Thesis (M.S.W.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 130-136).

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2004.

School social work practice that targets students and schools for change is the most effective approach in removing barriers to learning for all students. However, research on the profession has found that school social workers tend to focus on traditional clinical work with individual students and families, often to the exclusion of broader system level interventions. Working to create a positive school climate is an avenue for social workers to facilitate school-wide change. This research explores how school social workers employ a practice approach that embraces a broad clinical framework specifically including skills associated with building a positive school climate. The study also analyzes how specific school social worker characteristics are associated with the performance of practice tasks related to enhancing school climate. The project examines data collected from social workers practicing in Texas public schools as part of an exploratory, mixed method survey. The analysis utilized descriptive statistics and a hierarchical cluster analysis to group the school social workers with similar response patterns for the practice task variables. Descriptive statistics revealed that 93% of the school social workers participated in at least one of eight general practice tasks related to school climate dimensions and 77% participated in at least four of the eight. The cluster analysis yielded a solution that grouped the participants into four clusters. Once the clusters were profiled, three school social worker characteristics were found to significantly relate to the completion of tasks associated with school climate: perception of autonomy, job structure and years of experience. The results show widespread use of practice skills that target multiple dimensions of school climate. The findings lend support to the feasibility of participating in the school climate related tasks across school settings and school social worker characteristics. The research findings place school social worker expertise in a school reform framework and captures how they can contribute to school-wide change within their routine practice duties. / text

This thesis explores the activities of education welfare officers (EWOs): local education authority employees whose work includes the investigation of pupil absence from school. EWOs have rarely been the subject of research or analysis, as writers have tended to see them as self-evident functionaries. Given the paucity of the existing literature, it was necessary to construct a research programme that would seek to describe and understand the social relationships and processes that the EWOs were engaged in and attempt to develop new frameworks and categories of analysis. To this end, a grounded qualitative research programme was pgrsued. The research data for this study was generated by a series of semistructured, in depth interviews with EWOs in three different local authorities. These interviews focused on a number of selected examples from the EWOs workloads that were discussed in detail and the case files analysed. As well as generating a grounded analysis, this data was then used as the basis for a series of case studies that were interrogated through the framework of a Foucauldian analysis of disciplinary power. The research programme produced a number of specific insights into the work of the EWO that had been absent or understated by previous analysts and writers. It also showed how the uses of care and control, as the defining analytical and antithetical categories in previous analyses, was unhelpful and at times misleading. Through a careful and detailed analysis of the EWOs work, the thesis shows how their activity is better understood in terms of processes of normalisation where strategies are deployed that utilise relations of disciplinary power as described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. The way in which this work contributes to the development of Foucault's analysis of disciplinary society and the complications of supervisory mechanisms is discussed. However, the main achievement of this thesis is to show how the research programme led to the production of a framework for the analysis of the activities of EWOs that is able to engage effectively with questions that had apparently left previous writers baffled.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Also available in print.

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

The major purposes of this Field Study are twofold: firstly, to examine, briefly, the major issues in the transition of Australian secondary students from school to the world of work, and secondly, to examine one school-based and school-developed program which has been produced in response to perceived student needs in one particular school within one particular community. Whilst the emergence of school to work transition has only recently been recognized as being of major importance, it is now, as an educational issue, receiving widespread attention both in Australian and overseas. Transition programs are now also receiving considerable funding from Commonwealth Government Sources. The opening two chapters of this Field Study focus on the process of this raising of consciousness, both from the point of view of the initiating forces in Australian Society, as well as from some of the policy proposals and recommendations emerging from a national examination of the problem of transition. In addition some attempt is made to establish a particular philosophical stance - a stance which embodies those characteristics of a program considered, by this writer at least, to be essential components of any attempt by schools to come to grips with the needs of their students who are facing the process of transition. The middle section of this Field Study examines the approach that one particular school has adopted in the development of such a program - an examination which highlights such areas as the process of curriculum change, the clarification of expressed student needs, development of philosophical bases, sources and significance of Commonwealth funding and the political ramifications of program adoption. The final section of this Field Study commences an evaluation of this particular school's transition program based loosely upon evaluation guidelines developed by Robert Stake. Whilst this can only be a part evaluation (both because of the on-going nature of the program and the writer's involvement in the program as its director. )it is hoped that such an evaluation will produce a set of useful recommendations - useful both for the effective continuation of the program and useful for the implementation of possible future programs designed to assist Australian youth facing this major, and often traumatic, transition form school to the "real life world" outside school. The reader's attention is drawn to the range of possible future audiences of this report - audiences ranging from the academic examination of the project as part of a masters' degree to the clients of the actual program reported. Given this range of audience, it has been the intention of the writer to produce as "readable" a document as possible. It is the hope that in so doing all audiences will be served.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2001. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 126 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-117).