Turning into a “Godparent”: How adult volunteers negotiate their personal life to become a mentor for “Unaccompanied Refugee Minors”

This article looks into how volunteers deal with their biographies and social embeddedness to make sense of their engagement in mentoring before they are matched. It draws on a qualitative investigation on a community-based pilot youth mentoring program for “unaccompanied refugee minors” in Austria. This article reveals how already trained, local adults actively relate to “family,”“migration” and “previous activities” in their meaning-making. It shows how they negotiate their personal life and existing relationships in the process of turning into a future “godparent.” The discussion of findings against the state of the art leads the way to two heuristic claims: firstly, the study provides grounded arguments for an extension of the conventional mentoring concept on the side of the mentor. Secondly, for a more relational and processual approach towards the mentors’ side, both biographical and social network dimensions need to be integrated in methods and designs of youth mentoring research.

Motivated by a mandate: a university-clinic partnership to develop a perinatal depression registry at a community based hospital in the Midwest

Disparities in maternal mental health outcomes persist despite the myriad of existing evidence based treatments and recent public health prevention policy efforts. Integrated health care delivery models such as Collaborative Care and patient medical home models have the potential to reduce health disparities in clinic settings. These evidence-based approaches require multidisciplinary teams for successful implementation and to provide quality care to improve specified patient outcomes. However, strategies for successful collaboration and steps for critical reflection are often overlooked in clinical and health services research. Furthermore, a shared vision of social justice is essential in the process of building and sustaining patient-centered care models, but is often understated. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and implementation of a social justice-informed hospital-based perinatal depression registry to address maternal health disparities. Our partnership is informed by community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles for carrying out health services research. We describe the steps for building a sustainable university-hospital collaboration between traditional and non-traditional researchers using principles from CBPR in a clinic setting.

Uncoordination of China’s social assistance program resources and policy solutions

With the promulgation and implementation of Social Assistance Interim Measures, China hasbasically established the social assistance system framework with Dibao, Three-nos people support and disasterrelief as the basis, with housing aid, medical aid ,education aid and employment aid as the support and with temporaryassistance and charity help as the supplement. The establishment of various social assistance programsundoubtedly aims to fulfil different demands of urban and rural neddy people, however,the increase of socialassistance programs does not necessarily bring about an increase in the effectiveness of social assistance. Thispaper analyzes the uncoordination of Chinas social assistance program resources and put forward related policysolutions.

Dimensions of professional knowledge

This study concern how professional knowledge is discussed, understood and employed by integration workers in an integration activity in Sweden called Civic Orientation. The changing and complex nature of integration work implies that integration workers need specialized knowledge to ensure quality of the activity. Defining what is meant by professional knowledge is especially important and to address these issues, this study focuses on what constitutes professional knowledge with respect to the efforts made to support immigrant integration. Our study reveals that professional knowledge in Civic Orientation encompasses the understanding and responding to the heterogeneity of the groups in daily interactions, developing standardized procedures;and knowledge about how to establishing a cumulative approach to knowledge in the organization. We argue that these motives are embedded in different perspectives on culture and knowledge. Furthermore, these different perspectives are expressed as tensions between values of creativity and standardization as well as between equality and heterogeneity.

Social Work and Social Welfare from a Multidisciplinary Perspective -- A Challenge for Researchers

In 2008, a deep economic crisis started in the US and rapidly spread around the world. The financial and economic crisis, called “The Great Recession”, continues in many countries today and has been considered as the most severe recession in the history of US (after “The Great Depression”). The crisis brought very fast growth in unemployment and it is foreseeable that it will be long lasting and that recovery will be very slow. Hence, such economic change obviously had a significant impact on workers worldwide.