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\"This highly practical text surveys the myriad legal and ethical issues that social workers encounter both in daily practice and under special circumstances. Its initial section presents concepts in law and ethics that unite practitioners, researchers, and academics in the field, such as confidentiality, informed consent, and the interplay between social work and administrative and judicial systems. A selection of representative cases illustrates legal aspects involved in providing services to families, children, elders, and persons with disabilities. Also included are chapters on advocacy in social work, both in its potential to influence policy and on the global stage as part of the ongoing struggle for human rights and dignity. Among the topics covered: Confidentiality and the social worker-client relationship; Liability issues for social workers in the clinical context; Legal issues arising in the context of social work research; The social worker and forensic social work; Social worker involvement in access to school and school services; Social work in the context of health care; Legal issues working with immigrants, refugees, and asylees; The interface between social work and human rights. Legal Issues in Social Work Practice and Research is an interdisciplinary text aimed at social work, mental health, and legal professionals. It enhances the power of social work as an integrative system to support clients' rights and agency.\"-- Back cover

A large body of research indicates that child development is sensitive to early‐life environments, so that poor children are at higher risk for poor cognitive and behavioral outcomes. These developmental outcomes are important determinants of success in adulthood. Yet, remarkably little is known about whether poverty‐alleviation programs improve children’s developmental outcomes. We examine how a government‐run cash transfer program for poor mothers in rural Ecuador influenced the development of young children. Random assignment at the parish level is used to identify program effects. Our data include a set of measures of cognitive ability that are not typically included in experimental or quasi‐experimental studies of the impact of cash transfers on child well‐being, as well as a set of physical health measures that may be related to developmental outcomes. The cash transfer program had positive, although modest, effects on the physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development of the poorest children in our sample.

\"Who bears responsibility for the poor, and who may exercise the power that comes with that responsibility? Amidst the Great Depression, American reformers answered this question in new ways, with profound effects on longstanding practices of governance and entrenched understandings of citizenship. States of Dependency traces New Deal welfare programs over the span of four decades and into communities around the nation, from American Indian reservations in the Southwest to agrarian stretches of Middle America, and to the metropolises of the industrial North. Drawing on a wealth of previously un-mined legal and archival sources, Karen Tani reveals how reformers attempted to build a more bureaucratic, centralized, and uniform public welfare system; how traditions of localism, federalism, and hostility towards the 'undeserving poor' affected their efforts; and how, along the way, more and more Americans came to speak of public income support in the powerful but limiting language of law and rights\"-- Provided by publisher.

Little is known about the effects of the most recent welfare reform initiatives-which include work mandates, time limits, and enhanced earnings disregards-on children's outcomes. This is partly because the ways in which maternal employment and income affect children more generally are not well understood. This article describes the effects on child development of the Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP), a welfare program that began prior to 1996 federal welfare reform legislation. The present study utilized MFIP's unique, three-group research design to untangle the effects of different components of the program, and, in turn, discover how each component's effects on parents' income or employment affected children's development. This study's findings showed that MFIP increased employment rates and decreased poverty and, according to reports from mothers, children were less likely to exhibit problem behaviors and more likely to perform better and be more highly engaged in school. These findings, based on a total of 879 participants, bolster the long-standing literature that has associated poverty with worse outcomes for children by confirming, in a rigorous experiment, that incremental increases in income for working poor parents bring benefits to children.

Background Older people in poor health are more likely to need extra money, aids and adaptations to allow them to remain independent and cope with ill health, yet in the UK many do not claim the welfare benefits to which they are entitled. Welfare rights advice interventions lead to greater welfare income, but have not been rigorously evaluated for health benefits. This study will evaluate the effects on health and well-being of a domiciliary welfare rights advice service provided by local government or voluntary organisations in North East England for independent living, socio-economically disadvantaged older people (aged ≥60 yrs), recruited from general (primary care) practices. Methods/Design The study is a pragmatic, individually randomised, single blinded, wait-list controlled trial of welfare rights advice versus usual care, with embedded economic and qualitative process evaluations. The qualitative study will examine whether the intervention is delivered as intended; explore responses to the intervention and examine reasons for the trial findings; and explore the potential for translation of the intervention into routine policy and practice. The primary outcome is the effect on health-related quality of life, measured using the CASP 19 questionnaire. Volunteer men and women aged ≥60 years (1/household) will be identified from general practice patient registers. Patients in nursing homes or hospitals at the time of recruitment will be excluded. General practice populations will be recruited from disadvantaged areas of North East England, including urban, rural and semi-rural areas, with no previous access to targeted welfare rights advice services delivered to primary care patients. A minimum of 750 participants will be randomised to intervention and control arms in a 1:1 ratio. Discussion Achieving a trial design that is both ethical and acceptable to potential participants, required methodological compromises. The choice of follow-up length required a trade-off between sufficient time to demonstrate health impact and the need to allow the control group access to the intervention as early as possible. The study will have implications for fundamental understanding of social inequalities and how to tackle them, and provides a model for similar evaluations of health-orientated social interventions. If the health benefits of this intervention are proven, targeted welfare rights advice services should be extended to ensure widespread provision for older people and other vulnerable groups. Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN Number ISRCTN37380518

Public opinion concerning social welfare is largely driven by perceptions of recipient deservingness. Extant research has argued that this heuristic is learned from a variety of cultural, institutional, and ideological sources. The Present article provides evidence supporting a different view: that the deservingness heuristic is rooted in psychological categories that evolved over the course of human evolution to regulate small-scale exchanges of help. To test predictions made on the basis of this view, a method designed to measure social categorization is embedded in nationally representative surveys conducted in different countries. Across the national- and individual-level differences that extant research has used to explain the heuristic, people categorize welfare recipients on the basis of whether they are lazy or unlucky. This mode of categorization furthermore induces people to think about large-scale welfare politics as its presumed ancestral equivalent: small-scale help giving. The general implications for research on heuristics are discussed.

\"Animals, Equality and Democracy examines the structure of animal protection legislation and finds that it is deeply inequitable, with a tendency to favor those animals the community is most likely to see and engage with. Siobhan O'Sullivan argues that these inequities violate fundamental principle of justice and transparency\"-- Provided by publisher.

The household registration (hukou) system in China, classifying each person as a rural or an urban resident, is a major means of controlling populatin mobility and determining eligibility for state-provided services and welfare. Established in the late 1950s, it was initially used to bar rural-to-urban migration. After the late 1970s reforms, an inflow of rural migrant workers was allowed into the cities to meet labor demands in the burgeoning export industries and urban services without, however, changing the migrants' registered status, thus precluding their access to subsidized housing and other benefits available to those with urban registration. While there have been many calls for reforming this system, progress has been limited. Proposed reforms have attracted increasing academic and media attention.