Limits to partnership working: developing relationship-based approaches with children and their families

Located within a context of widespread change social work professionals are required to navigate tensions between organisational imperatives and developing effective relationships with families. Achieving effective partnership working is premised on the development of relational ways of working where trust is formed through co-creation. The recent emergence of 'Fast-track' approaches in education and training reflects a shift away from developing skills in critical/analytical reflection, towards an employer-led approach that prioritises the need for 'ready practitioners'. Simultaneously there has been change in the family justice system, culminating in the Children and Families Act 2014 and the 26-week time frame for the completion of care cases. This paper explores current contradictions within social work practice. Pivotal is defining the role of social work within a contemporary English jurisdiction. Adopting deeper relational ways of working with families may help to define the boundaries of a profession that appears to have lost its identity. Rather than facing the prospect that the door is closed on the possibility of reclaiming practice that prioritises and values professional judgement and discretion, this paper reflects upon some positive examples of relational work with families by social workers within different sectors of practice.     

Inaccessible and Unknowable: Accretion and Uncertainty in Modern Criminal Law

Between May 1997 and August 2006 over 3,000 new crimes and offences entered the statute book expanding the criminal law exponentially and insinuating criminal liability into areas of everyday life previously untouched. This unremitting intensification of the criminal law where often quite random and unrelated provisions are embedded in huge, generic and virtually annual Criminal Justice Acts has made the law inaccessible and unknowable to the public, and uncertain to those charged with interpreting and applying it. This article examines the phenomenon of accretion in the criminal law within the last decade drawing on historico-legal contexts, jurisprudential theory (particularly the Rule of Law), and contemporary illustrations. It argues that uncontrolled legislative accretion and a bloated statute book may introduce dangerous levels of uncertainty into the law not only undermining its integrity but eroding the essential mutual respect between government and the governed which legitimises the authority of the criminal law. The political hothouse of spin-cycle government has sought to rely on the creation of new law as the panacea to all ills blurring the democratic boundary between citizen and government.

Can APB 2000 Be Used to Discern Sincerity of Effort in Unimpaired Subjects from Maximal Performance in Subjects with Shoulder Pain?

The automated pegboard (APB 2000), which has been found to objectively quantify motor performance, was used to differentiate maximal motor performance among subjects with shoulder pain, healthy unimpaired subjects performing normally and also while feigning shoulder pain. Six participants with shoulder pain and 15 healthy unimpaired individuals participated. Individuals with shoulder pain were tested on the APB 2000 using their affected upper extremity. Unimpaired participants were instructed to perform normally on the test with randomly selected upper extremity and to feign shoulder pain with the other upper extremity. The two tests for the unimpaired participants were conducted 1 week apart. There were significant differences in mean performance time for normal, patient, and feigned performance, with 80, 111, and 149 sec for the three groups respectively (p < 0.0005). There was also considerable overlap in the three distributions of performance times. These preliminary findings suggest that the APB 2000 is able to distinguish performance time between these three groups. Whether it can be used to distinguish between maximal performance and submaximal performance in individuals suspected of submaximal performance requires further study.     

Australian Quarantine Policy: From Centralization to Coordination with Mid-Pandemic COVID-19 Shifts

Combining a historical institutionalism approach with institutional isomorphism and punctuated equilibrium, this article analyzes quarantine policy change across 120 years of Australian quarantine history. By anchoring its analysis within specific time periods (the years before the Spanish flu, seven decades of inaction, and multiple post-1997 pandemic updates and responses), the authors highlight when and why policies did or did not change and how the constant push-and-pull between state and Commonwealth institutional ownership altered policy possibilities. The heart of the analysis showcases how Australia's successful COVID-19 response is a unique output of prior quarantine policies, institutional evolution, and mid-pandemic alterations of key national pandemic response plans.     

Citizens' Attitudes Towards Municipal Mergers – Individual-level Explanations

Municipal mergers are one of the most common reforms of jurisdiction size. While there are many studies of municipal mergers at the contextual level and some about how mergers affect opinions, studies of how individual citizens regard prospective mergers are still scarce. Thus, we study why citizens have different opinions on prospective mergers that are yet to be decided on. Specifically, the factors of main interest in this study are political efficacy and political trust since these relate to how citizens make sense of the complex and uncertain reforms that municipal mergers are. To study this, we disseminated a population survey (N = 6,686) in the Finnish municipality of Korsholm in 2018. At that time, a merger was planned with the neighboring city of Vaasa. This merger was surrounded by a very heated debate, mainly due to the fact that the merger would have affected the position of language minorities (a very salient issue in bilingual Finland) whereby the Swedish-speaking majority in Korsholm would become a minority in a merged new municipality. Using regression analyses where internal- and external political efficacy and political trust are tested as predictors of opinions on this proposed merger, with control for demographic, socio-economic and social factors, the study demonstrates that external efficacy and political trust have independent significant impact on citizens' opinions on mergers. The findings also show that salient issues connected to mergers are important factors as are social factors.     

Measuring Trade Profile with Granular Product-Level Data

The product composition of bilateral trade encapsulates complex relationships about comparative advantage, global production networks, and domestic politics. Despite the availability of product-level trade data, most researchers rely on either the total volume of trade or certain sets of aggregated products. In this article, we develop a new dynamic clustering method to effectively summarize this massive amount of product-level information. The proposed method classifies a set of dyads into several clusters based on their similarities in trade profile—the product composition of imports and exports—and captures the evolution of the resulting clusters over time. We apply this method to two billion observations of product-level annual trade flows. We show how typical dyadic trade relationships evolve from sparse trade to interindustry trade and then to intra-industry trade. Finally, we illustrate the critical roles of our trade profile measure in international relations research on trade competition.     

Parent–Adolescent Acculturation Profiles and Adolescent Language Brokering Experiences in Mexican Immigrant Families

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Language brokering is a special form of interpersonal communication that is affected by the cultural and relational settings in which it occurs. The current study...     

Repeating the errors of our parents? Parental violence in men's family of origin and conflict management in dating couples

Within a social learning model, family-of-origin violence places men at risk for developing negative communication in their adult relationships. Thirty young men exposed to family-of-origin violence (exposed group) and 30 unexposed young men were videotaped discussing a conflict topic with their female dating partners. Relative to the unexposed group, the exposed men and women reported higher relationship aggression and during discussion showed more negative communication, were more domineering, and the men reported more negative affect. There were no differences between the groups on cognition or heart rate. The conflict management deficits and aggression evident in the exposed group suggest that these partners are at high risk for future relationship aggression and distress.     

Performance characteristics of the Cozart RapiScan Oral Fluid Drug Testing System for opiates in comparison to ELISA and GC/MS following controlled codeine administration

Oral fluid is an interesting alternative matrix for drug testing in many environments, including law enforcement, workplace drug testing, and drug treatment facilities. Performance characteristics of the FDA-cleared, qualitative, Cozart RapiScan Opiate Oral Fluid Drug Testing System (Opiate Cozart RapiScan System or Opiate CRS) were compared to the semi-quantitative Cozart Microplate EIA Opiate Oral Fluid Kit (Opiate ELISA) and to gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). The following oral fluid opiate cutoffs were evaluated: the GC/MS limit of quantification (LOQ) of 2.5 mg/l; 15 microg/l currently used for oral fluid testing in the United Kingdom (UK); 30 microg/l (Opiate CRS cutoff); and 40 microg/l, the proposed Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) cutoff. Subjects provided informed consent to participate in this IRB-approved research and resided on the closed research ward throughout the study. Three oral codeine doses of 60 mg/70 kg were administered over a 7-day period. After a 3-week break, subjects received three doses of 120 mg/70 kg within 7 days. Oral fluid specimens (N = 1273) were analyzed for codeine (COD), norcodeine (NCOD), morphine (MOR) and normorphine (NMOR) by GC/MS with an LOQ of 2.5 microg/l for all analytes. MOR and NMOR were not detected in any sample; 26.5% of the specimens were positive for COD and 13.7% for NCOD. Opiate CRS uses a preset, qualitative cutoff of 10 microg/l; this is equivalent to 30 microg/l in undiluted oral fluid as the oral fluid collection process involves a 1:3 dilution with buffer. Sensitivity, specificity, and efficiency of Opiate CRS compared to Opiate ELISA were 98.6, 98.1, and 98.2% at a 30 microg/l cutoff and 99.0, 96.2, and 96.6% at a 40 microg/l cutoff. Compared to the much lower GC/MS LOQ of 2.5 microg/l, sensitivity, specificity and efficiency were 66.8, 99.3 and 90.7%. Increasing the GC/MS cutoff to the current UK level yielded performance characteristics of 81.5% (sensitivity), 99.3% (specificity), and 95.4% (efficiency). Using a GC/MS cutoff identical to the preset Opiate CRS cutoff yielded sensitivity, specificity, and efficiency of 88.5, 99.2, and 97.5%, respectively. At the proposed SAMSHA confirmation cutoff of 40 microg/l, sensitivity increased with little change in specificity and efficiency (91.3% sensitivity, 98.9% specificity, and 97.5% efficiency). Oral fluid is a suitable matrix for detecting drugs of abuse. Opiate CRS, with a 30 microg/l cutoff, is sufficiently sensitive, specific and efficient for oral fluid opiate analysis, performing similarly to Opiate ELISA at the same cutoff, and having performance characteristics >91% when compared to GC/MS at the proposed SAMHSA cutoff.