This study was designed to determine the relationship between the adjustment to residential treatment of seven- to fourteen-year-old children and their mothers' experience of filial deprivation (or separation experience) during placement. Also included as predictors of the children's adjustment in this study were parental alienation, parental self-esteem, parental involvement in the children's treatment, and whether the placement had been supported (agreed to by the mother) or not. Also examined was the relationship between parental involvement and filial deprivation and whether the placement was supported or non-supported. Thirty mothers who had children admitted to a short-term residential treatment center (maximum ninety days), and thirty others who had children admitted to long-term treatment (one to two years) were interviewed within eleven months of admission. The adjustment of the children was assessed by rating scales completed by social workers and child care workers. Factor analysis of maternal reports of feelings following placement yielded four dimensions of filial deprivation in the population of mothers: anger and shame, guilt with sadness, bitterness, and thankfulness. Results indicated that filial deprivation is related to children's adjustment, especially in the areas of peer relationships and hostility. In addition, there was a negative relationship between maternal guilt with sadness and the frequency of contact of the mother with the social worker. Several significant relationships were found between aspects of the mother's personality and the adjustment of her child. The findings were discussed in relation to: possible social work interventions, the impact of institutional care on parents, and the provision of social services for seriously emotionally-disturbed children.

In this exploratory study, several conditions are identified as facilitative to a mandate of accountability to the welfare service users premised on a social process of cooperative inquiry. Firstly, constructive pressure from an extraneous surveillance power is necessary to instigate the structural inclusion of the welfare service users, without which the prevalent power asymmetry between the welfare service users and the professional service providers cannot be easily rocked. Secondly, enhanced social encounter and sustained interaction between the welfare service users and the service providers is the basis for emergent trust and alliance facilitative to an eventual power sharing that a mandate of accountability to the welfare service users demands. Thirdly, an ideological allegiance to the liberatory orientation of social work professionalism is imperative to nurturing the service providers' political commitment to the course of partnership with the service-using principal that a mandate of accountability to them requires. Realization of the service providers' accountability to the welfare service users invariably lies in the dialectic interaction between managerialism and professionalism. / Meanwhile, the study identifies different manifestation of the user involvement rhetoric between service units serving the elderly and the disabled persons (the "frail" group) and those serving clienteles with psychosocial or moral deficiency (the "deviant" group). It is the contention of this thesis that the greater strength and wider scope of user involvement as featured in the institutional structure of service units in the "frail" group does not necessarily correspond to a state of power symmetry that allows authentic argumentation between the professional service providers and the welfare service users in their discursive encounter. Given the multifarious strategies enabling the service providers to exert control over the welfare service users, the service providers' attitude in their relationship with the welfare service users is crucial for effecting change in the prevailing power position of the welfare service users. Materialization of a mandate of accountability to the welfare service users is hence premised on the prevalence of a cultural code that can embrace a more egalitarian relationship with the welfare service users among the service providers. / The last decades have seen a wide-reaching quest for reforms in the Hong Kong public sector. Among the multifarious managerial changes imposed on the Hong Kong welfare sector, the Service Performance Monitoring System instigated in 1999 embraces the irrefutable rhetoric of accountability that subjugates welfare service units in Hong Kong to a renewed mandate of managerial control premised on performance measurement and the enhanced involvement of the welfare service users. It is this policy context that revitalizes the user participation ethos that the profession of social work has always been supporting. By the mixed methodology of survey and case study, the research on which this thesis is based endeavours to locate the structural properties of the commonly incepted user involvement mechanism among the Hong Kong welfare service units, and to discern the processual dynamics in the discursive space enabled by the structural inclusion of the welfare service users. This is meant to advance our understanding on the ways by which user involvement enables a mandate of accountability premised on a cooperative inquiry with the welfare service users. / The study identifies a generally limited strength and scope in the user involvement initiatives adopted by the welfare service units. The discursive encounter between the service-using principal and the service-providing agent was also fused with tension. The tension was manifested in the service providers' unease at the accountability discourse, which legitimized the authority of the welfare service users in the management structure of the service units. In a service environment where the managerial discourse and the professional discourse used to compete for dominance, both the managerialist and professional tenets were employed by the service-providing informants to confront the tension and neutralize the implied power of the welfare service users, however meager it was. Whilst structural inclusion of the service users is a necessary condition for tackling the management risk arising from necessary entrustment to the service-providing agent, this thesis contends that structural re-engineering by itself is insufficient to ensure the advancement of the service-using principal's influence in their accountability relationship with the professional service providers. / Leung Tse Fong, Terry. / "November 2005." / Adviser: Bong-ho Mok. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4336. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 301-315). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

This is a study of Yellow Brick Road a paraprofessional volunteer training and group counseling program. The study was designed to help determine whether or not the program was meeting its own goals which are stated as: 1) to offer clients an experience which not only helps them to effect change in their lives, but to maintain those changes through healthy time-restructuring within a supportive environment; 2) to demonstrate that volunteers who are undergoing intensive training can provide quality counseling and other services; 3) to create a community environment supportive of healthy change. Toward evaluating these broadly stated goals, this study will specifically look at these factors: 1) client satisfaction, 2) internal program consistency, 3) activity group validity, that is, whether or not activity groups contribute to the change process.

Social service outreach workers serving homeless populations exemplify what Michael Lipsky calls street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) who exercise discretionary power in the performance of their professional roles. This dissertation draws on over 200 hours of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban center in the Mountain West to examine the challenges faced by homeless outreach workers and case managers in serving the needs of homeless clients and the practices they use to manage those challenges. Using a grounded theory analysis of participant observation and interview data, this dissertation focuses on what is termed “aggressive advocacy” in which social service SLBs creatively and actively pursue work arounds and solutions to potential barriers to homeless services for their clients. The analytic concept of “fitting stories” is used to describe the ways in which SLBs assist their clients in developing service-worthy narratives. They implement the Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool in ways that probe clients’ conditions and experiences to capture potentially missed vulnerabilities and enhance service-eligible vulnerability scores. Homeless SLBs also invoke discretionary power in negotiating with other agency gatekeepers and landlords, and they may go beyond their official job descriptions to spend time helping homeless clients who are resistant to services or at risk of losing them. In each of these aggressive advocacy activities, homeless SLBs demonstrate discretionary power in supporting their clients and fulfilling their agencies’ mission to serve homeless clients. Several implications of these findings for better understanding social services for the homeless are addressed as well as the broader implications of this study for understanding street-level bureaucracy more generally.

One of the current key challenges for nonprofit social service organisations is how to diversify resource mobilisation practices in order to build sustainable organisations that can innovatively achieve social mission. Two approaches to resource mobilisation that are promoted within Australia are social enterprise and partnering with business. Both of these approaches involve a re-orientation toward business, either in management practices or through an enduring relationship. Despite an increased interest in business-focused resource mobilisation strategies there are few successful examples of social enterprise and partnering with business emerging across the nonprofit sector. There is also scant empirically based research to understand what it takes to adopt these practices, what the consequences of adoption might be and how governments, nonprofits and business stakeholders might support their emergence. This research aims to build an evidence base to provide greater understanding of these issues. The thesis analyses data from fourteen organisational case studies of nonprofit social service organisations located across Australia. Seven of these organisations were selected because they had adopted an enterprising form of resource mobilisation and had been recognised for their achievements in this area. The other seven organisations matched these adopters in terms of mission, location, size and stage of organisational development, though had less diversified resource streams and had not attempted or successfully managed to develop a social enterprise or business partnership. Case-orientated research and qualitative comparative analysis was used in order to achieve causal complexity and a 'configurational' view of the cases (Ragin 1999). The thesis details the conditions that are both necessary and sufficient for business-focused resource mobilisation .processes to be adopted. Organisational capacity and self-efficacy are critical conditions that open up resource innovation possibilities; there is a range of other sufficient conditions that work in combination with these. There are value and ideological challenges to be negotiated by nonprofit social service organisations as they are called upon, both internally and from without, to reinvent the means with which they achieving organisational sustainability. This tension creates the need for new thinking atthe level of policy and practice - across all sectors - in order that these critical organisations that bear responsibility for the social good can successful organise within the contemporary context.

One of the current key challenges for nonprofit social service organisations is how to diversify resource mobilisation practices in order to build sustainable organisations that can innovatively achieve social mission. Two approaches to resource mobilisation that are promoted within Australia are social enterprise and partnering with business. Both of these approaches involve a re-orientation toward business, either in management practices or through an enduring relationship. Despite an increased interest in business-focused resource mobilisation strategies there are few successful examples of social enterprise and partnering with business emerging across the nonprofit sector. There is also scant empirically based research to understand what it takes to adopt these practices, what the consequences of adoption might be and how governments, nonprofits and business stakeholders might support their emergence. This research aims to build an evidence base to provide greater understanding of these issues. The thesis analyses data from fourteen organisational case studies of nonprofit social service organisations located across Australia. Seven of these organisations were selected because they had adopted an enterprising form of resource mobilisation and had been recognised for their achievements in this area. The other seven organisations matched these adopters in terms of mission, location, size and stage of organisational development, though had less diversified resource streams and had not attempted or successfully managed to develop a social enterprise or business partnership. Case-orientated research and qualitative comparative analysis was used in order to achieve causal complexity and a 'configurational' view of the cases (Ragin 1999). The thesis details the conditions that are both necessary and sufficient for business-focused resource mobilisation .processes to be adopted. Organisational capacity and self-efficacy are critical conditions that open up resource innovation possibilities; there is a range of other sufficient conditions that work in combination with these. There are value and ideological challenges to be negotiated by nonprofit social service organisations as they are called upon, both internally and from without, to reinvent the means with which they achieving organisational sustainability. This tension creates the need for new thinking atthe level of policy and practice - across all sectors - in order that these critical organisations that bear responsibility for the social good can successful organise within the contemporary context.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2003.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

Thesis (doctoral)--Columbia University, 1972. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [11]-[28] (2nd group)).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 240-260). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.