Developing a Case Typology for Children in Out-of-Home Care: Child Welfare Worker Perspectives
This study uses exploratory research methods to create a comprehensive list of case types for children entering out-of-home care placements. Child welfare workers' experiences were the primary source of data for this qualitative analysis. Researchers conducted focus groups in five urban counties in Minnesota. A case typology of 18 case types defined by 4 specific categories (parents' capacity or behavior, child reasons, problems in parenting, previous unsuccessful child welfare intervention) is presented. Data from worker perspectives are analyzed and compared with quantitative research to enhance conceptual understanding of case types, intervention strategies, and associated outcomes. Researchers discuss implications of a case typology, including potential benefits, in the application of intervention strategies, outcomes reporting, and data tracking.
Envisioning Public Child Welfare Agencies as Learning Organizations: Applying Beer's Viable System Model to Title IV-E Program Evaluation
The idea of a learning organization emerges from organizational cybernetics and results in agency staff having the means to use their skills and expertise to meet the needs of the organization's clients. Relevant to Title IV-E training programs, such organizational processes would maximize the use of knowledge and skills the graduates bring back to the agency. This article uses focus group data to explore how Title IV-E graduates perceive the potentialities of their agency as a learning organization. This analysis results in recommendations to improve organizational performance without impinging on existing agency resource constraints.
Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History
This book explores the history of the Dominican Republic as it evolved from the first European colony in the Americas into a modern nation under the rule of Rafael Trujillo. It investigates the social foundations of Trujillo's exceptionally enduring and brutal dictatorship (1930-1961) and, more broadly, the way power is sustained in such non-democratic regimes. The author reveals how the seemingly unilateral imposition of power by Trujillo in fact depended on the regime's mediation of profound social and economic transformations, especially through agrarian policies that assisted the nation's large independent peasantry. By promoting an alternative modernity that sustained peasants' free access to land during a period of economic growth, the regime secured peasant support as well as backing from certain elite sectors. This book thus elucidates for the first time the hidden foundations of the Trujillo regime.