<p>This study explores the conceptions and understanding of gambling and problem gambling among Croatian Canadians in Hamilton. This study aims to outline how Croatian Canadians perceive and understand gambling and problem gambling, while also examining the level of knowledge and awareness of the current available services and resources for problem gamblers in Hamilton and the surrounding area. Using purposive and snow-ball sampling, five key informants from the community were recruited and interviewed for this study.</p> <p>The findings from this study demonstrate that gambling and problem gambling is common amongst Croatian Canadians in Hamilton. However, the level of awareness and use of problem gambling services is quite low. The participants were also able to outline a number of key recommendations on how to raise awareness on problem gambling, as well as the levels of service use among members of this community. In addition, the participants also described the concerns of stigma associated with talking about problem gambling, and how this relates to cultural upbringings, such as the influence of religions and communism. Further, while Croatian Canadians may be viewed as a single, cohesive, homogenous group, this in fact is not the case. The community is quite divided, and there are a number of diverse opinions and understandings as a result. The participants suggest that since the community has so many different sub-groups, it is difficult for agencies and organizations to disseminate information, as not all members of the community are being reached. Further, this internal diversity of opinions and understandings of gambling and problem ganlbling also challenges any totalizing notions of cultural difference, or understanding.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

<p>This content analysis focuses on the contributing factors, processes, and contexts associated with women's decisions to divorce. In reviewing both quantitative and qualitative published articles between the timeframe of 1965 - 2009, themes were extracted from research that spoke to women's reasons to end their marriages. A feminist theoretical perspective was employed as the lens through which the articles were reviewed and informed the final findings. These findings were grouped into three themes: factors, process and decision-making, and context. While these themes were presented separately, the author also notes that they are necessarily intertwined due to the complexity connected to women's decision to divorce.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

<p>In 2006, the Ontario government introduced and implemented a provincial client complaints policy through changes to the Child and Family Services Act. The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of complaints managers in Children's Aid Societies under this new policy. Data was collected through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with six complaints managers from Southern Ontario. Analysis of the data revealed that the client complaint mechanism is procedurally driven and contradicts the spirit of Child Welfare Transformation, compelling child welfare staff to spend significant time complying with rules and regulations with there being less emphasis on outcomes. The public presentation of the complaint process and the resulting practices contribute to service recipients having false expectations of what can be accomplished. As well, the power differentials that already exist in the relationship between service users and professionals are exacerbated. Although the mechanism appears to have been designed with the intent of holding Children's Aid Societies accountable for their actions and decisions, it is not linked with other accountability mechanisms and does not include a process for provincial review. The process was implemented in a climate where Children's Aid Societies face persistent negativity and it is not surprising that child welfare staff unconsciously shield themselves through defensive responses. Service recipients have a right to raise concerns. Power imbalances must be challenged to ensure inclusive practices are developed and that demonstrate satisfactory outcomes are desired and achievable. The value of truly 'hearing' complaints is that we open ourselves to the possibility of improving practice and being more inclusive of client voices.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

<p>This paper is an exploratory case study on the inside experiences of community organizing. A case study was conducted on a successful community campaign, People Against Radioactive Contamination (PARC), consisting of 10 participants who attended a focus group to talk about their experiences in a successful campaign. This paper explores some inside experiences and issues associated with community organizing which were identified as important to the research participants. The paper examines three major themes: group building, campaigning and understanding success, and addresses how these issues are seen in other community work literature. As indicated in the paper, community practice generally is an under-researched area of social work in Canada; especially lacking in community work research is the inside experiences and human element associated with the practice. This paper provides some impetus for social work to attend better to all forms of community practice in both undergraduate and undergraduate programs.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

<p>The study explored the settlement challenges of South and South East Asian refugees in the City of Hamilton. This study was undertaken to represent the voices of the marginalized and vulnerable communities such as refugees to be included on settlement related research. The purpose of the study was also to identify issues to suggest directions for future policy planning.</p> <p>The study concludes that 'settlement' is a narrowly defined concept that fails to incorporate significant aspects of a refugee's life. South and South East Asian refugees face unique barriers and challenges in the process of settlement. The mainstream settlement agencies are not always able to respond to the peculiar needs of ethno-racial refugees, which create a wide gap between the service providers and users. Ethno racial agencies attempted to represent the unique needs of South and South East Asian refugees are often crippled by funding restrictions. These have impacted the overall quality of their services, which are perceived as being broad, general and superficial by the service receiving communities and individuals. Therefore the settlement sector, both mainstream and ethno racial, needs to be sensitized about the unique barriers and challenges faced by the South and South East Asian refugees.</p> <p>The finding of the study also exemplifies that the discrepancy between policy idea and everyday reality. Although settlement is widely considered as a "two way process" between the mainstream and the ethno-racial minorities, it is more a fallacy in reality. The ethno racial refugees face skin colour racism and systemic discrimination on a daily basis which make their settlement experience overwhelmingly challenging. Participants often are confronted prejudice and non-accommodative attitudes towards their culture, language and customs and live in an atmosphere of hostility and insecurity. The settlement policies, which are meant to help refugees adapt, adjust, and integrate in host society are found discriminatory and insensitive towards their settlement needs. To the participants, settlement is more or less a one way struggle with constant rejection and exclusion from the mainstream community.</p> <p>To contribute to policy and program changes in the settlement sector, this study also summarizes what could be done from the participants' point of view and identifies specific areas for further research and policy debates.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

<p>Social work like many other healthcare professions seems to be moving away from client focused care to document centred care in an attempt to meet increasing assessment and accountability requirements. It may be argued that as healthcare has come to be viewed more and more as a business in the current neo-liberal climate, managerialist concepts have become entrenched in healthcare. In October 2005 the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care mandated the implementation of the Resident Assessment Instrument-Mental Health (RAI-MH) for all inpatient mental health beds in Ontario. The tool was hailed as a comprehensive assessment tool that would decrease documentation requirements for the healthcare team, as well as provide the Ministry with a means to develop a case-mix based payment system for inpatient mental health services.</p> <p>This qualitative research explored the origins of Minimum Data Set tools such as the RAI-MH, as well as the opinions and experiences of mental health social workers two years after the RAI-MH was implemented. Six social workers were interviewed and their practice experience ranged from new graduate to seasoned social worker. All the social workers reported increasing documentation requirements has led to less time being spent on patient care. All of them indicated that the RAI-MH has not decreased documentation but rather was added to existing documentation requirements. The newly graduated social workers had a more positive response to the RAI-MH than the seasoned social workers who appeared more skeptical. They were also more likely to report that the style of their initial interview was driven by the questions asked on the RAI-MH whereas the seasoned social workers attempted to limit its impact. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings on patient care, critical analysis as well as social work education. Possible research directions for the future are also highlighted.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

<p>The principles of person centred care have been widely espoused in dementia care. However, the language and conceptualization of person centred care is primarily articulated 'top down': from the vantage point of health and social care professionals, academics and policy makers. The perspectives of family caregivers have not been well explored - a striking omission since it is they who are most likely to have closest knowledge of the 'persons' with dementia. The purpose of this study was to learn from family caregivers of people with dementia the meaning of "person-centred care" and thus, to generate a 'bottom up' view of its conceptualization that can contribute to informing and improving service delivery in dementia care.</p> <p>A small qualitative study of family caregivers was conducted in Ontario using personal interviews to explore their accounts of the degree to which the care their relatives received was knowing or unknowing, i.e. knowledgeable about the 'persons' supposedly at the centre of person-centred care. Analysis of their accounts revealed some key themes: caregivers' attention to establishing their positions as 'knowers', their efforts to enable knowing care of their relatives, and their responses when they witnessed unknowing care. The study also illuminated the consequences of unknowing care for individuals with dementia and their family caregivers. Findings revealed that family caregivers perceived person-centred care as closely linked to a dynamic process in relationship building between service providers, family caregivers and persons with dementia. Barriers to the implementation of person centred care were discussed and implications for social work practice and advocacy considered.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

<p>As Canada becomes increasingly ethnically diverse, health care professionals must extend their knowledge base of a range of cultural groups. Of interest in this thesis is how these cultural values and traditions intersect with those of the dominant culture. The principle guiding question was to explore the intersection between race and age and how these facets of identity impact the welfare, care, and cultural needs of the ethnic elderly living in mainstream long term care facilities (LTCFs).</p> <p>The purpose of this research study is to examine the experiences of elderly East Asian immigrants who currently reside in mainstream LTCFs in Southern Ontario, through the perceptions of their informal primary caregivers. In particular, the research has focused on the participants' family member's challenges in living in a residence where the resident is cared for with Westrn ideology and methods, and primarily in English.</p> <p>Three primary caregivers were interviewed uing an in-depth, qualitative methodology. Findings of this study suggest that despite assumptions of a monolithic family culture that exists for minority families where each family member abides by the rules of filial piety and is willing to give or receive care from one another, with appropriate cultural supports available, Asian families may be more prepared to consider placement for their elderly family members in LTCFs.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

<p>Much of our knowledge about drug users is gleaned from popular culture representations. Representations in popular culture films are not neutral however, only certain representations of women, drugs and drug use are allowed to appear as a coherent narrative of drug user's lives. This study presents the popular film Requiem for a Dream to explore how women who use drugs for pleasure have become known as mad (sick), bad (deviant) and sad (victims), in contemporary Western culture. Using a Foucauldian analysis, this study takes up Foucault's notion of the embodied subject as historically and culturally contingent as an analytic tool to challenge popular screen images of women, drugs and pleasure.</p> <p>This exploration offers an historical account of dominant discourses on drugs, the subject, women and pleasure which highlights the processes by which contemporary ideas about women who use drugs for pleasure have emerged. These discourses are repeated and reproduced across multiple sites of knowledge production and meaning making including popular culture, which become the basis for representations of drug use in film.</p> <p>Introducing popular culture in social work classrooms is a means by which to talk about the politics of difference, and to interrogate the tensions of our own professional values and practices. Requiem for a Dream is a means by which to interrogate our professional knowledge that in embracing values that rest on the liberal human subject has a paradoxical effect of rendering women who use drugs for pleasure as profoundly irrational, immoral and unfree.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

<p>Huntington's disease (HD) is a devastating, degenerative brain disorder for which there is, at present, no effective treatment or cure HD slowly diminishes the affected individual's ability to walk, think, talk and reason (Huntigton's Disease Society of America, 2007)</p> <p>Huntington's disease profoundly affects the lives of entire families-emotionally, socially and economically. Despite this impact, the predominant research focus is on finding a cure and the medical treatment of the disease. There has been very little research on the meaning of the illness experience for individuals with HD and families.</p> <p>This study explored six people's experiences, two people with HD, and four family-care providers, with the intent of representing their experience as intimately as possible. The following themes emerged from the analysis of the participants' narratives: the challenge to social identity; efforts to sustain social identity; and the mismatch between the needs of people with HD and the available formal care.</p> <p>Family members emphasized certain characteristics of good care: empathic, flexible, accessible and responsive to individual and family needs. Families in this study identified the moral dilemma they were faced with knowing that the care their relative with HD received was inadequate, yet there was limited community support such as home care to augment the significant emotional and physical demands associated with caring for the person with HD at home.</p> <p>Family members valued empathic care providers who recognized the person with HD was not culpable for his or her behaviour. Thus the provision of care requires better training, and institutional arrangements that allow for the time and flexibility that the person with HD requires.</p> <p>It is also apparent from this study that family members and individuals with HD can make a significant contribution to understanding the social and emotional implications of the illness.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)