Social work and mental distress: articulating the connection

Mental distress is prevalent across all social work contexts, yet social work's relationship with mental health is insufficiently articulated and the contributions practitioners make to this area of practice are under-recognised. This action research study sought to explore and address these concerns from academic, educational and practice perspectives. It was conducted in two parts: beginning with social work students at a Scottish university, followed by social workers in three practice settings. This paper reports on part one, which examined students' preparedness for working with mental distress in their final year placements. Using semi-structured questionnaires, a focus group and follow-up interviews, the study set out to enhance understanding of the social work role, identify gaps in educational provision and develop ‘Learning Insights’ to address them. Whilst the results here suggest that many students felt unprepared for the complexity of roles and tasks in working with mental distress, some reported successful engagement in powerful and transformative interventions by the use of relationship-based methods. The findings attest to a largely unsung but distinct professional contribution social work makes to the amelioration of mental distress—one that is relational, that transcends technical–rational concerns and is encapsulated in the concept of connection

The Connection between Wage Growth and Social Security's Financial Condition

The conventional view that faster wage growth would improve Social Security's financial condition rests on several measures of the program's finances that the Social Security trustees emphasize in their annual reports. These measures include annual cash-balance ratios, the 75- year actuarial deficit, the "crossover date," and the "trust fund - exhaustion date." All of these measures show that Social Security's financial condition would improve if future wage growth were faster. This conventional view also suggests that the trustees' relatively conservative assumptions about future wage growth cause the program's financial imbalance to be overstated. Unfortunately, the measures highlighted in the trustees' annual reports have a short-term orientation that biases calculations toward showing an improvement under faster wage growth. The connection between wage growth and Social Security's finances should be evaluated using measures that are free of a short-term bias. This Policy Analysis evaluates the connection under the more comprehensive infinitehorizon "fiscal imbalance" measure. It uses simple cases of the program's operation to explore the impact of the relevant forces -- population aging, wage growth, discount rates, and the projection horizon. It shows that although faster wage growth is desirable in and of itself to increase general prosperity, it would likely worsen Social Security's overall financial condition. By implication, a "do nothing" policy motivated under the conventional view would be diametrically opposed to the correct perspective: Early reforms of Social Security should receive higher priority under faster wage growth

Internal goods to legal practice: reclaiming fuller with macintyre

Lon Fuller rejected legal positivism because he believed that the ‘procedural morality of law’ established a necessary connection between law and morals. Underpinning his argument is a claim that law is a purposive activity grounded by a relationship of political reciprocity between lawgivers and legal subjects. This paper argues that his reliance on political reciprocity implicates a necessary connection between his procedural morality and an unarticulated ‘substantive morality of law’: it presupposes that law is properly understood by reference to the political task of achieving a common good. To establish this necessary connection, I propose we look to Alasdair MacIntyre. Understanding law as a ‘social practice’, on MacIntyre’s terms, can provide the necessary socio-political context to explain why and how legal practice is conditioned by political reciprocity. If we apply MacIntyre’s distinction between the internal and external goods of a social practice, legal positivism can be understood as confusing law as a co-operative social practice with the instrumentalisation of that practice by legal officials

Social Media Usage: A Comparison of Public Relations/Journalism and Marketing/Management Students

Research indicates that students use social media for more social reasons than professional reasons. To test the assumptions in the literature, this study examined key disciplines having a professional connection to undergraduate studies. The findings focus on the key social media platforms utilized in professions as presently used by students

Efficiency of Truthful and Symmetric Mechanisms in One-sided Matching

We study the efficiency (in terms of social welfare) of truthful and symmetric mechanisms in one-sided matching problems with {\em dichotomous preferences} and {\em normalized von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences}. We are particularly interested in the well-known {\em Random Serial Dictatorship} mechanism. For dichotomous preferences, we first show that truthful, symmetric and optimal mechanisms exist if intractable mechanisms are allowed. We then provide a connection to online bipartite matching. Using this connection, it is possible to design truthful, symmetric and tractable mechanisms that extract 0.69 of the maximum social welfare, which works under assumption that agents are not adversarial. Without this assumption, we show that Random Serial Dictatorship always returns an assignment in which the expected social welfare is at least a third of the maximum social welfare. For normalized von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences, we show that Random Serial Dictatorship always returns an assignment in which the expected social welfare is at least \frac{1}{e}\frac{\nu(\opt)^2}{n}, where \nu(\opt) is the maximum social welfare and $n$ is the number of both agents and items. On the hardness side, we show that no truthful mechanism can achieve a social welfare better than \frac{\nu(\opt)^2}{n}.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur

Earnings management and corporate social responsibility

By drawing on stakeholder-agency theory and the earnings management framework, we hypothesize a positive connection between corporate social responsibility and earnings management. We argue that earnings management damages the interests of stakeholders. Hence, managers who manipulate earnings can deal with stakeholder activism and vigilance by resorting to corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. Furthermore, CSR is a powerful tool that can be used to garner support from stakeholders and, therefore, provides an avenue for entrenchment to those managers that manipulate earnings, so as to reduce significantly their chances of being fired. Finally, we expect that the positive connection between corporate social responsibility and financial performance is negatively moderated when combined with earnings management practices. We demonstrate empirically our theoretical contention by making use of a database comprising 593 firms from 26 nations for the period 2002-2004

A comprehensive weighted evolving network model

Many social, technological, biological, and economical systems are best described by weighted networks, whose properties and dynamics depend not only on their structures but also on the connection weights among their nodes. However, most existing research work on complex network models are concentrated on network structures, with connection weights among their nodes being either 1 or 0. In this paper, we propose a new weighted evolving network model. Numerical simulations indicate that this network model yields three power-law distributions of the node degrees, connection weights and node strengths. Particularly, some other properties of the distributions, such as the droop-head and heavy-tail effects, can also be reflected by this model.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted by Physica

What does fairness imply?

Decades back, a most prominent justice philosopher, John Rawls, put forth a clear definition of fairness in problems of social choice. Decision theory, which studies individual, and not social, choice has provided axiomatizations of decision rules in many settings, most prominently in settings where individuals face uncertainty (and not just risk). It turns out that there exists an analytical connection between these two branches of thought. This note exploits the aforementioned connection, by reading the social choice problem in terms of decision theory and (partially) exploiting the existing axiomatization. The purpose of the note is to obtain new and interesting questions more than it is to answer them, so it concludes by proposing a research problem.

The Connection between Literacy and Work: Implications for Social Assistance Recipients

This study is based on the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) data. The study finds that there is a virtuous cycle between literacy and work: Literacy is important for employability, but employment is also important in maintaining literacy. Absence from the work place has a negative effect on literacy. There is tentative evidence that encouraging employment will have long-term employability benefits through the improvement of skills. In other words, encouraging work among SARs may improve their employability not only because of the gain in work experience and improvement of work habits, but also because of a positive effect on their literacy.literacy, welfare, socail assistance