of emotional labour by investigating work in a child protective service environment. Notable characteristics of formal organisations, such as child protective services, are that they operate within a legal framework and that workers' professional duties have great influence on clients. This paper examines the intricacies of the worker-client relationship and the emotional dynamics of the service interactions by interviewing a group of workers in a public hospital in Victoria, Australia. This research extricates the complexities in the client-worker relationship by examining a range of work characteristics including their roles as professional caregivers, the emotional bonds and boundaries in the workers-client relationship, the intensity and magnitude of felt and displayed emotions, as well as the self-management of emotions and clients' emotions. This study adds to existing knowledge on the emotional expressions, experiences and regulation of emotions of the professional work lives in a child protective service work environment.
This paper is divided into the following sections. The first section details protective service work within the larger framework of human service work, and how the worker-client interface is different from other front-line service work. This is followed the need to examine the emotional dynamics of work in a child protective service organisation. Next, a study of these emotional dynamics in a child protective service organisation is reported. The paper concludes with a consideration of the wider implications for the sociology of protective service work, and how affective issues differ other service work roles.

Consumer complaint channel choice in self-service technology encounters

Consumers’ choice of channel to communicate complaints, following the decision to voice to the organisation, has received very little research attention. This study contributes to filling this gap by exploring the drivers of consumers’ choice of complaint channel in the self-service technology (SST) context. Surprisingly, in this context, consumers have often chosen interpersonal complaint channels over electronic channels, resulting in some of the value of using SSTs being lost for consumers and organisations alike. Preliminary findings indicate that the perceived ease of use, the likelihood of organisational response, the desire for social interaction and the source of the SST-related complaint, might provide some clues as to the organisational strategies that can be used to encourage greater utilisation of technology-based complaint channels.

The Australian Association of Social Workers and social policy debates: a strategy for the future?

It has been argued that the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) not only has a mandate, but also an important role to play in influencing social debates for the benefit of the users of social services and, further, that as a professional association, it is ideally positioned to do so. However, the AASW has been criticised for failing to meet this mandate and have any lasting impact on the formulation of social policy. In the present article, the author considers the process by which the AASW engages in social policy debates and speculates on the historical, cultural, and structural factors that may impede its ability to do so. From this analysis, strategies are suggested for the AASW to increase its impact on the formulation of social policy.

Opportunities and challenges for global education in social education curriculum

This paper will explore understandings about global education as expressed in national and local curriculum statements. Despite curriculum statements in Studies of Society and Environment area including ‘global’ in their rationale, slippage occurs between policy documents and the translation to standards statements. The curriculum area - Studies of Society and Environment is - changing as new titles describe the field and a more integrated approach is being developed in some states – Tasmania and Victoria, this presents challenges for global education.

My work in global education is a result of many years as a Geography teacher, nine years at the Asia Education Foundation, a leader of teacher study tours to Asia and pre-service teacher education students to Canada and Northern Territory. I am a passionate believer in the power of travel to unsettle, to educate, and to be reminded of all I have, and to be thankful.

Non-formal education for women workers in Thai industry

This study focuses on non-formal education provision for women workers in industry in Thailand. It consists of a dissertation and four elective studies. The dissertation explored the possibilities to improve women workers' quality of life. The experience gained from the research formed the Participatory Approach Model called "PAM".

Quality in disability service - whose indicators?

The study identified indicators of disability service quality used by three stakeholder groups (service users, providers and managers) in order to develop an explanatory schema regarding stakeholders' perceptions of quality and its indicators. The different perspectives were identified and the emerging quality indicator framework had a complex socio-ecological basis.

Event extraction using behaviors of sentiment signals and burst structure in social media

Significant world events often cause the behavioral convergence of the expression of shared sentiment. This paper examines the use of the blogosphere as a framework to study user psychological behaviors, using their sentiment responses as a form of ‘sensor’ to infer real-world events of importance automatically. We formulate a novel temporal sentiment index function using quantitative measure of the valence value of bearing words in blog posts in which the set of affective bearing words is inspired from psychological research in emotion structure. The annual local minimum and maximum of the proposed sentiment signal function are utilized to extract significant events of the year and corresponding blog posts are further analyzed using topic modeling tools to understand their content. The paper then examines the correlation of topics discovered in relation to world news events reported by the mainstream news service provider, Cable News Network, and by using the Google search engine. Next, aiming at understanding sentiment at a finer granularity over time, we propose a stochastic burst detection model, extended from the work of Kleinberg, to work incrementally with stream data. The proposed model is then used to extract sentimental bursts occurring within a specific mood label (for example, a burst of observing ‘shocked’). The blog posts at those time indices are analyzed to extract topics, and these are compared to real-world news events. Our comprehensive set of experiments conducted on a large-scale set of 12 million posts from Livejournal shows that the proposed sentiment index function coincides well with significant world events while bursts in sentiment allow us to locate finer-grain external world events.