Child & Family Social Work最新文献

Given that the number of children and young people needing care keeps rising and fewer people are becoming foster carers, efforts to support carers and workers in foster caring are essential. This paper considers the experiences of carers and foster care agency workers involved in Australia's piloting of the Mockingbird Family. With a view understanding experience, data were collected via focus groups with carers and agency workers (n = 20) involved in piloting, implementation and evaluation. Deductive analysis applied the theory of experience to generate understanding of experience, as both intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions to capture strengths in the Mockingbird Family's foster caring networks. These dimensions of experience included collective passions of carers and workers; experiential change over time; collective experiences as a moving force; and experiences as transformational. Understanding of experience associated with the perceived strengths of the Mockingbird Family, including strategies to promote strong professional relationships between carers and workers, is an important element in strengthening environments of children and young people in care. Safe and stable environments are crucial for wellbeing.

The increasing use of social networks makes online interactions more accessible and increases the risks of cyberbullying. There is a lack of research comparing the role of online and offline social capitals in facilitating positive bystander behaviours in cyberbullying. This study aims to investigate the relationships among cyberbullying victimization experiences, social capitals and bystander behaviours among adolescents. A total of 1207 students in grades 7–9 from boarding schools in China were recruited for this study. Multiphase regressions are used to explore the associations of social capitals and bystander behaviours. Results showed that cyberbullying victims reported more frequent residential mobility and less frequent communication with parents compared with non-victims. Participants with more offline capitals and less online capital reported fewer experiences as cyberbullying victims. Participants' defending bystander reactions were related to more offline social capitals and higher academic achievement. The findings from this study may contribute to our understanding of bystander reactions to cyberbullying and its relationship with online and offline social capitals among boarding school adolescents. The discussion could also provide implications for proactive and individualized intervention to improve online and offline social capitals to cyberbullying bystander behaviours in schools and communities.

Policymakers increasingly emphasize the importance of achieving meaningful participation of children living in residential care. To achieve the goal of participation, children must be adequately informed, have opportunities to express themselves freely and to be heard, and be given the opportunity to influence decisions about their lives. This study investigated the views and experiences of both children and staff with respect to children's participation in residential facilities in Norway. We conducted both focus-group and individual interviews with 6 children and 18 staff members at different facilities. Qualitative interview data were analysed using the dimensions of meaningful participation: informing, hearing and involving. The study offers three main findings. First, children's initiatives determine if staff inform them of their rights, with two exceptions: children are presented with information by staff when they arrive at a facility and/or after staff use coercion that requires protocols. Second, staff members expressed the importance of listening to children's opinions in a standardized way, following bureaucratic guidelines and structures. Third, several children stated that, no matter what they say, they cannot change the minds of staff members. These findings reveal that the dimensions of meaningful participation (informing, hearing and involving) are not all fully present at these facilities. Further research is needed to determine how to achieve in practice the policy goal of participation of children in residential care.

Adolescent substance use has been linked to several negative outcomes, which can be exacerbated by exposure to adversity such as child maltreatment. However, few studies have examined the intersection of adolescent substance use and child protective service (CPS) involvement. This study examined the relationship between substance use treatment and entries into foster care among adolescents referred to CPS for maltreatment. Data for this study came from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), an annually reported database that contains information on all CPS reports screened for investigation. NCANDS was merged with county-level data from the American Community Survey to explore the relationship between treatment and foster care entry while adjusting for contextual factors. Our sample included 2326 adolescents who were referred to CPS in fiscal year (FY) 2018 and were followed until FY 2019 to examine correlates of foster care entry. A series of multilevel logistic regressions were conducted. Approximately 1 in 20 adolescents entered foster care during the study period and 1 in 10 used treatment services prior to foster care entry. Substance use treatment increased the odds of foster care entry (adjusted odds ratios = 2.30, p < 0.05), while adolescents residing in counties with higher percentages of non-Hispanic White residents had lower odds of foster care entry (adjusted odds ratios = 0.67, p < 0.05). Among adolescents with substance use referred to CPS, substance use treatment increases the likelihood of foster care entry. This may highlight the need to provide services earlier and to ensure that adolescents can access treatment without entering state custody. Future research should explore these relationships in more depth.

Social workers routinely make judgements and decisions as part of their everyday practice. The nature and quality of these can have a significant and long-lasting impact on the children and families concerned. In this paper, we present an analysis of more than 20 000 judgements (n = 21 193) made by social workers (n = 586) in relation to case vignettes, based on a series of anonymized referrals (n = 12) to social services in England. We do so to ascertain how accurately the social workers were able to predict subsequent actions, events and outcomes, and to calculate the ratio of true positives to false positives at various decision thresholds. We find that the social workers' predictions were more accurate than chance in relation to all but one of the referrals, albeit at the cost of a high rate of false positive errors. We consider these findings in relation to what appears to be a general lowering of the threshold for child protection interventions in England in recent years and in relation to who suffers the injustice of false positive errors in child and family social work.

This study presents the findings of Let's Be Friends (Shaanxi), Trial 2 (LBF2), which is a second test of the school-based intervention. Let's Be Friends (LBF) is designed to promote social competence and prevent maladaptive behaviour by strengthening the social information processing (SIP) skills of third-grade children in rural China. A cluster-matched design with random sampling was used in LBF2. Two rural counties in China were selected by purposive sampling (one is the treatment site, and another is the control site). Nine treatment schools (n = 343) were selected by random sampling. Fifteen control schools (n = 369) were selected by using vector-norm matching. All children of the third grade, ages 8–10, in the treatment schools received 12 sessions of LBF2 intervention. Skill-level Activity Scale and the Carolina Child Checklist–Teacher Form were employed to measure children's SIP skills and aggressive behaviour. LBF2 promoted the improvement of study children's SIP skills and effectively improved children's authority acceptance. LBF has the potential to be applied in China.

In 2018, the child welfare system in Ontario, Canada, expanded the age of protection to include 16 and 17 year olds for the purpose of mitigating risk of harm for older adolescents. To date, there is little information regarding investigations of older adolescents, particularly in Ontario; this study will address this gap. Data used for this analysis were drawn from the Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect-2018. The Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect-2018 sample data were weighted to derive an annual incidence estimate of 155 649 maltreatment-related investigations conducted in Ontario in 2018. Child, caregiver, household, and investigation characteristics were compared across three age groups: children (0–10), younger adolescents (11–15), and older adolescents (16–17). Characteristics and differences in the likelihood of a service response (referral to nonchild welfare services, transfer to ongoing child welfare services, or placement in out-of-home care during the investigation) were examined descriptively and using chi-square automatic interaction detection. Half of investigations involving older adolescents received a service response, and they were more likely to receive a service response when there were concerns about future risk of harm, where there were concerns about the relationship between the adolescent and their caregivers, where internalizing or externalizing symptoms were noted, where caregivers had few social supports, and where the household experienced economic hardship. These findings suggest that older adolescents are being triaged for circumstances that reflect concerns about their vulnerability, including mental health needs, attachment concerns, and caregiver isolation.