Journal of evidence-informed social work最新文献

Purpose: Social work plays a marginal role in opposing the trend of mass incarceration and high rates of recidivism, and social work education offers limited opportunities for students to specialize in working with people who are currently or were previously incarcerated. How to train students of social work to work against mass-incarceration is still challenging.

Methods: The authors devised and implemented an in-school social service agency devoted to working with people pre and post release from a prison system. The agency is a field practicum setting where interested students study and practice reentry work. In this article, the authors describe and assess the educational merit of this in-school agency.

Results: Findings from surveys of students and alumni suggest that the program attained its educational goals of connecting classroom education to practice experience and training students for careers in the criminal justice system. The authors also discuss pending challenges.

Discussion: The experience of the Goldring Reentry Initiative suggests that by developing their own social work agencies, the authors may be able to heighten their students educational experience and expand their contribution to social work practice broadly.

The field of social work seeks to enhance human well-being by addressing the needs of people living in poverty. Three billion people around the world use the internet daily, and 65% of them use social media. This article qualitatively identifies emergent themes about the lived experiences of poverty from people who reported either being poor or having have been poor, using selected social media posts (N = 1,495) on the website Reddit. We found that the experiences of poverty bring arduousness and hardship, which necessitates an arsenal of survival strategies and skills. It was also found that some people who were poor experienced the saving grace of unexpected charitable acts, which eased their burden. Moreover, these experiences manifest in vestigial feelings and behaviors even when one is no longer poor. An understanding of the lived experiences by poor people themselves is a foundational task for social work educators, practitioners, and researchers.

Practice evaluation strategies range in style from the formal-analytic tools of single-subject designs, rapid assessment instruments, algorithmic steps in evidence-informed practice, and computer software applications, to the informal-interactive tools of clinical supervision, consultation with colleagues, use of client feedback, and clinical experience. The purpose of this article is to provide practice researchers in social work with an evidence-informed theory that is capable of explaining both how and why social workers use practice evaluation strategies to self-monitor the effectiveness of their interventions in terms of client change. The author delineates the theoretical contours and consequences of what is called dual-process theory. Drawing on evidence-informed advances in the cognitive and social neurosciences, the author identifies among everyday social workers a theoretically stable, informal-interactive tool preference that is a cognitively necessary, sufficient, and stand-alone preference that requires neither the supplementation nor balance of formal-analytic tools. The author's delineation of dual-process theory represents a theoretical contribution in the century-old attempt to understand how and why social workers evaluate their practice the way they do.

Purpose: The current review provides summary and evaluation of prevalence data for the sexual victimization of college men ages 18 - 24.

Methods: Potential studies were selected by searching electronic bibliographic databases. Studies were initially selected for inclusion if they (1) assessed prevalence rates of sexual victimization on college campuses and (2) were published in a scholarly journal (3) in the English language. Utilizing this strategy, 3,973 studies were initially identified, of which 5 underwent complete review.

Results: All 5 studies returned results for sexual victimization of men on college campuses. However, identified prevalence data varies widely from 3.2% - 28.7% of the males surveyed. When incapacitation as a form of victimization was included in the study, college men as a whole appear to be most vulnerable to this form of sexual violence, though sexual minority males may have more heterogeneous experiences of victimization.

Conclusions: Conceptualization of sexual victimization and wording of items attempting to assess prevalence rates likely lead to underestimation of true prevalence. Even with an incomplete understanding of prevalence, results suggest that continuing to assess prevalence may not be the most pressing need at this time. Research into the kinds of victimization college men face as well as education, prevention, and intervention within these areas may likely do more to positively advance the knowledge base.

The Center for Evidence-Based Practices (CEBP), a multidisciplinary center located at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences (MSASS), has been in operation for the past 17 years. It is a joint project of MSASS and the Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, and funded primarily through the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, as well as a variety of contractual agreements with agencies throughout the state and the country. The CEBP provides technical assistance for service innovations that improve quality of life and other outcomes for people with mental illness or co-occurring mental illness and substance use disorders. Clinical and programmatic consultation, as well as training, are provided to both public and private agencies to help them build capacity to implement and sustain research-supported interventions practices. CEBP staff also provide instruction to students in the classroom and field experiences.