Suchergebnisse

Service user involvement is now a well embedded feature of social work education in the United Kingdom. Whilst many education institutions have fully embraced the involvement of service users in teaching, there is still work to be done in more fully engaging with service users who are seldom heard. This article highlights the opportunities and challenges associated with innovative work being piloted in Northern Ireland where victims and survivors of political conflict are routinely involved in teaching social work students about the impact of conflict on their lives.

This paper examines how service users and carers can contribute to social work education in a post conflict society. A small-scale study undertaken in Northern Ireland is used as a case study to show how such citizens can potentially critically contribute to social work students' understanding of the impact of conflict on individuals, groups and communities. The need to appreciate the effects of such community division is now a core knowledge requirement of the social work curriculum in Northern Ireland. The article reports on research findings with service users, carers and agency representatives which points to ways in which social work students can achieve a critical understanding of the impact of conflict. Northern Ireland, in this way, is presented as a divided society, still in a state of adjustment and evolution, following a period of protracted community strife and violence. The author suggests that individuals who have been directly affected by conflict can contribute in an informed and critical way to social work students' developing knowledge and experience in an important area of their professional competence and understanding of anti-oppressive practice more broadly.

Abstract
This article presents findings from an exploratory in-depth qualitative research project with seventeen child welfare professionals exploring their permanency decisions with regards to Looked after Children. Thinking aloud-protocols and semi-structured interviews, in conjunction with a specifically constructed vignette were used to explore the permanency decisions of child welfare workers. Findings from this innovative research suggest that different decisions were taken by participants based on viewing the same vignette. However, even though the decisions differed, they clustered around the more interventionist options with most favouring adoption and foster care despite viable alternatives offered. There was broad consistency related to the rationale for the decisions taken, but this did not translate into a consistent permanency option being chosen. Possible reasons to account for this are that the decisions were heuristically constructed, idiosyncratic to individual inclinations and influenced by factors other than the individual needs of the service user. The implications of this are that children and families do not get a consistent and reliable response to their permanency needs. We therefore recommend the greater use of structured decision-making tools in permanency decisions to increase their objectivity and consistency.

Background: Borders play a profound role in human life. Although there has been extensive attention to issues of globalization, immigration, and human rights in the social work literature, our analysis of borders is related to, but different from, these issues. Our presentation uses a macro lens to analyze the range of issues that borders raise in both domestic and international social work practice. We address the question: How does social work engage in issues related to international borders? Methods: To address the research question we conducted a comparative case analysis of three borders: (1) U.S.-Mexico; (2) Northern Ireland (U.K.)-Republic of Ireland; and, (3) South Korea-North Korea. These cases were selected because each of them has critical, but different, border-focused issues that are relevant to social work practice. Data sources included the research literature and information from the professional social work organizations. In each case we provide background analysis of the border issue (history, politics, current status of the border). We then compared the cases on the following criteria: (1) forms of social work practice on each side of the border; (2) the border issues relevant to social work; (3) the role of social work organizations in directly or indirectly addressing the border issues. Inductive thematic analysis was used to identify describe elements in each case. Findings: Comparison of these cases identified that borders become challenging when: (a) there is unresolved history (i.e., the border is contested), (b) there are economic disparities between the countries, (c) there is ongoing militarized activity. In the U.S./Mexico case, the social work profession's focus on human rights requires efforts to advocate for migrants and recognizes ethical challenges for social work practitioners working for agencies in the border region. In the UK/Ireland case, social work is very similar on both sides of the border, but the challenges posed by Brexit are only partially acknowledged in the social work community. In the case of North and South Korea, social work is firmly established in the South but does not exist in the North. In addition to identifying the unique circumstances of each of these cases, cross-case analysis identified more general themes including impacts on domestic social work practice and education, lessons for international social work, and additional consideration relevant to a broader range of border circumstances. Conclusion and Implications: Increased globalization has led to major reconceptualization in our understanding of borders. The COVID-19 epidemic demonstrates the limited relevance of borders in some circumstances (spreading of the virus) but the heightened relevance of borders in other circumstances (actions such as quarantine, travel restrictions, and immigration crackdown). This duality is reflected in the three cases that we examined and their implications for additional cases. Social work practitioners, particularly when engaged in policy practice have a role to play in framing the understanding of borders and the resulting policies.