<p> <b>Purpose.</b> The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative case study was to explore the experiences of advocates who represent organizations that engage in disability policy advocacy. The study investigated the strategies and activities used by disability rights advocates, including those used when advocating for deinstitutionalization of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD), and the recommendations for advocates of the deinstitutionalization of individuals who live in large intermediate care facilities (ICFs).</p><p> <b>Methodology.</b> A phenomenological case study and semistructured interviews were used to explore the strategies and practices of organizations that engage in disability policy advocacy. The researcher used a purposeful sampling approach to interview 5 disability policy advocates with extensive experience for the study. Gen and Wright&rsquo;s (2013) policy advocacy framework was used to guide the development of the interview questions and resulting themes that emerged from the interviews.</p><p> <b>Findings.</b> Advocacy organizations identified three main activities used when advocating for individuals with I/DD: coalition building, information campaigning, and engaging decision makers. When advocating for the deinstitutionalization of people with I/DD, their strategies included coalition building, information campaigning, and reform efforts. The advocates consistently recommended reform efforts, and to a lesser extent, coalition building as strategies and activities to expedite the deinstitutionalization of individuals who reside in large ICFs.</p><p> <b>Conclusion.</b> Reform efforts (pilots, demonstrations, litigation) are consistently recommended for future advocacy efforts in support of expediting the community transition of individuals who reside in large ICFs.</p><p> <b>Recommendations.</b> Future research should explore the activities of advocacy organizations for other populations or in other geographies. This research study has direct implications for individuals who reside in large ICFs and want to move to community living. This study adds to the practice of advocacy in that it will aid the development of future advocates through training targeting practices of successful, highly experienced advocates. </p><p>

In the current policy, commissioning and delivery environments for services aimed at improving the lives of children and their families, increasing priority is placed on the ability to measure and demonstrate the effectiveness of social welfare intervention. This is particularly acute for voluntary sector services that increasingly provide services on behalf of local authorities and operate in a highly competitive environment in which the ability to demonstrate effectiveness and value for money can ultimately determine survival. However, social welfare intervention is delivered in the context of complex social systems in which a multiplicity of factors interplay between those individuals who are managing, providing and using social services. This complexity presents significant methodological challenges in terms of understanding the effect of intervention on individuals’ lives. Often the pressures to produce highly aggregated data about outcomes mean that the experience and the voice of those using services is overlooked and the connection between data and lived experience is lost. This thesis describes the evaluation of an approach to measuring outcomes known as Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS). This places the service user at the heart of measuring outcomes whilst collecting data that can be used to evaluate effectiveness within a service, or comparatively between services, or between service user groups. The approach was implemented with practitioners and young people within the context of a leaving care support service provided by a voluntary sector service. The GAS implementation was evaluated using a realist research strategy in order to understand the ways in which a complex policy and operating environment interplayed with the challenging contexts of transition for young people and their heterogeneous pathways in leaving care. For a variety of reasons, explained within this thesis, participation levels in the trial were low and therefore quantitative data regarding outcomes was too limited to be conclusive. Nevertheless the study represents a useful pilot of this approach and highlights the importance of context in determining results when introducing new approaches to outcomes measurement into practice environments. The findings that emerge from the evaluation betray a concerning picture of the pressures and constraints on practice experienced by a large leaving care service in the current climate of cuts to local authority funding and statutory services. As opposed to being an independent or somewhat removed undertaking, this study was concerned to frame ‘evaluation’ and ‘outcomes measurement’ as participatory and reflexive activities that should be embedded within service delivery. By so doing, it aimed to facilitate reciprocal or ‘bi-directional’ learning between providers and the users of services to underpin interventions, particularly with vulnerable populations of service users. Given that the support provided by leaving care services may represent the last intervention before young people disappear from the system’s view, this is particularly significant in supporting them to develop agency and self-determination to take them through the often compressed and accelerated journeys that characterise adolescence for this group.

This PhD study explored the day to day lives of young people living in foster care in the United Kingdom. This study utilises Bourdieu’s (1986) conceptualisation of social capital, which has been described as a useful heuristic as it focuses on practices and processes (Morrow 1999) within networks. One of the original contributions of this thesis is its application of Bourdieu’s theory as an analytical framework to explore young people’s experiences of foster care. The study employed qualitative methods to gather rich, contextualised data. Ten young people, aged between twelve to fourteen years old, participated in the research and each of the participants were interviewed on two occasions. Findings are presented across three chapters and they highlight the ways young people in foster care both preserve and build their access to social capital. Firstly, this includes the ways in which the young people are actively engaged in practices to manage and preserve their relationships and as a result their access to social capital. Secondly, findings show that young people in foster care experience stigma by virtue of having the status of being ‘in- care’, and in order to minimise this, the young people actively managed their spoiled identity (Goffman 1968), which allowed them to maintain access to social capital. Thirdly, the findings show that despite the experience of disrupted networks and multiple placement moves, given the opportunity, the participants demonstrated their ability to persevere in their attempts to start again, which built their access to social capital. This thesis offers a particular utility for the discipline of social work, by providing a way of understanding and theorising how young people continually work, in both prosaic and at times heroic ways, to minimise the disruption to their relationships, networks and their subsequent access to social capital.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-07-15T13:31:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Vilara Mendes.pdf: 2710775 bytes, checksum: 512ad33d9a304b5c92eef7518ed26eba (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-01-16 / This study has as investigation object of the integrity of the care in the process of work of the Teams of Health of Family (ESF) in the Jequi? city. It has the objectives to understand the senses and meanings of the integrity of the care in health in the process of work of the respective teams; to analyze the devices that guide the integral care to health (bond, reception,responsibility and resolution) and to identify the implications of the integrity of the care to the health in the process of the workers' of health work. It is a qualitative research, in an approximate perspective of the dialectic; method; it was used as technique s collection the semi-structured interview, the systematic observation and the analysis of official documents.The method of analysis approached to the hermeneutics-dialectics. The people of the study were twenty workers of health and seven users of the teams of health of the family. The results showed that the practices of health developed in some teams of health of the family seem contradictory to the integral service, still sustained in the doctor-centered model, mainly oriented for the hard technologies light-hard. However it is possible to notice some sensibility of guiding the work process for a perspective to the light technologies (relational practices),trying to develop their practices starting from an enlarged vision of the individual as bearer of foreseen needs and unexpected. The public litics of municipal health are a limit to be overcome in the sense of reaching the profile change in the ganization structure of the attention to the health. Was ended, therefore that for materialization of the integrity of the care in the Municipal district of Jequi?, the development of competences is demanded in the work process in health as well as a politics of articulate formation to the practice for construction of collective projects ntegrated to the care in health, in that workers and managers of health and users are co-responsible for the production of a knowledge - to do, aiming at to give positive answers to the needs and the user's demands - family in a humanized way. / Este Estudo tem como objeto de investiga??o a Integralidade do cuidado no processo de trabalho das Equipes de Sa?de da fam?lia no munic?pio de Jequi?-BA, tendo como objetivos compreender os sentidos e significados da Integralidade do cuidado em sa?de no processo de trabalho das respectivas equipes; analisar os dispositivos que orientam o cuidado integral a sa?de (v?nculo, acolhimento, responsabiliza??o e resolubilidade) e identificar as implica??es da integralidade do cuidado ? sa?de no decorres do processo de trabalho dos trabalhadores de sa?de. Trata-se de uma pesquisa qualitativa, em uma perspectiva aproximada do m?todo dial?tico, onde foi utilizado como t?cnica de coleta de dados ? entrevista semi-estruturada, a observa??o sistem?tica e an?lise de documentos oficiais. O m?todo de an?lise dos dados foi ? hermen?utica-dial?tica. Os sujeitos do estudo foram vinte trabalhadores de sa?de e sete usu?rios das equipes de sa?de da fam?lia. Os resultados mostraram que as pr?ticas de sa?de desenvolvidas em algumas equipes de sa?de da fam?lia se apresentam contradit?rias ao que se prop?e o atendimento integral, encontrando-se ainda sustentada no modelo m?dico, principalmente orientado pelas tecnologias duras e leve-duras. Todavia ? poss?vel perceber alguma sensibiliza??o no sentido de orientar o processo de trabalho para uma perspectiva voltada para as tecnologias leves (pr?ticas relacionais) procurando desenvolver as suas pr?ticas a partir de uma vis?o ampliada do individuo como portador de necessidades previstas e imprevis?veis. As Pol?ticas p?blicas de sa?de municipal ? um limite a ser uperado no sentido de alcan?ar a mudan?a de perfil na estrutura de organiza??o da aten??o a sa?de. Conclui-se, portanto que para concretiza??o da integralidade do cuidado no Munic?pio de Jequi?, exige-se o desenvolvimento de compet?ncias no processo de trabalho em sa?de assim como uma pol?tica de forma??o articulada ? pr?tica para constru??o de projetos coletivos integrados ao cuidado em sa?de, em que trabalhadores e gestores de sa?de e usu?rios sejam co-respons?veis pela produ??o de um saber fazer objetivando dar respostas positivas ?s necessidades e demandas do usu?rio fam?lia de forma humanizada.

Feminism is often blamed for having made the 'wrong decisions' on issues such as work and care. This thesis argues that such judgements are based on a misperception of how social movements exercise collective agency. While feminist historiography and social movement studies offer some insights, neither directly address the question of to what extent the directions taken by social movements can be shaped by high level strategic decision-making. In answering this question, the research was informed by philosophical pragmatism and by feminist theories of responsibility and reason. The prevailing 'movement CEO' image of decision-making was rejected in favour of an approach directed to interpreting the past actions of the women’s movement without neglecting its decentralised and collective nature. ¶ I began by investigating the degree of strategy in Australian women’s movement activism on work and care issues in two periods: the interwar years (1919–1938) and in the 1970s and 1980s. These periods were chosen because they are often taken to illustrate failures in feminist decision-making. The second-wave movement is said to have failed women by over-emphasising access to paid work at the expense of women’s caring roles while the feminists of the early twentieth century are said to have locked women into mothering roles by relying on maternalist arguments. The historical research drew on primary sources including the records created by organisations and individuals involved in the movement, together with oral history interviews. The historical studies found little evidence of capacity for, or orientation towards, high level strategic decision-making in terms of the political and discursive risks identified in later criticisms of feminism. The studies supplement existing historical accounts by illuminating the nature of organisational processes within the movement and the reasoning used by participants. ¶ I then developed a positive alternative to existing rational actor models of decision making, which avoids the assumption that movements as such engage in strategic decision-making but still allows for the possibility of purposive collective action. This 'organisation-direction' model proposes that collective intentions may be formed in the more densely-organised nodes of a movement field and may pull the movement in certain directions without imposing high-level strategic decisions. Non instrumental elements such as emotion and movement knowledge are irreducible parts of reasoned action, which only sometimes involves assessing risks and opportunities. Movement goals and means are generated in the course of practical engagement rather than through a linear process of decision-making. The thesis contributes to the social movement literature that emphasises the constitutive role of non-instrumental elements of action by showing how these are linked to goal-oriented organisation. The thesis responds to the growing emphasis on strategic choices in social movements by exploring the nature and limits of strategy instead of assuming its usefulness as an interpretive device.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2007. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 224-228).

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1992.

Thesis (M.S.W.)--University of Hong Kong, 1992.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, 1994. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-129).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2007. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 224-228).