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The aim of this Australian Research Council Linkage doctoral project with industry partners UnitingCare-Lifeline Ballarat and Lifeline Australia was to investigate whether calls to Lifeline – a generalist telephone counselling and referral service – could be used as valid and reliable social indicators of health. The Lifeline Australia service receives approximately 1,000 calls a day and key details of each call are recorded on its Client Services Management Information System (CSMIS). A number of research questions directed this study: (1) What are the characteristics or attributes of callers to Lifeline?; (2) How do the patterns of calls to Lifeline vary spatially?; and (3) What is the statistical relationship between calls to Lifeline and other measures of community health? This thesis presents a detailed descriptive summary and analysis of Lifeline’s national CSMIS call data (N = 90,128 cases) from 01-04-2003 to 29-06-2003. It explores this and other sources of call data, such as the Telstra Exchange data, for their potential to be used as social indicators. The project created a model of generalist telephone counselling and referral use (MGTCRU). The MGTCRU was used as a theoretical base to a call rate indicator, named the Lifeline Indicator of Social Need (LISN), which reflects the community’s capacity to provide social support to its most socially isolated residents. The LISN was found to have useful attributes and a potential for use as a social indicator of community strength. The call rate indicator showed a statistically significant relationship with the Accessibility/Remoteness Index of Australia, measures of socio-economic disadvantage, and suicide rates. However, the CSMIS database was found to have certain limitations. The thesis presents recommendations for this situation to be addressed. While acknowledging that there are limitations to telephone counselling call data it is clear that these call data can be used to create cost effective, rapid, reliable, and potentially valid social indicators. This thesis has made a number of significant empirical and theoretical contributions to knowledge on telephone counselling and referral. The descriptive summary of the CSMIS data provided in this thesis might be used in innovative ways by social researchers. The LISN could be used on its own or included in other social indices. The MGTCRU provides a theoretical framework for understanding telephone counselling and referral services use and may assist these services to organise their operations and meet the needs of their callers. This project may have particular application to a current upgrade of Lifeline Australia’s telephony and call data systems. / Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis critically analyses how social work practitioners construct moral-ethical decision-making in systems that are constituted as legal-rational authority and political-socioeconomic interests. Notions of moral-ethicality in practice are represented in social work literature and codified ethics in certain ways and this thesis argues that such representations do not conceive of ways in which the claimed ideals of social work might be achieved in the face of structural oppressions and power imbalance that facilitate disadvantage. A notion that there are possibilities for challenge and resistance by social work practitioners to the power of cultural pedagogy that is inherent in the discursive field of social work is articulated. This is a critical postmodern work with a postmodern approach and this thesis is premised on the works of Zygmunt Bauman, and his perspectives on morality, ethics, responsibility for the Other and power relations. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2003

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Melbourne, 1984. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 184-197).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p.135-149) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on November 28, 2007) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of West Florida, 1996. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 109 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Edith Cowan University, 2006. / Submitted to the Faculty of Regional Professional Studies. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.). / Written for the Dept. of History. Title from title page of PDF (viewed ). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1990. / Abstracted in DAI-A 51/03, p. 1007, Sep 1990. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-140).