Serviço social, educação e complexidade: um diálogo com o homo complexus professor

Pós-graduação em Serviço Social - FCHS

A produção do conhecimento em Serviço Social: o mundo do trabalho em debate

Pós-graduação em Serviço Social - FCHS

Dimensões e limites da supervisão acadêmica de estágio em Serviço Social

Pós-graduação em Serviço Social - FCHS

Crenças envolvendo o não aprender: um estudo evolutivo sobre a construção do conhecimento social

The construction of social knowledge, under the Piagetian approach, has been the target of recent research in the Brazilian context. From this perspective, this article presents preliminary data from an evolutionary study regarding the ideas of children and adolescents about not learning. Herein we present data obtained from the second methodological tool used in this research: an analysis of a story involving a situation of not learning, applied to 80 students between 06 and 16 years old. The main results indicate that most of the students surveyed tend to blame only themselves for not learning. They justify it by factors such as indifference, indiscipline, among others. Students' beliefs are also analyzed according to levels of understanding of social reality and most students presented a very elementary level of understanding.

Como resolver uma situação de não aprendizagem: um estudo psicogenético sobre a construção do conhecimento social

Based on the Piagetian theory and on the research about the construction of Social Knowledge, this article presents the beliefs of children and adolescents regarding the resolution of a situation of not learning. Data were obtained from 80 students, between 06 and 16 years, who analyzed a story involving this issue. The main results indicate that most participants are not able think about the situation contained in the story in a more complex way, disregarding processes and elements, thus. They tend to give simplistic answers and it demonstrates the characteristics of the most elementary level of understanding of social reality. Even among the older students, a less elaborated representation of this daily social question, “to learn or not to learn”, was also preponderate.

Desenhos sobre aprendizagem e não aprendizagem: a construção do conhecimento social sob o enfoque piagetiano

The article presents preliminary data of a survey that aimed to investigate the beliefs of children and adolescents about not learning. A total of 80 students, aged 6 to 16 years participated of the study. Among the participants, 20 are 6 years old, 20 are 9, 20 are 12 and 20 are 16 years old. As methodological tool, it was asked the participants to draw a person that learns and another one that doesn’t learn. Data was analyzed according to the Piagetian perspective for the construction of social knowledge. The main results indicate that a significant part of the participants tend to blame the students for the result of no learning. This indicates that students are able to consider the amplitude of different dimensions of social phenomena only partially. When considering the level of understanding of social reality, it was observed that, even at older ages, participants have a very basic notion of the social world.

O teatro do oprimido como ferramenta educativa: ações junto aos adolescentes em estado de vulnerabilidade social

This article is a theoretical and practical portrait of a non-formal educational activities aimed to examine the transformations experienced by young people in a state of social vulnerability participating in social discussions in a form of theater of the oppressed - the theater-forum. The technique of theater-forum was held as a methodology able to establish a critical space action / reflection / action on the social reality experienced by these young people. The discussions postulates in some theatrical performances were analyzed critically and scored from theoretical frameworks of contemporary thinkers (Bauman, Augé, Boal,Bock, Aguiar, Ozella). We conclude that this action re-signified social problems (violence, drug involvement, hyperconsumerism, poverty, cultural capital etc.) Among these young people. In general, the young through a collective construction could experience new processes of subjectivity and open to possible changes and social transformations criticism in your life.

O Serviço Social contracenando com a arte para desvelar a realidade

Pós-graduação em Serviço Social - FCHS

Serviço Social e Educação: uma aproximação a partir do estado da arte

Pós-graduação em Serviço Social - FCHS

Social Support Quality in Internet Based Information and Communication: From "Digital Divide" to "Voice Divide"

National and international studies demonstrate that the number of teenagers using the inter-net increases. But even though they actually do have access from different places to the in-formation and communication pool of the internet, there is evidence that the ways in which teenagers use the net - regarding the scope and frequency in which services are used as well as the preferences for different contents of these services - differ significantly in relation to socio-economic status, education, and gender. The results of the regarding empirical studies may be summarised as such: teenager with low (formal ) education especially use internet services embracing 'entertainment, play and fun' while higher educated teenagers (also) prefer intellectually more demanding and particularly services supplying a greater variety of communicative and informative activities. More generally, pedagogical and sociological studies investigating "digital divide" in a dif-ferentiated and sophisticated way - i.e. not only in terms of differences between those who do have access to the Internet and those who do not - suggest that the internet is no space beyond 'social reality' (e.g. DiMaggio & Hargittai 2001, 2003; Vogelgesang, 2002; Welling, 2003). Different modes of utilisation, that structure the internet as a social space are primarily a specific contextualisation of the latter - and thus, the opportunities and constraints in virtual world of the internet are not less than those in the 'real world' related to unequal distribu-tions of material, social and cultural resources as well as social embeddings of the actors involved. This fact of inequality is also true regarding the outcomes of using the internet. Empirical and theoretical results concerning forms and processes of networking and commu-nity building - i.e. sociability in the internet, as well as the social embeddings of the users which are mediated through the internet - suggest that net based communication and infor-mation processes may entail the resource 'social support'. Thus, with reference to social work and the task of compensating the reproduction of social disadvantages - whether they are medial or not - the ways in which teenagers get access to and utilize net based social sup-port are to be analysed.

Semiotic Analysis in the Study of Social Work

Research and professional practices have the joint aim of re-structuring the preconceived notions of reality. They both want to gain the understanding about social reality. Social workers use their professional competence in order to grasp the reality of their clients, while researchers’ pursuit is to open the secrecies of the research material. Development and research are now so intertwined and inherent in almost all professional practices that making distinctions between practising, developing and researching has become difficult and in many aspects irrelevant. Moving towards research-based practices is possible and it is easily applied within the framework of the qualitative research approach (Dominelli 2005, 235; Humphries 2005, 280). Social work can be understood as acts and speech acts crisscrossing between social workers and clients. When trying to catch the verbal and non-verbal hints of each others’ behaviour, the actors have to do a lot of interpretations in a more or less uncertain mental landscape. Our point of departure is the idea that the study of social work practices requires tools which effectively reveal the internal complexity of social work (see, for example, Adams & Dominelli & Payne 2005, 294 – 295). The boom of qualitative research methodologies in recent decades is associated with much profound the rupture in humanities, which is called the linguistic turn (Rorty 1967). The idea that language is not transparently mediating our perceptions and thoughts about reality, but on the contrary it constitutes it was new and even confusing to many social scientists. Nowadays we have got used to read research reports which have applied different branches of discursive analyses or narratologic or semiotic approaches. Although differences are sophisticated between those orientations they share the idea of the predominance of language. Despite the lively research work of today’s social work and the research-minded atmosphere of social work practice, semiotics has rarely applied in social work research. However, social work as a communicative practice concerns symbols, metaphors and all kinds of the representative structures of language. Those items are at the core of semiotics, the science of signs, and the science which examines people using signs in their mutual interaction and their endeavours to make the sense of the world they live in, their semiosis. When thinking of the practice of social work and doing the research of it, a number of interpretational levels ought to be passed before reaching the research phase in social work. First of all, social workers have to interpret their clients’ situations, which will be recorded in the files. In some very rare cases those past situations will be reflected in discussions or perhaps interviews or put under the scrutiny of some researcher in the future. Each and every new observation adds its own flavour to the mixture of meanings. Social workers have combined their observations with previous experience and professional knowledge, furthermore, the situation on hand also influences the reactions. In addition, the interpretations made by social workers over the course of their daily working routines are never limited to being part of the personal process of the social worker, but are also always inherently cultural. The work aiming at social change is defined by the presence of an initial situation, a specific goal, and the means and ways of achieving it, which are – or which should be – agreed upon by the social worker and the client in situation which is unique and at the same time socially-driven. Because of the inherent plot-based nature of social work, the practices related to it can be analysed as stories (see Dominelli 2005, 234), given, of course, that they are signifying and told by someone. The research of the practices is concentrating on impressions, perceptions, judgements, accounts, documents etc. All these multifarious elements can be scrutinized as textual corpora, but not whatever textual material. In semiotic analysis, the material studied is characterised as verbal or textual and loaded with meanings. We present a contribution of research methodology, semiotic analysis, which has to our mind at least implicitly references to the social work practices. Our examples of semiotic interpretation have been picked up from our dissertations (Laine 2005; Saurama 2002). The data are official documents from the archives of a child welfare agency and transcriptions of the interviews of shelter employees. These data can be defined as stories told by the social workers of what they have seen and felt. The official documents present only fragmentations and they are often written in passive form. (Saurama 2002, 70.) The interviews carried out in the shelters can be described as stories where the narrators are more familiar and known. The material is characterised by the interaction between the interviewer and interviewee. The levels of the story and the telling of the story become apparent when interviews or documents are examined with the use of semiotic tools. The roots of semiotic interpretation can be found in three different branches; the American pragmatism, Saussurean linguistics in Paris and the so called formalism in Moscow and Tartu; however in this paper we are engaged with the so called Parisian School of semiology which prominent figure was A. J. Greimas. The Finnish sociologists Pekka Sulkunen and Jukka Törrönen (1997a; 1997b) have further developed the ideas of Greimas in their studies on socio-semiotics, and we lean on their ideas. In semiotics social reality is conceived as a relationship between subjects, observations, and interpretations and it is seen mediated by natural language which is the most common sign system among human beings (Mounin 1985; de Saussure 2006; Sebeok 1986). Signification is an act of associating an abstract context (signified) to some physical instrument (signifier). These two elements together form the basic concept, the “sign”, which never constitutes any kind of meaning alone. The meaning will be comprised in a distinction process where signs are being related to other signs. In this chain of signs, the meaning becomes diverged from reality. (Greimas 1980, 28; Potter 1996, 70; de Saussure 2006, 46-48.) One interpretative tool is to think of speech as a surface under which deep structures – i.e. values and norms – exist (Greimas & Courtes 1982; Greimas 1987). To our mind semiotics is very much about playing with two different levels of text: the syntagmatic surface which is more or less faithful to the grammar, and the paradigmatic, semantic structure of values and norms hidden in the deeper meanings of interpretations. Semiotic analysis deals precisely with the level of meaning which exists under the surface, but the only way to reach those meanings is through the textual level, the written or spoken text. That is why the tools are needed. In our studies, we have used the semiotic square and the actant analysis. The former is based on the distinctions and the categorisations of meanings, and the latter on opening the plotting of narratives in order to reach the value structures.

The adolescent response to pregnancy: Accepting the reality

The research literature on adolescent pregnancy indicates a relationship between early prenatal care and positive pregnancy outcomes, yet fewer than half of pregnant teenagers seek prenatal care in the first trimester of pregnancy. Although social support theory speculates that there should be a relationship between support and health outcomes, available studies do not reflect the processes by which pregnant adolescents use their social resources in making decisions about their pregnancies. This study describes the processes by which the adolescent comes to accept the reality of her pregnancy.^ Drawing from the social-psychological theories of illness behavior and symbolic interactionism, this study examines the symptom diagnosis and help seeking behavior of the pregnant adolescent. This approach describes how the adolescent interprets events and draws conclusions based on her social reality.^ Interviews were conducted with ten young women, aged 15-17, who had recently delivered a first child. Onset of prenatal care ranged from the third month to the seventh month. None were married, and all but two lived with a parent. All but one were currently in school. Initial unstructured interviews were attempted to construe the modes of expression of the young women regarding the event of pregnancy. Subsequent interviews elicited the processes of recognition and explanation of symptoms of pregnancy.^ Analysis revealed a consistent natural history in the subjects' experiences as they come to accept the reality of pregnancy. Symptom appraisal and definition involves noticing changes in themselves, and evaluating and attempting to find suitable explanations for these symptoms. Lay consultation from friends and family aids in identifying the symptoms and to receive suggestions for treatment. It is at this point that prenatal care is usually initiated. Finally the young women describe the integration of pregnancy into their belief systems. ^

SOCIAL AND BIOLOGICAL DETERMINANTS OF SHORT-TERM GROWTH VELOCITY AMONG PRESCHOOLERS OF RURAL GUATEMALA: A PATH ANALYSIS APPROACH (WEIGHT-GAIN, IRON DEFICIENCY, GASTROINTESTINAL SYMPTOMS)

This dissertation develops and tests through path analysis a theoretical model to explain how socioeconomic, socioenvironmental, and biologic risk factors simultaneously influence each other to further produce short-term, depressed growth in preschoolers. Three areas of risk factors were identified: child's proximal environment, maturational stage, and biological vulnerability. The theoretical model represented both the conceptual framework and the nature and direction of the hypotheses. Original research completed in 1978-80 and in 1982 provided the background data. It was analyzed first by nested-analysis of variance, followed by path analysis. The study provided evidence of mild iron deficiency and gastrointestinal symptomatology in the etiology of depressed, short-term weight gain. Also, there was evidence suggesting that family resources for material and social survival significantly contribute to the variability of short-term, age-adjusted growth velocity. These results challenge current views of unifocal intervention, whether for prevention or control. For policy formulations, though, the mechanisms underlying any set of interlaced relationships must be decoded. Theoretical formulations here proposed should be reassessed under a more extensive research design. It is suggested that studies should be undertaken where social changes are actually in progress; otherwise, nutritional epidemiology in developing countries operates somewhere between social reality and research concepts, with little grasp of its real potential. The study stresses that there is a connection between substantive theory, empirical observation, and policy issues. ^

Superando dualismos : trayectorias socio-productivas en el abordaje de las transformaciones en la estructura social hortícola platense

En el presente artículo se presentan los principales lineamientos de la estrategia teórico-metodológica que se está implementando en la investigación en curso, en la que se busca dar cuenta de las transformaciones en la estructura social hortícola platense, acaecida en los últimos 20 años. Este enfoque busca superar los dualismos acción y estructura e individuo y sociedad, pensándolos como aspectos complementarios en el abordaje de la realidad social. En este sentido, se revisan los aportes y limitaciones de dos paradigmas que se pronuncian como antagónicos en la explicación de la conducta social, como así también los aportes teóricos que buscan reconciliar ambas posturas. Se propone el concepto de trayectorias como concepto mediador, que permite reunir en el análisis tanto la historicidad de los procesos sociales, las constricciones estructurales y la agencia de las sujetos. A su vez, enlazado a esta postura teórica, se implementa una estrategia metodológica cualitativa, a partir de la utilización de entrevistas semiestructuradas y observación participante. Finalmente, en este trabajo se sostiene que las principales transformaciones acaecidas en el espacio social periurbano platense durante los '90, han afectado a la posición de productor.

Superando dualismos : trayectorias socio-productivas en el abordaje de las transformaciones en la estructura social hortícola platense

En el presente artículo se presentan los principales lineamientos de la estrategia teórico-metodológica que se está implementando en la investigación en curso, en la que se busca dar cuenta de las transformaciones en la estructura social hortícola platense, acaecida en los últimos 20 años. Este enfoque busca superar los dualismos acción y estructura e individuo y sociedad, pensándolos como aspectos complementarios en el abordaje de la realidad social. En este sentido, se revisan los aportes y limitaciones de dos paradigmas que se pronuncian como antagónicos en la explicación de la conducta social, como así también los aportes teóricos que buscan reconciliar ambas posturas. Se propone el concepto de trayectorias como concepto mediador, que permite reunir en el análisis tanto la historicidad de los procesos sociales, las constricciones estructurales y la agencia de las sujetos. A su vez, enlazado a esta postura teórica, se implementa una estrategia metodológica cualitativa, a partir de la utilización de entrevistas semiestructuradas y observación participante. Finalmente, en este trabajo se sostiene que las principales transformaciones acaecidas en el espacio social periurbano platense durante los '90, han afectado a la posición de productor.