No Easy Way Through: Black Workers and Race Leadership at the Nadir

It is difficult, even excruciating, to imagine the staggering descent from high optimism to despondency experienced by many African Americans who lived between emancipation and the dawn of the twentieth century. For historians living in the post–civil rights era, recapturing the scale, velocity, and brutality of that dramatic fall has been hampered by two conceptual problems. The first of these, undergirded by prominent trends in the formerly “new” social history, is a widely shared enthusiasm for illuminating those hidden corners of daily life where men and women on the receiving end of Jim Crow continued to wield a degree of control. “Agency” has been the buzzword for a generation of scholarship that emphasizes the staying power and persistence of black Southerners in the face of relentless assaults on their social and economic status, their civil rights, and even, at times, their collective existence. This is, in many ways, an understandable reaction to an earlier consensus that relegated black historical initiative to the margins of a national fable cleansed of unseemly violence and sharp social conflict, but it can also be problematic.

An audit of assessment and reporting by Approved Social Workers (ASWs)

This paper examines the routine practice of Approved Social Workers (ASWs) in adult mental health services in Northern Ireland. It begins with a review of existing literature on the ASW role before describing how a retrospective audit, using a mixed methods approach, was used to collect data on eighty-four assessments carried out to determine whether compulsory admission to hospital was needed. Respondents were also asked to consider how such assessments might be affected by proposed changes to the law in this field. The key findings highlighted a number of areas of practice that may be improved. There were inconsistencies in how the assessments were recorded and an uneven distribution of workloads across ASWs. Some problems were identified with interagency working and, in a quarter of the assessments, the ASW reported having felt afraid or at risk. The authors make a number of recommendations, which include: the use of a standard reporting procedure; that organisations should consider how to deliver a more even distribution of ASW workload; that protocols should be developed that ensure that ASWs are not left alone in potentially risky situations; and that joint assessments with General Practitioners should be required, rather than just recommended.

Coercion in the Community: A Situated Approach to the Examination of Ethical Challenges for Mental Health Social Workers

Increasingly, mental health social workers in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world are employing coercive interventions with clients. This paper explores this trend in the context of community-based settings, using national and international research literature on this subject. It begins with a discussion about the complex, contested nature of ideas on coercion. The authors then explore debates about how coercion is perceived and applied in practice. They choose two forms of coercion*/informal types of leverage, and the legally mandated use of Community Treatment Orders*/to highlight the range of ethical problems and dilemmas that confront practitioners in this field. The authors conclude by developing a tentative, explanatory model to explain how and why mental health social workers should consider a more holistic, situated approach to help deal with ethical concerns about the use of coercion.

Decision making by senior social workers at point of first referral

In the United Kingdom there has been difficulty in implementing the family support provisions contained in the 1989 Children Act, largely because of continued emphasis on child protection activity by local authorities. There is an observable international tendency for child-care referrals to receive investigative response, resulting in families being traumatized and children's needs left unmet. There has been a lack of research into how child-care referrals are initially categorized by senior social workers. This paper reports on research undertaken in two Health and Social Services Trusts within Northern Ireland to ascertain if it might be possible to treat more initial referrals as 'child-care problem enquiries' as opposed to 'child protection investigations'. Results demonstrate that, while such potential may exist, a preoccupation with the management of risk could lead to the development of child-care problems receiving quasi-child protection responses. Consequently, changes in initial decision making may not have the full intended effects in terms of the organizational release of resources for family support or a lessening of the traumatic impact upon families.

Relationships matter: The problems and prospects for social workers' relationships with young children in care

One of the key lessons learnt in the UK from the Laming Inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié was the importance of social workers developing consistent and long-term relationships with young children in whose lives they are involved. This issue is now informing policy developments, including the proposed Social Work Practices which, based on a similar model to General Practitioner practices, aim to provide a lead professional to act as a parental figure and an advocate for every child in care. This paper begins by confirming the importance of developing relationships between social workers and young children, but questions the ability of the new policy developments to facilitate these. Drawing upon data from research involving interviews with social workers, the paper outlines the factors which hinder social workers' relationships with young children and argues that while the new proposals address some of the more surface structural and organizational factors, they do not address the deeper factors regarding attitudes, values and emotional competence which are crucial if social workers are to successfully build relationships with young children in care.

Risks to home care workers: Professional perspectives

Care at home is fundamental to community care policy, but the simultaneous growth of health and safety regulation has implications for home care services because of the duty of employers towards home care workers. This grounded theory study set in Northern Ireland used data from 19 focus groups and nine semi-structured interviews with a range of health and social services professionals and managers to explore perspectives on planning long term care for older people. Home care workers faced a wide range of hazards in the homes of clients, who themselves were faced with adapting their living habits due to their changing health and care needs and 'risks.' Creative approaches were used to ensure the health and safety of home care workers and simultaneously to meet the choices of clients. Staff experienced feelings of conflict when they judged it necessary to impose their way of providing home care and thus impose their values on clients to create a safe working environment. There was variation between and within organizations in terms of the staff focus on client needs or on their employer responsibility towards home care workers. The planning of home care services must take account of both the choices of clients and the hazards facing home care staff.

Deciding to Detain: The Use of Compulsory Mental Health Law by Social Workers

Critical commentary

Best of the old alongside the new: training for part-time youth workers

Set against the dearth of published research into the effectiveness of youth leadership training programmes, the present study describes how a comprehensive evaluation model was utilised to evaluate one such programme in Northern Ireland over a 3-year period. The training welds together a traditional curriculum approach and a competence-based methodology to provide an integrated experience for the part-time youth worker participants (n = 128). Self-completion questionnaires and follow-up interviews with a random sample of these youth workers and their supervisors were used to collect data. Outcomes suggest that the synthesis of these two training strategies is not only effective in meeting the learning needs of youth workers, but also leads to identifiable improvements in the range and quality of youth work programmes available to young people

Local, European and global: An exploration of migration patterns of social workers into Ireland

Whilst the project to increase workforce mobility is part of a common labour force policy across the European Union, for some social workers, it has also been coupled with an aspiration to develop a pan-European identity within the profession (Lorenz, 1994, 2000; Frost, 2008). In this article, taking the island of Ireland as an example, we examine empirical data on the movement of social workers in recent years, both within Ireland and inward from outside the island, and consider the challenges and opportunities this has presented for the profession, also drawing on the British experience. From this analysis, some tentative conclusions are drawn about what is happening, what is possible and what is desirable in balancing aspirations for increased mobility within the European Union and a pan-European social work identity against the needs and interests of local, European and global communities.

Distance between home and work: A multilevel analysis of individual workers, neighbourhoods, and employment sites in Northern Ireland

Abstract. We explore the distances between home and work for employees at twenty-eight different employment sites across Northern Ireland. Substantively, this is important for better understanding the geography of labour catchments. Methodologically, with data on the distances between place of residence (566 wards) and place of work for some 15 000 workers, and the use of multilevel modelling (MLM), the analysis adds to the evidence derived from other census-based and survey-based studies. Descriptive analysis is supplemented with MLM that simultaneously explores individual, neighbourhood, and site variations in travel-to-work patterns using hierarchical and cross-classified model specifications, including individual and ecological predictor variables (and their cross-level interactions). In doing so we apportion variability to different levels and spatial contexts, and also outline the factors that shape spatial mobility. We find, as expected, that factors such as gender and occupation influence the distance between home and work, and also confirm the importance of neighbourhood characteristics (such as population density observed in ecological analyses at ward level) in shaping individual outcomes, with major differences found between urban and rural locations. Beyond this, the analysis of variability also points to the relative significance of residential location, with less individual variability in travel-to-work distance between workers within wards than within employment sites. We conclude by suggesting that, whilst some general ‘rules’ about the factors that shape labour catchments are possible (eg workers in rural areas and in higher occupations travel further than others), the complex variability between places highlighted by the MLM analysis illustrates the salience of place-specific uniqueness.

Spatial Mobility, Workers and Jobs: Perspectives from the Northern Ireland Experience

Spatial mobility, workers and jobs: perspectives from the Northern Ireland experience,Regional Studies. How best to address local concentrations of worklessness is a key question for labour market, economic developmentand social inclusion policy. Historically, initiatives in Northern Ireland have focused on moving ‘jobs to workers’, butin changed political circumstances there is now greater emphasis on encouraging the movement of ‘workers to jobs’. A review of the Northern Ireland experience in the context of broader consideration of the geography and socio-institutional structure of local labour markets sheds light on the difficulties and successes in implementing both approaches. It is concluded that both have a role to play because labour market space is simultaneously ‘segmented’ and ‘seamless