Final Executive Report of the Project on International Study of Religion and Spirituality in Social Work Practice 1997 - 2020

This report presents an overview of national and international comparative studies of social workers’ views about religion and spirituality in practice, including surveys in Aotearoa New Zealand, Norway, the UK and USA.This Final Executive Report presents an overview of a series of national and international comparative surveys about the role of spirituality and religion in social work practice based on the views of social workers. Dr. Leola Dyrud Furman was the Principal Investigator for this project. She, Dr. Edward Canda, and colleagues conducted national surveys of social workers in the USA (1997 and 2008), and in the United Kingdom (2000), Aotearoa New Zealand (2006), and in Norway twice (2002 and 2011). The purpose of this project was to better understand the extent to which practicing social workers incorporate religion and spirituality in their practice and to explore their views regarding the appropriateness of addressing religion and spirituality in social work practice and education. This final report includes an overview of the project, an explanation of how to cite permission for using the survey instruments, a list of related publications based on our findings, executive summaries from studies in each country, and a copy of the survey instruments used in the USA and the UK

Ethical Considerations About Spirituality in Social Work: Insights From a National Qualitative Survey

Copyright 2004 Alliance for Children and FamiliesA mixed methods national survey of 2,069 National Association of Social Workers members examined ethical concerns regarding religious and nonreligious spiritual issues in clinical practice settings. This qualitative study focuses on responses to open-ended survey questions and relates them to quantitative findings. Practitioners' insights provide a basis to extend ethical guidelines in practice and education. The findings indicate that most respondents deal with spirituality in practice, and many use general ethical principles and situational considerations. However, they likely lack guidelines for systematic ethical decision making about the use of spiritually oriented activities in practice. The authors suggest ways that social work educators and supervisors should provide ethical guidelines and case examples for spiritually oriented activities in both educational and direct practice contexts

On a multivariate Pareto distribution

A multivariate distribution possessing arbitrarily parameterized Pareto margins is formulated and studied. The distribution is believed to allow for an adequate modeling of dependent heavy tailed risks with a non-zero probability of simultaneous loss. Numerous links to certain existing probabilistic models, as well as seemingly useful characteristic results are proved. Expressions for, e.g., decumulative distribution functions, densities, (joint) moments and regressions are developed. An application to the classical pricing problem is considered, and some formulas are derived using the recently introduced economic weighted premium calculation principles

Actuarial and Financial Risks: Models, Statistical Inference, and Case Studies

Publisher's, offprint versionUnderstanding actuarial and financial risks poses major challenges. The need for reliable approaches to risk assessment is particularly acute in the present context of highly uncertain financial markets. New regulatory guidelines such as the Basel II Accord for banking and Solvency II for insurance are being implemented in many parts of the world. Regulators in various countries are adopting risk-based approaches to the supervision of financial institutions

An International Analysis of the Role of Religion and Spirituality in Social Work Practice

This is the publisher's version.As service populations have changed, social workers in Norway and the United States have attempted to respond to the needs of diverse cultures, which often include issues of religion and spirituality. Members of the Norwegian Union of Social Educators and Social Workers (FO) and the U.S. National Association of Social Workers (NASW) were sampled to explore attitudes and perceptions of social workers regarding the placement of religion and spirituality in practice. In general, U.S. social workers were more accepting of religion and spirituality than their Norwegian colleagues. Factors such as secularism, functional differences of church and state relations, and different historical trajectories in the social work professions development in b o t h countries may contribute to differences between the U.S. a n d Norway