• Findings: It is clear that the street children are the major targets by the government agencies but these children have no cordial relationship with the police. Their vision of the police is that of ‘punishment’ rather than ‘help’. Also, the government through the Social Welfare Department provides some assistance to street children, but their programmes were not attractive enough to the children, hence, the street children’s concept of approved schools is that of a typical ‘Nigerian prison yard‘.

• Applications : It is argued that the global paradigm shift from eradication of street children to providing support for street children has a very weak root in Nigeria. Therefore, there is the need for proper implementation of the Nigeria Child Rights Act promulgated in the year 2003, which could improve the standard of practice presently obtainable in Social Welfare Department and in other government agencies such as the Police Department as a possible solution to this social menace.

• Findings: Based on a sample of the members of the National Association of Social Workers, the findings suggest that work environment and organizational factors contribute to social workers’ organizational and professional commitment, though the results suggest that organizational commitment is noticeably easier to explain than professional commitment.

• Applications: In today’s changing social service environment it is especially prudent for administrators to promote factors associated with employee commitment. This study suggests that social work managers ought to develop a greater understanding of organizational and professional commitment because of its link to organizational effectiveness and consequently how social workers work toward accomplishing their organizational or program mission.

• Findings: The most important result is that social work can be seen as a social system (function-system) with its own exclusive function that cannot be replaced by any other (function-) system. The reason for this is that every function-system of society occurs as a special kind of communication. Through the identification of an exclusive code of communication the present work demonstrates that professional social work is an essential function-system of society. Social work expands self-referentially, and without internal constraints, by continuously scanning the environment for those already in need as well as for potential new cases of need.

• Applications : Modern social workers have to reflect their daily actions. This can be shown with the help of some historical and sociological knowledge of the forms of mutual help. By integrating some of the discoveries that are introduced here into the research and curricula of social work, the present work raises the level of the current debate and provokes a detailed discussion of the future of social work in modern society.

• Findings: The survey findings indicated that 36 percent (n = 392) of the respondents were considered to be suffering from mental distress. Children and Families Division was worst affected, reporting the highest levels of absenteeism and poorest well-being. The qualitative findings were summarized into five broad themes: organizational culture and function; control; lack of resources; responsibility for people; and the rate and pace of change, which were incorporated into a model.

• Application: The article suggests that during times of change a thorough understanding of working conditions in the public sector are a fundamental prerequisite to developing interventions aimed at improving them. Additionally, the model clearly identifies a number of factors that are ‘organizational’, rather than being intrinsic to working in social services.

• Findings: The Royal Commission's recommendations for wider local authority responsibilities and resources to implement community care services for people with mental illness were not adopted with consequences for the role of social work in mental healthcare.

• Application: The article concludes that it is simplistic to portray the Royal Commission report as progressive or reactionary but that one lesson from history may be that practitioners and other stakeholders should continue to contribute to policy debates at national levels since such discussions shape services and practices for long periods.

• Findings: A central finding was that social workers who felt competent in their abilities to practice in a managed care environment also reported lower levels of role stress and burnout. Other findings included that those working with clients with severe and persistent mental illness reported lower levels of sense of competence and higher levels of role stress and burnout symptoms.

• Applications : Potential implications for research, education, and practice with the focus of increasing workers' knowledge and skills when providing services in a managed care environment are addressed. Future research is recommended to include more diverse samples that provide a more comprehensive picture of the population of social workers in the USA.

• Findings: Despite the different entry referral points of the cohorts, they had similar social backgrounds. Subsequent offending rate by LAC was 44 percent, which was significantly less than the former PEFS (64%). The offences of PEFS were significantly more violent, including a murder rate more than 1670 times their peers in the general population. In regard to being victims of crime, whilst both LAC and PEFS had higher rates of being victims of crime than the general population, LAC men were significantly more often victims of sex and violent crimes, having a murdered rate 176 times their age peers. However, there were no suicides amongst LAC but the PEFS suicide rate was 133 times that of their peers in the general population.

• Applications : These results indicate that, despite starting from a more disadvantaged situation, former LAC did significantly better than the PEFS young men. Whilst the LAC rates of `victimhood' shows their continuing relative vulnerability, the outcomes of the PEFS indicate another group of socially excluded people who require at least as much preventative support as former LAC. Overall, the LAC results indicate that Social Work support made a positive difference in the LAC outcomes.

• Findings: The results show that the social workers' assessment of the clients' experience differs from the clients' own assessments regarding the sub-scales of alliance and the clients' sense of own competence. However, no difference was observed between the social workers' assessment and the clients' negative experiences of the sessions. The results show the importance of asking the clients for their views when testing new ways of working. This will provide a more balanced picture as social workers are inclined to perceive the negative aspects and misjudge other experiences. The two different forms of session, with or without the ASI, did not affect the social workers' assessment of the clients' experience of the sessions.

• Applications : Testing of new methods of working in social work.

• Findings: The study has proved that psychological well-being has a negative relationship with college stress and positive coping strategies have significant buffering effects on psychological health problems. Male students reported higher level of stress, worse psychological well-being, and having less inclination towards using positive coping strategies. Students studying in Science subjects scored higher in personal hassle. Students from private colleges reported highest level of academic hassle while Year 2 students had the highest level of stress and lowest level of psychological well-being compared to students studying in other years.

• Applications : Efficient coping strategies should be cultivated within the different college cohorts in various situations. Intervention should be given to the high-risk college students groups. School social workers shall play an important role in cultivating proper coping strategies to future college students.

• Findings: As the social work landscape has to contend with a more conservative and fiscally restrictive environment, so too has practice supervision become more focused on efficiency, accountability and worker performance often at the expense of professional and practice development. In addition, current research has identified a crisis in the probity of practice supervision where many practitioners cite disillusionment and despair, as well as lack of opportunity to stop and critically reflect on practice situations as another challenge in this changed climate.

• Application: As a significant site of practice, a critically informed supervision praxis has the potential to emerge as a site for modelling social change strategies associated with the critical social work tradition.

• Findings: Results are consistent with our hypotheses. Addicted to drugs was seen as more blameworthy and dangerous compared to mental illness.

• Applications : These findings are important for framing the stigma and stereotypes of mental illness and drug addiction are discussed. In turn, these kinds of basic models will inform stigma change efforts of advocates.

• Findings: The challenges faced by not-for-profit human service organizations in the changing world also were identified. The authors advocated that commercial values and social values should not be confused. Social work is profoundly influenced by the values of our society. Social work administrators must recognize their work is motivated and shaped by social values.

• Applications : Recommendations for teaching, researching, and practising social work administration are also suggested.

• Findings: The article presents the results of a study in which social work students' usage of different forms of knowledge in their field studies was examined. The results demonstrate that social work students use different forms of knowledge in practice, and un-knowing is one of the actively used forms. Women tend to use un-knowing somewhat more than men.

• Applications : The article is a contribution to the ongoing debate on evidence-based practice in social work. It is argued that it is important to teach social work students to understand un-knowing in theory and to use it in practice, and in combination with other forms of knowledge in social work.

• Findings: The main findings of the research are described and analyzed within the framework of institutional, social and political contexts, using Denzin's critical-interpretive approach. It was found that at the basis of what is conceived of as a positive intervention experienced by both families in distress and social workers alike, lies the quality of the bond that was established between these two groups. As a result of the bond, based on relations of trust and closeness, the clients experienced a significant relief from the weight of their distress and reported changes in their self-image and in their family relations. However, the work setting in the social agency — a heavy workload, extensive burdens of bureaucracy, and budgetary limitations — made it impossible for social workers to devote themselves appropriately to cultivating the bond.

• Applications : The research here described also indicates that there is need for a `social dialogue' between social workers and clients in order to clarify the connection between individual family problems and the socio-political situation in Israel and to facilitate a greater role for the general public in matters concerning families in distress.

• Findings: Marx provides a number of `reminders' or `coordinates' which might help us to make sense of transformations taking place within the `world of work' today. More fundamentally, he illuminates aspects of `actually existing capitalism'. Furthermore, focusing on the first volume of Capital helps us to think about a constellation of connected factors, loosely referred to under the headings of time, toil (or labour) and technology, underpinning the `modernization' of social work and related areas of activity. The book also remains important because it reminds contemporary readers that capitalism is an exploitative economic system which damages bodies and minds. In this context, it is significant that Marx was perturbed and outraged by how the lives of children were being destroyed by the dynamic, unregulated power of capital.

• Applications : It would be erroneous to assume we can mechanically apply Marx's work in manifestly different times and circumstances. Rather, we have to `do our own work', in our particular time, place, and professional field and ponder whether some of the ideas adumbrated by Marx, in the late 19th century, still have contemporary resonance and meaning within neoliberal modernity.

• Findings: Despite the obvious ambiguities of many cases, much of the time social workers often feel very sure of their formulations. This is because social work takes place in the terrain of human relationships about which we all, qua human beings, routinely make moral evaluations in everyday life. Rhetoric of complexity and reflection should not be confused with uncertainty.

• Applications : This article endorses Spafford et al.'s respect for uncertainty and tentativeness, but argues that it is folly to think that we already have it in social work. A tentative and sceptical vocabulary of the emotional and moral domain is required if social work is indeed to embrace and acknowledge the limits and fallibilities of its technologies and practices.

• Findings: Participating social workers describe their awareness of the mutuality within their relationships with clients, including an awareness of the care their clients have and express towards them. However, participants report that this openness to mutuality and reciprocity in their relationships with clients is subversive of social work practice norms, which warn against dual relationships. These findings indicate that there is a serious disconnection between social work training and standards, and the ways social workers practice in the field. This puts workers in a potentially untenable position caught between ideals of professional behaviour and their relationships with their clients.

• Application: The findings of this study suggest the need for potentially radical shifts in how we conceptualize worker—client relationships within social work practice. We suggest that the accommodation of a theoretical orientation that incorporates an understanding of mutuality of care and the interdependency of identity and human development within all interpersonal relationships provides a significant opportunity to our profession to reexamine how we interact with our clients.

• Findings: The number of referrals increased over time; those for older people stabilized but those for younger adults were still rising. There was a clear association between location or setting, perpetrator and type of abuse. A referral about someone living in a care home was more likely to identify abuse by multiple staff and institutional abuse or neglect, especially if the individual was an older person with mental health problems. People with learning disabilities were more likely to experience sexual abuse, mainly from other service users or members of their family. Those living in a private home with others, primarily relatives, tended to be at risk of financial, physical or psychological abuse. Older people living alone were particularly vulnerable to financial abuse by family members or, less frequently, home care workers.

• Applications : This study suggests that well-developed adult protection procedures identify many more cases than previously estimated. Further research is needed to explain the low level of referrals from mental health services and variation between territories.

• Findings: It is significant that nearly half of the Trinidad group and two-thirds of the Barbados group reported experience of rejection or abandonment in childhood. A profile of stressful or traumatic experiences was compiled for each participant, from which it was possible to identify co-ocurring pairs of stressors, which suggest inter-relationships between the phenomena. Marked co-occurrence was found between domestic violence and alcoholism; domestic violence in the participants' family background and non-attainment of. Secondary School Certification; non-attainment of Secondary School Certification and rejection; poverty and rejection; domestic violence and rejection.

• Applications: Case management techniques can benefit from research-generated insights on interrelationships between critical risk-connected phenomena, especially in developing concerted approaches to problems of substance abuse using preventive techniques.

• Findings: The practitioners' participation and feedback offer insights into complex connections between `theory' and `practice' with the practitioner as a positioned subject and mediator of practical meanings of formal concepts.

• Applications: 1) Recognition of each practitioner's interpretation of formal concepts and how they are applied in actual practice, even within shared organizational contexts. 2) The importance of dialogue to expand the range of possibilities that maintain openness to ongoing learning. 3) The value of theoretical pluralism that may offer greater opportunities for professional discretion, rather than single self-contained approaches that may constrain effective and ethical practice.

• Findings: Knowledge creation activities involve many potential opportunities and stumbling blocks. Emotions and politics are part of the process. Appreciating some of the easily overlooked dimensions of the research process may help new researchers avoid some of the problems.

• Applications: This article is dedicated mostly to new researchers hoping to avoid commonly experienced problems associated with undertaking socially just and politically sensitive research. More seasoned researchers might use the article as guide to re-evaluate their own research histories.

• Findings: Qualitative data revealed that both workers and service users valued the relationship they developed. The nature of that relationship and its important component qualities are analysed using Biestek's Principles of the Casework relationship and Weiss's categories of social relationship provision.

• Applications : The results provide further support to a growing literature that emphasizes the value service users place on the nature and quality of the relationship with the worker in social care practice, and the importance of positive human qualities in workers.