International Journal of Social Welfare最新文献

This study assessed the relationship between maternal working hours and stunting, underweight and obesity in children under age 5 in China, using data from the China Nutrition and Health Survey (CNHS) conducted in 2002 and multivariable logistic regression. We found that maternal work hours 25–40 or >40 h per week were associated with a higher risk for underweight and stunting (under growth) in children under age 5. The association between working 25–40 h per week and stunting was somewhat stronger for children from low-income families and the effect of working >40 h per week on underweight was larger among children from mothers with lower education, although with marginal significance (90% confidence). In contrast, we found that long maternal work hours (>40 h per week) were associated with a lower risk for overweight and obesity in children under age 5. This association was stronger among children from mothers with lower education.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an update on the development of the long-term relative poverty rate in Europe. We use European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data (EU-SILC) for 26 European countries between 2009 and 2018. In addition to describing the development of long-term poverty, we also analyse the drivers of poverty on the country level via fixed effects panel regression analysis. We are particularly interested in how economic growth, employment rates, social expenditure, and short-term poverty rates are related to long-term poverty. Overall, the results show that long-term poverty has increased in 13 out of 26 countries, but was unchanged or decreased in 13 countries. Gross domestic product growth is not related to the development of long-term poverty. However, we find that male employment and social welfare expenditure reduce poverty rates. Furthermore, short-term poverty is negatively associated with long-term poverty. Hence, short-term poverty and long-term poverty rather substitute than complement each other.

While there is a growing body of literature on the lived experiences of people in poverty, their interaction with the welfare delivery system at different levels is still under-theorised. This article presents a multi-level institutional framework to qualitatively study the low-income families' experiences in claiming in-work benefits (IWBs). Considering the Low-income Working Family Allowance (LIFA) in Hong Kong as an extreme case of IWB's residualism and productivism, the findings suggest that LIFA claimants faced cycles of counter-productive re-assessment in their everyday frontline practices, and underwent organisational barriers in workplaces and families in collecting the proofs required by the means-testing and work-testing procedures. These experiences were linked to Hong Kong's macro-systemic contexts that prioritised long working hours and strict targeting of low-wage breadwinners. This study contributes to the literature by linking social policy implementation and welfare delivery to claiming experiences, and empirically reveals the complexities of IWBs using means-tests and work-tests.

Scholars have long grappled with the ways in which unequal power relations influence the creation and circulation of international social work knowledge. I outline a robust postcolonial theoretical framework to elucidate complexities of global knowledge and power and extend possibilities for considering such questions of epistemic justice. Drawing on my own research with service providers in Nepal, I suggest three analytic strategies to apply postcolonial insights in international social work research: reflexivity, critical discourse analysis, and postcolonial translation. Postcolonial theory and the strategies provided support social work researchers to comprehend, generate, and disseminate knowledge that can disrupt colonial assumptions.

Despite the increased popularity of exit programmes targeting people involved in sex work, the research community has yet not critically scrutinised policies that regulate these programmes. This study aimed to start filling this research gap by studying the example of Denmark, a country that has implemented exit programmes although sex work remains partly decriminalised since 1999. In specific, this study has analysed policy documents that were formulated by the government and four Danish municipalities in relation to the government's latest grant called ‘Exit Package for People in Prostitution’, which was issued in 2019 to finance municipal exit programmes running between 2020 and 2023. The key finding indicates that the ‘problem’ of sex work is the sex work of the ‘vulnerable’ sex workers. Their sex work must be reduced because they risk being seriously harmed by their sex work activities. Implications from the findings of the study are discussed.

Little is known about psychosocial or ‘internal’ behaviours that can perpetuate chronic poverty and how to alleviate them in development programmes. This paper presents a conceptual and evaluation framework examining the relationship between a person's psychosocial behaviours, empowerment and economic wellbeing. The framework shows empowerment is enabled or limited by internal behaviours – including one's identity, aspiration, hope and confidence. We tested the framework on a behaviour change intervention among 1508 extremely poor smallholder farmers in Zambia. The intervention was a six-session curriculum for promoting positive mindsets using faith-based messages. We used concurrent mixed methods to examine changes and differences in levels of empowerment for individuals exposed to the intervention and those not. We found significant correlations between participation in the intervention and improvements in participants' internal attitudes and overall empowerment. The framework and mixed methods evaluation offer insights into how to design programmes to address internal constraints to empowerment.

How much, and in what ways, do cultural ideas contribute to understanding cross-national differences in the extent of long-term care (LTC) policy marketisation? We argue that differences in cultural ideas in the political sphere about ‘ideal’ ways of organising the provision of care shed light on these differences, relatively independently of the governing parties' positions on the left/right spectrum. Our comparative case study of two conservative welfare states, Germany and Austria, supports this argument. LTC policy marketisation in the mid-1990s was, in both cases, based on left-libertarian ideas. While these ideas gained strong political support from parties across the left/right spectrum in Austria, they were combined with etatist ideas in Germany, resulting in a substantially lower potential for marketisation in Germany's LTC policy. Our study also shows that, by contrast with neo-liberal ideas, left-libertarian ideas address care recipients' self-determination and divert attention away from social problems associated with LTC marketisation.

As interest in universal basic income (UBI) policy has peaked in recent years, the study of public support for such a policy is rapidly developing. While recent studies recognise the multidimensionality of the UBI proposal, we still know little about to what extent support for UBI is unambiguously supported or rejected. We show that the public holds distinct but related opinions towards three dimensions of UBI: universalism, redistribution and unconditionality. The higher and lower educated are equally ambivalent towards the policy, suggesting a lack of political entrenchment towards UBI in Dutch society. Post hoc comparisons show that key demographics and constituencies support some dimensions while rejecting others, enabling both compromise and division on the issue. Despite these distinct controversies, however, the strong correlation between attitudinal dimensions suggests that survey experiments tend to overstate the degree of multidimensionality by ignoring the strong commonalities in support for policy aspects.

This article explores the association between internet use and Chinese migrant older adults' life satisfaction based on the displacement hypothesis. Using 2016 and 2018 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) data, we find that internet use is significantly associated with lower life satisfaction. The association is stronger in the female, age 71 and above and low-income groups. Mediation analysis suggests that social capital has a significant mediating effect in linking internet use and life satisfaction, accounting for about 25% of the total effect of internet use. Based on the findings, we recommend appropriate interventions for internet use and promote social inclusion of migrant older adults, so as to further improve their quality of life.

The world is witnessing a dramatic increase in displaced persons in Africa, Asia, South America, and, most recently, Europe. Within this population of violence-induced displacement are older women, a group that is mostly unseen because research and relief initiatives primarily target younger women and children. This study aimed to explore the changes in the convoys and support for older women in displacement (OWD). Qualitative data were collected from nine OWD using art-based convoys of concentric circles and interviews. The collected data were analysed in themes, and findings revealed that while there has been intervention from formal organisations to fill the displacement-induced support gap, supports are still limited, sporadic, not focused on the peculiar needs of OWD, not guided by any framework, and mainly material in design. The study concluded by recommending sustainable support to help OWD become empowered to cope effectively without aid.