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published_or_final_version / Social Service Management / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Community Medicine / Master / Master of Philosophy

In this paper I will present my research about different kinds of social workers, and there way of looking at and working with adolescents alcohol use. To get my result, we interviewed eight social workers from four different organizations. The Interview participants were people working with adolescents on their spare time, and in the school environment. There were also participants representing social services and the police. The theory that we have chosen to apply to our thesis is systems theory. The results shows that professionals in Oskarshamn see that high school youth alcohol consumption generates large negative effects on the individual. One of the most complained of the impact of young girls drinking is so serious implications, as different forms of sexual exploitation. The result also shows that the preventive work is the focus of efforts to combat youth alcohol use.

Occupational stress of nurses has been widely researched, for example in specific health care units - intensive care, specific conditions - cancer. Personal characteristics like emotional involvement and depersonalisation of patients are also suggested as stressors for nurses. In South Africa the Department of Health has made a number of changes since 1994. One of the changes involved the restructuring of the different departments to unify the fragmented health services. No comparison study was found for professional and enrolled nurses. The objectives of this study were to determine the construct validity and internal consistency of the Nursing Stress Indicator (NSI) and to identify differences between occupational stressors of professional and enrolled nurses. A cross-sectional survey design was used. An random sample of professional nurses (N = 980) and enrolled (N = 800) nurses of seven of the nine provinces of South Africa were used. The NSI was developed as measuring instrument and administrated together with a biographical questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data. Five internally consistent factors were extracted. The first factor was labelled Stress: Patient Care. It relates to stress because of the care nursing staff provide to patients. The second factor was labelled Stress: Job Demands, and refer to the demands associated with the work of the nurse. The third factor indicated a lack of support in the organisation as well as from supervisors and colleagues, and was labelled Stress: Lack of Support. The fourth factor was labelled Stress: Staff Issues, because it included item loadings on things like shortage of staff, and fellow workers not doing their job. The fifth factor contains items concerning working hours, especially overtime, and was labelled Stress: Overtime. The results indicated that a difference in stress levels exists between professional and enrolled nurses. Professional nurses' severity for the different stressors are higher on all five the extracted factors than those of the enrolled nurses. The sources of occupational stress for professional and enrolled nurses were almost the same. One source of stress for professional nurses that the enrolled nurses did not experience is management of staff. Professional nurses (compared with enrolled nurses) obtained practically significant higher scores on two stressors, namely stress because of making a mistake when treating a patient and stress because of disagreement with medical practitioners or colleagues concerning the treatment of a patient. Recommendations for future research were made. / Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

This study explores the role of exercise and nutrition in burnout rates of social workers. Through convenience and snowball sampling 100 workers were asked to complete a questionnaire, with 82 returned. Burnout was assessed on three subscales, Emotional Exhaustion (EE), Depersonalization (DP) and Personal Accomplishment (PA), using the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). The exercise questions were adapted from Canada's Physical Activity Guide of Healthy Living. The nutrition questions were adapted from Healthy Eating Worksheet from the Canadian Cancer Society. Those employed in child welfare had significantly higher levels of EE and DP and significantly lower levels of PA. Results of a multiple regression analysis indicated that higher exercise scores were significantly related to lower levels of EE. Higher nutrition scores were significantly related to lower levels of EE, and DP, and higher levels of PA. These effects were found even when setting was controlled for.

Based on research involving an overview of 44 policies at Canadian universities and 21 interviews with anti-harassment practitioners across the country, this thesis explores the challenges faced by anti-harassment practitioners working with legally defined institutional harassment discrimination policies. Anti-harassment work at Canadian universities is complex because practitioners must negotiate institutional demands set out in policy as well as politicized demands from members of marginalized groups both inside and outside the institution. Interviews with practitioners reveal that their daily work in reactive investigation and mediation of complaints as well as their proactive work in educating campus communities may support the less powerful parties to complaints, rather than focusing only on limiting the institution’s legal liability. Therefore, although anti-harassment practitioners occupy a boundary role as defined by Fraser (1989), their work is not entirely “depoliticizing”. Practitioners’ identities, sense of marginalization, and commitment to activist politics contribute to their position as tempered radicals as defined by Meyerson and Scully (1995), helping to explain their commitment to both institutional prerogatives and to empowering marginalized members of the institution. The advent of neoliberalism has set the stage for the shift of discourses and practices away from those which value equity to those that underscore traditional divisions of power and challenge the demands of so-called “special interest groups’. This shift is underscored by concerns about “political correctness” that arise within institutional communities and the broader social context. Perhaps the most obvious of the changes relates to the shift from a focus on equity and human rights to what is termed the “respectful workplace model”. The inclusion of personal harassment issues in human rights policies shifts the focus of the policies to issues that are not tied to historical oppressions and can potentially deflect attention from the human rights component of these policies. The challenge is to move beyond a legalistic perspective regarding policy development and to consider changes in the broader social context that influence policy change and the work of anti-harassment practitioners.

An exploratory study was conducted to examine the effects of parental child protection employment on the children of the employees. Semi-structured interviews were conducted of eight children, who had one parent employed in a child protection agency in Eastern Ontario. The analysis of the interviews demonstrated perceived impacts on identified areas of the participants' lives: family transactions within the community; internal family functioning; and the impact on the individual participant. The interview results were also examined along four variables: gender of the child protection worker parent; gender of the participant; age of the participant; and position held by the child protection worker parent. Of these, only the gender of the child protection worker parent appeared to have a differing trend between groups. Further research is suggested to generalize these results beyond the participants in the study.

The establishment of the Border Industrialization Program (BIP) between Mexico and the United States in 1965 led to the creation of free-trade zone assembly factories--or maquiladoras--along Mexico's Northern border and in the interior. Thousands of Mexican women have since entered the industrial export sector as maquiladora workers, and make up the majority of unskilled and semi-skilled assemblers in electronic and apparel maquila plants. This paper agues that maquiladora managers' preference for women is the result of an unquestioning belief in the gender-specific traits of women--such as dexterity, docility, patience--and well-calculated hiring and personnel policies, which have been designed not only to take advantage of the patriarchal system in Mexico and women's weaker social, political and economic position, but to maintain and control women's qualities of "cheapness", "docility", and "productivity", to the advantage of business.

Adult learning models have emerged that help social work students to make links between their lived experiences, narratives, and their developing identity as practitioners. This educational methodology involves students exploring and co-constructing their own personal and professional narratives through dialogue, sharing them within a reflecting team format. Reflecting teams emerged out of the work of family therapist Tom Andersen, and have been further developed for practitioner education by narrative therapist, Michael White. A detailed description of the learning model is provided, with an overview of the orienting principles and some guidelines for application. / The educational practice of reflecting processes is examined through a conceptual framework drawing on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) and Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). Bakhtin was a literary theorist, philosopher, and teacher who was interested in language, literature and human consciousness, and was fascinated with dialogue in relationship as a site of knowledge construction as well as a model for understanding the dialogic nature of human consciousness. Vygotsky was a psychologist, cultural theorist, and activist who conceptualized learning as a social process that occurs in relationship. He also investigated language as a psychological/cultural tool, and was curious about human consciousness as "inner speech." Their writings act as a theoretical foundation for the dissertation, providing a series of heuristic devices or lenses through which to view reflecting processes: individual/social, self/other, outer word/inner speech, language, monologue/dialogue, and authoritarian/internally persuasive discourse. / The dissertation includes an alternative to traditional academic rhetorical style in the form of conversations between various writers. Drawing on Bakhtin and Vygotsky, a dialogical genre is developed as an approach to engaging with the texts of Andersen and White. In developing this methodology, the dialogic form of inquiry is expressed in a conversation between Bakhtin, Vygotsky and a student persona. This dialogic genre also occurs as an extended series of conversations in the format of a reflecting process between Andersen, White, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and a student, Mishka. The dissertation concludes with an overview of Bakhtin's exploration of moving from monologue to dialogue and from authoritarian to internally persuasive discourse, and how this is accomplished by means of the "penetrated word" and transformative discourse in the context of relationship.