This study examines the effectiveness of a legal advocacy program of the Gwinnett County Domestic Violence program. The legal advocacy program assists the victims to resolve their legal issues. This evaluation focuses on Temporary Protective Orders in the form of Child Custody, Restraining Orders and Possession of Property. The program setting is Gwinnett County, a residential facility that houses 32 women and their children. The sample consists of women who entered the shelter between July 2000 and July 2001. A secondary data analysis was used to collect data, as well as interviews with the legal advocate and the shelter director. Data was collected in the winter and spring of 2002 at the agency where it is maintained manually in the form of written files and records. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data, along with graphs and a Program Logic Model for a fine interpretation of results. The findings of this study revealed that most cases were resolved eventually. However, some cases were not resolved indicating the existence of barriers between systems.

The objective of this study was to examine what factors affect the level of commitment in intimate interpersonal relationships. To attain this objective, a survey was administered to 40 subjects: 23 were administered to parents or guardians who attended a Parents Teachers Association meeting at a high school in College Park, Georgia and 17 were administered to members of a community in College Park, Georgia. This study revealed that subjects who were in the regular dating category were not committed to their partners. However, subjects who were in the categories of married, engaged/or planning marriage and exclusive dating were committed to their partners. This study was an attempt to provide a clearer understanding of the maintenance of intimate interpersonal heterosexual relationships.

The overall objective of this study was to provide additional information as to the nature of the problem of eating disorders among the lesbian population, and to identify the role in which sexual abuse plays in the development of an eating disorder. To attain this objective, the following areas on eating disorders and sexual abuse were addressed by the researcher: a) eating disorders among women, b) DSM-IV criteria for diagnosis of an eating disorder, c) the relationship between sexual abuse and eating disorders, and d) eating disorders and the lesbian population. A self-administered questionnaire, consisting of 20 questions from the Eating Disorder Inventory 11 and 19 questions regarding sexual abuse from three different scales, was given to women who were self-identified as lesbians, and who attended one of several support groups in the Atlanta Metropolitan area. This study was an attempt to examine the relationship between eating disorders and sexual abuse, and to provide additional information to the social work profession as to the magnitude of the problem among the lesbian population. The results of the study showed a statistically significant correlation between eating disorders and sexual abuse among lesbians, using Pearson’s r with significance of p<.05.

This study explored the impact of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) on human service delivery. This study examines the effectiveness of TVPA, established in 2000 to halt human trafficking through law enforcement, prevention, and aid to victims. Through a review of the literature, this study examines how globalization has influenced human trafficking. The methodology for the study included interviews with social providers who provide services to victims of human trafficking living in the metropolitan area. Demographic and service data are obtained from the 2000 Trafficking Victim Protection Survey. The outcome measure identified gaps in services based on the availability of service to victims in the local area. The social systems theory constituted the conceptual framework for this study. The researcher found a need for increased and integrated services to victims of human trafficking. The implications of these findings for social work practice include establishing services and better interventions strategies for victims.

This study examines the perceived preparation and self-efficacy among offenders in the Department of Correction and Rehabilitation who are incarcerated at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in Montgomery County, Maryland and are participants of the reentry program. Eighty-nine (89) participants were selected for the probability sampling. The 89 survey participants were sentenced inmates who were within the last 90 to 120 days of incarceration. The respondents were males and females over the age of 18. Findings of the study revealed that there was a statistically significant relationship between perceived preparation and successful release of the offenders in the reentry program.

published_or_final_version / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Communities have come to rely on technology to enhance public safety and communication during disasters. With nearly one-third of online adults receiving information from government organizations using digital tools other than websites, it is no surprise that increasingly government organizations are leveraging social media to push out information to their communities. My interest in the topic of government use of social media during disasters began when I began managing social media platforms for a city emergency medical services system. My hope for the research is to reveal how government organizations are using social media for emergency management and to discover what they have learned. This paper reviews literature about community use of social media during various stages of disasters, and includes findings from interviews with five government organizations regarding their social media use during emergency events. The goal of the research is to develop a deeper conversation among government and emergency management professionals to establish a direction for further research. Eventually, this ongoing research will better quantify the value of social media use by government organizations during disasters so they can make informed decisions on how government can best utilize social media platforms. / text

The problem: Risk and uncertainty are integral to child protection decisions because of the need to protect children from intrafamilial maltreatment, which is more common than abuse by strangers and occurs in the private sphere of the home. The problem of assessing intrafamilial risks to children following abuse and neglect referrals has received little attention in the UK compared with North America. Improved assessment of such risks would inform child protection plans, enabling risk reduction and improved safeguarding of children. There are currently no UK recommended valid and reliable risk assessment tools available for child protection teams, who rely on unaided professional judgement where information may be incomplete, expertise is variable and the process open to bias. Currently, UK child protection risk assessments are based on professional opinions about the range and weighting of factors associated with families where children have been abused or neglected. Study purpose: Selecting and weighting the most significant predictive factors of risk to children by using actuarial statistical methods is more likely to lead to yield accurate risk ratings. Whilst not perfect predictors, such actuarial tools categorise cases into low or high risk groups better than unaided professional judgements or consensus based assessments. Actuarial risk assessments have not previously been tested for UK child protection work, so this study selected and applied the best available North American tool. Method: The Michigan Family Risk Assessment for Abuse or Neglect (FRAAN) was selected on the basis of its published evidence base and applied to a cohort of UK Serious Case Review reports from Thirteen Counties (SCRs) to identify and rate pre-existing risks before the abusive event. Further analysis of risk factors singly and in combination was extended to compare the Thirteen Counties data with two large recently published SCR studies and one study of UK child homicide perpetrators. Findings: The FRAAN assessment scores correctly identified most cases as High or Intensive Risk. FRAAN performed adequately in identifying these very high risk cases (Sensitivity = 88%) but specificity could not be assessed using these exclusively high risk cases. Most frequent neglect risk factors were inadequate physical care of children, unsupported primary carers and their inability to prioritise the child’s needs over their own. Most frequent abuse risk factors were families not cooperating with a need for parenting improvement, prior abuse incidents, a youngest child aged <6 years and domestic violence. Comparing those cases where children died versus those where they survived, risk factor frequencies for Deceased and Survivor groups were strongly positively correlated, showing no statistical differences between the direction of scores for the two groups. Parental substance misuse was more common in the Deceased group, whilst households where a child had a disability or delinquency problems were both more common in the Survivor group. FRAAN risk scores could not effectively distinguish between fatal and non fatal outcomes. Comparisons between this Thirteen Counties study dataset and a UK study of child homicides and two major recent reviews of SCRs demonstrated no statistical differences between the ages and sexes of the children, the causes of death and parental characteristics, except for in the cases of men with convictions for violence, which were possibly under recorded in SCRs. Key risk factors in all the studies were parental mental illness, chaotic neglectful families and substance misuse. These factors appear to distinguish high risk families where there are further risks of fatal child abuse. Conclusions: The use of formal risk assessment tools is likely to help child protection teams identify cases where extra support, or substitute care, is required to protect children at high risk of further intrafamilial maltreatment. The use of such tools in low and medium risk cases was not tested in this study due to lack of access to a mix of cases. Policy, practice and further research directions are recommended to extend the testing of the FRAAN risk assessment tool.

Kling (1999) defined social informatics as "the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts" (Kling, 1999). This extended abstract proposes a definition of literature and art informatics (LAI): the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their role in the creative efforts of writers and artists. Expanding social informatics to include creative activities in literature and the arts will benefit the social informatics research community in several ways. First, it will address the paucity of empirical scholarship meant to examine the role of information technology in the creative efforts of writers and artists. Second, it will open another area of inquiry within social informatics which will provide additional opportunities for validating bodies of theory that can usefully inform our scholarship. This abstract will also discuss a current set of studies being conducted as examples of one possible path for LAI research.

<p> Modification of self-traits is defined as a user's modification of his or her physical self-description between real life and online dating profiles. Personality traits may impact this modification in online dating. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of gender and modification of self-traits on measures of anonymity, social desirability, and self-monitoring to identify factors that contributed to deception in online dating. The theoretical framework used in this study was Paulhus' social desirability model to explain changes in social interactions with the inclusion of anonymity and the desire to be perceived in a favorable light. The research questions concerned the differences in anonymity, social desirability, and self-monitoring between men and women, and the differences in anonymity, social desirability, and self-monitoring between high- and low-level modified self-traits. Archival data of 80 participants were obtained from a 2008 study conducted by Toma, Hancock, and Ellison. A factorial MANOVA was employed to determine the significance of gender and level of modified self-traits on anonymity, social desirability, and self-monitoring. Nonsignificance was found in anonymity, social desirability, and self-monitoring between gender and high- and low-level modified self-traits. Educators could benefit from the result of this study by informing new online daters of the existing digital landscape to include risky and questionable online dating conditions and predators. Likewise, law enforcement officers could benefit from this study by identifying and pursuing deceptive online daters who commit criminal acts or civil crimes against other online daters. </p>