<p> Child abuse and neglect often leads to a child's removal, necessitating the intervention of the Juvenile Dependency Court. Parents are provided with services aimed at mitigating the risk factors leading to the removal and safely facilitating reunification. Therefore, the purpose of this project was to develop a grant to fund a Safety Organized Practice training program focusing on family engagement for service providers contracted with Ventura County Children and Family Services. The proposed training program would provide specialized training to child welfare professionals in order to increase the quality of interventions provided by child welfare professionals, enhance the quality of their visitations with families, and help promote improved reunification rates. The potential funding source for this grant was the W.K. Kellogg Foundation as this program coincides with the foundation's focal beneficiaries. The actual submission and/or funding of this grant was not required for the successful completion of the project.</p>

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The purpose of this evaluation is to explore the efficacy of social workers in reducing the rate of recidivism of persons with mental disorders charged with misdemeanor crimes in State Court Division. This evaluation required the selection of two samples for mixed methods analysis. A total of 3] mental health cases were identified to recidivism evaluation, however 10 cases were eliminated due to lack of significant identifying information. A group sample of seven key stakeholders was used to participate in a focus group. The focus group discussed the attributes of effective collaboration between attorneys and social workers in decreasing the recidivism rate of the mentally ill. The participants rated their ideas by order of importance and assigned each one to categories. According to the recidivism data, 28.5% (6) had been rearrested for a new or similar charge as in their previous cases, leaving 71.5% as successful diversion cases following interventions of the ASM social worker. The focus group identified three core conceptualizations of attributes to effective programs: program foundation, procedures, and coalition building. The limitations of this study and recommendations for future evaluation are also discussed.

This study, a needs assessment, had the purpose of examining the psychosocial emotional stressors that affect unwed teenage mothers. The sample for this study consisted of thirty-two African American unwed teenage mothers. The sample was drawn from a population of teenage mothers attending Harper-Archer and Carver High Schools participating in an after-school program sponsored by the Department of Family and Children Services. An instrument consisting of twenty psychosocial stressor questions and five demographic questions was utilized. The survey method consisted of a self-administered questionnaire that was distributed during a teen parent meeting. The results were analyzed utilizing frequency distributions, means, standard deviations and Pearson's 'r' Correlation Coefficient. The findings of the study revealed: 1) That support from family and social contact with other teenage mothers positively influences role performance. 2) There is a correlation between feeling that someone understood and role performance and, 3) Depression appears to negatively affect role performance among teenage mothers.

This study was conducted to determine current business practices regarding the employment of ex-offenders. The underlying reason for this study is that yearly approximately 90,000 persons are released from correctional institutions throughout the United States. The author postulated that non-offenders are more likely to obtain employment than an ex-offender who has been incarcerated, has ineffective job skills, is male, Black and older. A self-developed questionnaire was delivered and mailed to 153 personnel managers of companies within the Metro Atlanta area. The results indicated no significant difference in the respondents' attitudes involving the test hypothesis. On the basis of the findings, it was concluded that employers in the Metro Atlanta area do not show a significant difference in the employment practices toward ex-offenders than other employees.

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The overall objective of this descriptive research was to show that there was no significant difference between the maternal attitude towards the unborn child in crack cocaine using and non-crack cocaine using mothers. The population was comprised of a total of 30 subjects, 15 crack cocaine users and 15 non-crack cocaine users, who were patients at Maternity and Infant Health in the Metropolitan Cleveland, Ohio area. The results revealed that there is statistical significance between the attitudes of crack cocaine using and non-crack cocaine using mothers. This statistical significance revealed that pregnant women that abuse crack cocaine during pregnancy have the same attitude towards their unborn child as pregnant women who do not abuse crack cocaine during pregnancy. This study was an attempt to provide a clear understanding about crack cocaine addiction, the effects the addiction has on an unborn child and school age children and how pregnant women feel towards themselves and their unborn baby.

The ownership of financial assets protects American households from experiencing the struggles of income poverty. The asset-based theory of American social welfare, which was conceptualized by Professor Michael Sherraden in 1991 and amended in 2001 by other scholars, posited that social welfare programs diminish the prevalence of poverty by enabling households to save funds to purchase assets. This theory has been scantly testedespecially among American householdsdespite a great amount of funds being invested into programs designed to help low-income American households to build assets. The only previous study that examined the intermediary role of future-orientations on the effect of asset-ownership on a financial outcome operationalized assets as comprised primarily of farm animals (i.e., oxen, chicken, pigs, etc.), in a manner that deviates substantively from the original conceptualization of the asset-based theory of American social welfare. This dissertation research endeavored to remedy this limitation within the asset-ownership literature by utilizing data from a representative survey sample of American householdsnamely the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the accompanying Transition-to-Adulthood Supplementto empirically test the theory using structural equation modeling analyses. Structural equation modeling analyses of the data suggested that young adults future-orientations positively partially mediated the effect of parental asset-ownership on young adults financial responsibility. Specifically, parental asset-ownership had an important direct effect (β = -0.174, z = -6.91, p = 0.000) on young adults financial responsibility, coupled with an important mediation effect of young adults future-orientations (β = 0.012, z = 4.17, p = 0.000) on the relationship between parental asset-ownership and young adults financial responsibility. The mediation effects implied that the design of asset-development programs should integrate components into the structure of the programs that empower the low-income participants to think and talk about their future-orientations and plans.