Editors' Choice Articles
The editors have selected their choice articles from the latest two issues of The British Journal of Social Work. Read the abstracts below, and click through to read the articles online for FREE.
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38:1
Social work practice to support survival strategies in sub-Saharan Africa
Siobhan Laird
The high levels of absolute poverty, malnutrition and illiteracy across the sub-Saharan region require African social workers to develop new methods of intervention which differ from those used in Western countries. Identifying, augmenting and enhancing the strengths of disadvantaged people lie at the core of all social work practice. This paper adumbrates the range of survival strategies used by African households and concludes that these require buttressing through alternative approaches to orthodox social work methods.
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38:2
Resilience across cultures
Michael Ungar
Findings from a 14 site mixed methods study of over 1500 youth globally support four propositions that underlie a more culturally and contextually embedded understanding of resilience: 1) there are global, as well as culturally and contextually specific aspects to young people’s lives that contribute to their resilience; 2) aspects of resilience exert differing amounts of influence on a child’s life depending on the specific culture and context in which resilience is realized; 3) aspects of children’s lives that contribute to resilience are related to one another in patterns that reflect a child’s culture and context; 4) tensions between individuals and their cultures and contexts are resolved in ways that reflect highly specific relationships between aspects of resilience. The implications of this cultural and contextual understanding of resilience to interventions with at-risk populations are discussed.
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