The purpose of this research was to study the relationship between the levels of support from family and non-family members to the academic performance of urban black disadvantaged college students. The research was designed to answer the question of whether students who expected and received high family and/or non-family support would do better academically than those who expected high support but received low support. The conceptual framework on which the study was based was of "the family as a social system," as formulated by Biddle and Thomas. Data were collected from 44 students at a four-year urban commuter college located in New York City. These students were first-semester freshmen. Some were in an educational opportunity program which limited its eligibility criteria to persons with high school averages below 80 and family incomes at or below the poverty level. The other portion of the sample group met all of the criteria listed, but was not in the educational opportunity program. The students were administered a survey form at two times during the Spring 1980 semester. The instruments were designed by the researcher to elicit their perception of expectations of support and actual receiving of support from family and/or non-family members in the emotional, social, financial and informational categories. These categories continuously came up during counseling sessions with students. A Kruskal-Wallis One-Way Analysis of Variance was performed to determine if there was a significant relationship between the degree of supportiveness from family and non-family members and the academic achievement of urban black disadvantaged college students. The results of the tests did not support the research hypothesis. However, there was definite relationship between support expected and support received. The major implication of the study is that there may be other more important factors which have an influence on urban disadvantaged students' academic performance. The implication for social workers in higher education is that as counselors they must be concerned with students and the promotion of policies that have overall social policy implications which will allow the higher education arenas to meet the range of students' needs with understanding and sensitivity.

An increasing number of clients are seeking admission to state mental hospitals to satisfy non-psychiatric needs. The study describes this phenomenon, its possible causes and its consequences. The study draws profiles of these clients' characteristics, problems, needs, and level of functioning. Clients' expectations from the state hospital and differences between them and the hospital inpatient population are explored. The study was conducted on a time sample of 100 clients who sought admission to a New York State psychiatric center. The client sample were found not in need of inpatient treatment and were referred to an emergency housing program. Data were gathered through structured and unstructured questionnaires, interviews with clients, staff, center officials, and the center's statistical and patients' records. Chi-Square Test and Spearman Correlation were used to test relationships between variables. Study data indicated that: (1) The majority of clients were young, white, single, males, unemployed, educated below high school level, and were living with a relative or a friend at the time they appeared for admission. (2) Client's self assessment and staff assessment of clients' needs suggested that housing and financial aid were significant to more clients than psychiatric treatment. (3) Client's self assessment and staff assessments of individual client's level of functioning indicated that the majority of clients were able and willing to live independently in community settings. (4) The majority of clients sought admission to the psychiatric center expecting help with housing, financial and emotional problems in that order. (5) Client sample and patients admitted to the center during the same period did not differ significantly with regard to age, sex, race, religion and marital status. The two populations differed in admission status, educational level, employment status, and sources of referral to the Center. The study recommended a clear boundary distinction of psychiatric and non-psychiatric services and that psychiatric admission be based on psychiatric rather than social factors. The study also recommended several policy and planning options in dealing with the problem. A major option was the initiation of local personal social service centers to service clients with non-psychiatric problems.

Effective October 1, 1978, New Jersey mandated independent review of all out-of-home placements supervised and approved for payment by the Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS). The law authorized each county's Superior Court Assignment Judges to appoint five-member Child Placement Review Boards who must make recommendations to the judge within 45 days of the child's entry into care; all cases must be reviewed at least annually. Semi-structured telephone interviews with members of 36 Boards and 26 persons from DYFS some two years after review was implemented indicated that the Boards varied greatly in the degree to which they exercised their authority. Boards which assumed an independent role were more likely to (1) require DYFS workers to give testimony on all cases; (2) meet weekly; (3) review at least 12 cases at each meeting; (4) have contact with their judge; and (5) reschedule cases before the next mandated annual review. This latter practice, commonly known as "re-review" or "relist", probably did more to demonstrate the Boards' independent role than formal disagreements with DYFS. Formal disagreements were relatively infrequent, presumably because most children were in the only care arrangement possible. Re-review, on the other hand, recognized the impracticability of immediate return home or adoption but held DYFS accountable for taking timely action to ensure permanence for children. The study described the various ways local DYFS offices prepared for review and local Board-DYFS relationships. The impact of review was considered by eliciting respondents' assessments of review. All 36 Board respondents and all but four DYFS respondents felt that DYFS gave more careful attention to case planning because they knew they would have to report to an outside body. Fourteen Board respondents and 24 DYFS liaisons identified at least one disadvantage. The study concludes with an endorsement for independent review and offers recommendations for strengthening it. The study recommends that further research be undertaken to more rigorously study the effects of review.

The relationships and interactions of political participation and personal control are the focus of this study. Factor analyses indicate that both concepts are multi-dimensional in nature, political participation being defined by general and specific types of conventional participation and by general and specific types of radical participation, and the personal control dimension being defined by measures of individual vs. system blame, efficacy, and internal vs. external locus of control. A number of demographic factors are included so as to refine and broaden the results. The major findings are as follows: Internals attribute political outcomes to systemic factors, externals to individual effort: general conventional political activity is related to specific forms of conventional political activity and to general radical activity, but not to specific radical activity of boycott; intra-party activity is related to voting and extra-party activity but voting is not related to extra-party activity; lower economic status and external locus of control are related to participation in boycott; males are likely to engage in general radical activity, females in the specific radical boycott action; marrieds and those with more social work experience engaged in extra-party activity; locus of control and economic status are not related; where attribution of outcome is to system and efficacy is high, the score on general radical activity is low; where attribution is to individual effort, score on general radical activity is high when efficacy is high and locus is internal; boycott is engaged in most where economic status is high and locus is external, indicating that incongruity between economic status and locus may motivate participation in radical action. Participation in the boycott was also evident among those of lower economic status, especially where locus was external. Externality and incongruity between economic status and sense of control thus seem to be motivating factors for engaging in radical political activity. Internality seems to motive participation in conventional political action, especially where economic status was higher. The study indicates quite clearly that locus of control must be defined in terms of the context within which the measure is taken, that the very definition of control depends upon the individual's belief that the attributes of a particular context either provide (internal locus of control) or do not provide (external locus of control) the opportunity for effecting outcomes within it. In this study, the contention is put forth that a need for control is a general motivating force for all individuals and that the individual will participate (politically, in this study) within those contexts that afford him the opportunity to believe in his or her sense of control. Where the individual believes that the extant political context offers an opportunity to exercise a belief in personal control, that individual may be said to be internal in locus of control. Where alternate political contexts have to be created or alternate (radical) political activities engaged in so that a sense of personal control is established, the individual engaging in those alternate activities may be said to be external in locus of control. The various sub-specialties in social work will utilize the results of this study differently. It may be that political activity is affected by locus of control and/or vice versa, thereby making the results differentially useful to the policy planner and organizer and the casework practitioner. For each, as well as for the political and social scientist, the results of this study extend the concept of reward beyond the usual socio-economic one to include the personal control concept.

This study was conducted with a dual focus: the development of a practice model with families who had lost a baby due to SIDS and the testing of that model against the conventional counseling approach offered by the NYC SIDS Program. The social networking model, which was designed according to developmental research guidelines, was based on the consensus findings in the literature, as well as the author's clinical work with more than 500 SIDS families. This model emphasized social support as a key factor in coping with the death, resulting in a crisis intervention approach which sought to sensitize the existing network and create artificial support when necessary. Using a comparative research design, three primary hypotheses were established: (1) The social networking group would perceive greater social support. (2) The social networking group would experience a less problematic grief process. (3) The social networking group would experience a less problematic blame process. The data were collected during a one-year period at the Brooklyn Office of the NYC SIDS Program (MHRA). The sample was drawn from 82 infant deaths, resulting in 30 mothers in each group. Randomization occurred after the respondent met the criterion for inclusion, which was the perception of limited support at the first contact point. Mothers were interviewed at two weeks, three months and six months after the death and the design employed a measure of perceived support, a grief scale and separate indices of self-blame, blaming others and blame by others. The findings confirmed the primary hypotheses that mothers in the social networking group perceived greater support and experienced less grief and blame. The data also suggested a sequential model of change in the networking approach, wherein markedly improved perceptions of support coincided temporally with reductions in self-blame and perceived blame by others, followed by reductions in grief and blaming others later on. Qualitative analysis of case material indicated that within the networking group, mothers whose outcome was not optimal tended to report more concurrent psychiatric and social stressors and a less responsive social network, implying a mutually interactive coping process.

Relatively little is known about immigrants' use of social service agencies that are set up to help them. The purpose of this study is to examine the new immigrant's use of social service agencies in a metropolitan city in Canada. Five hypotheses have been developed in relation to the two basic subsystems under study. The dependent variable is the new immigrant's use of social agencies; and the antecedent variables are derived from the characteristics of immigrants. The hypotheses, which this study tests, were derived from a review of the relevant literature in the field of immigration, the history of social services to new immigrants in Canada, and the present structure of social services to new immigrants to Canada, and are backed by the general characteristics of new immigrants. The study population were immigrants who had come to Toronto less than two years before. Immigrants were divided into (1) those who sought assistance from social service agencies and (b) those who did not. A quota sampling method was used to select immigrants. Fifty immigrants were selected from each of two public social service agencies and fifty from each of two private agencies - agencies that had been set up primarily to provide services to new immigrants. To these 200 cases were added 75 immigrants who had never been to an agency for assistance; they were selected from the membership lists of ten immigrant associations. The author administered the open-ended questionnaire personally in all the 275 interviews with the immigrants. In cases where immigrants could not communicate in even a little English interpreters were used, except where the author himself spoke the immigrant's language. The first 200 immigrants were interviewed at the four different social service agencies; the 75 non-users of agencies were interviewed at their homes. Tabulation of the data shows an equal number of immigrants in the sample who came from the developing countries (53%) and from the industrialized countries (47%). Half of the people in the sample had no relatives or friends in Toronto, while the other half had at least one close relative or friend who was in Toronto before the new immigrant's arrival. Fifty-six per cent had college-level education; the rest less. Sixty-three per cent of them were employed before they immigrated, while 37 per cent were not employed. The following hypotheses were tested by this study: (1) Immigrants who are aware of social agencies in their home countries tend to feel comfortable in using agencies in the new country also. - Supported by the data. (2) When new immigrants make use of the network of available social services, they will use those which are closest to their own cultural and language orientation. - Supported by the data. (3) The new immigrant who has a professional background and/or English language skill uses social services more often than others. - Supported by the data. (4) Relative to immigrants from industrialized countries, immigrants from developing countries use social services less. - Supported by the data. (5) Dependent immigrants (who have relatives in the new country) make use of social service agencies more often than the independent immigrants (who have no relatives in the new country). - The study found, on the contrary, that independent immigrants use social service agencies more than dependent immigrants do. The study findings suggest the importance of finding a method by which the immigrant can be brought to the appropriate service by the shortest, most direct route without a frustrating waste of time, energy and skill. The study recommends setting up access services at neighborhood levels, in order to meet the changing needs of new immigrants in metropolitan Toronto.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1974. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 297-306). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1913. / "Reprinted with additions from the Biblical World, vol. 44, no. 2." Bibliography: p. iv. Also available on the Internet. Also issued online.

Thesis (M.A.) in Liberal Studies--University of Maine, 2009. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-78).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic University of America, 1937.