Articles

Maths in Prison

Catherine Byrne et al. — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 04:14:54 PDT

I teach maths to all levels in an adult male remand prison in Ireland and am also studying for a PhD in maths in prison education in Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). This paper describes recent initiatives piloted by maths teachers and school management to increase attendance, engagement and certification in maths. It assesses the effects of the initiatives and looks at future potential in this setting and in others. To set the paper in context, I begin by describing a typical day as a prison maths teacher.

Social Services Will Not Touch us with a Barge Pole’: Social Care Provision for Older Prisoners

Kate O'Hara et al. — Tue, 26 Jan 2016 01:27:40 PST

Older prisoners are the fastest growing subgroup in the English and Welsh prison estate. Older prisoners have high levels of health and social care needs. This mixed method study involved the distribution of a questionnaire examining the availability of health and social care services for older prisoners to all prisons housing adult males in England and Wales, followed by qualitative telephone interviews with representatives from eight prisons. Over half of establishments had some contact with external social care services but reported significant difficulties in arranging care for individuals. A professional lead for older prisoners had been identified in 81% of establishments; however the value of this role to positively affect practice appeared questionable. Statutory social care was often non-existent in prison due to the lack of understanding of what it constituted and who was responsible for its provision.

Links Between Depressive Symptoms and Unmet Health and Social Care Needs Among Older Prisoners

Kate O'Hara et al. — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 02:30:32 PST

Background: absolute numbers of older prisoners and their proportion of the total prison population are increasing. They have multiple health and social care needs that are prominent on entry into prison. No previous studies have identifed older prisoners’health and social care needs at this crucial point Objective: to examine unmet health and social care needs among older men entering prison and their links with depressive symptoms.

Undertaking Action Research in Prison: Developing the Older prisoner Health and Social Care Assessment and Plan

Kate O'Hara et al. — Tue, 08 Dec 2015 02:09:39 PST

Older prisoners are the fastest growing group in prisons. They have complex health and social care needs and the coordination of their care is suboptimal. An action learning group including health care staff, prison staff and older prisoners was established at one prison in England. The group developed the Older prisoner Health and Social Care Assessment and Plan (OHSCAP) which is a health and social care assessment and care planning process for the better identification and management of older prisoners’ needs. This paper describes and critically analyses the process of action learning in prison to develop and pilot the OHSCAP. Data were collected through reflective notes from the action learning group facilitator, reflective diary writing from group members, emails, research project steering group meeting notes and interviews with action learning group members. The constant comparison method of data analysis was used.

Examining the Use of Community Service Orders as Alternatives to Short Prison Sentences in Ireland

Kate O'Hara et al. — Tue, 08 Dec 2015 01:06:26 PST

Ireland’s highly discretionary sentencing system provides a rare opportunity to study the behaviour of judges when relatively free of externally imposed constraints. While this is so, few studies have investigated sentencing trends.

Note No. 9 Research Briefing - Governing Young Citizens: Discourses of Childhood in Irish Social Policy

Karen Smith — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 02:20:53 PDT

Producing Governable Subjects: Images of Childhood Old and New

Karen Smith — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 02:15:54 PDT

Conceptions of childhood in terms of ‘evil’ and ‘innocence’ transcend time and culture. These conflicting images are deployed by Chris Jenks as the Dionysian and Apollonian models of childhood to symbolize external and internal forms of control. Drawing on the literature on governmentality this paper revisits these models and introduces a third model, the ‘Athenian’ child, analogous and supplementary to those developed by Jenks. This model is necessary in order to take account of relatively recent strategies in the government of childhood, which, predicated on understandings of children in terms of competence and agency, operate via responsibility and reflexivity.

Youth Work as a Public Good: Older Teenager's Experiences of Youth Services in Dulbin

Matt Bowden et al. — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 08:00:58 PST

In the context of consumerism, individualism and the privatisation of young people’s leisure, youth work struggles to attract young people, especially those aged 15 to 9 years. Drawing from a study exploring young people’s perspectives on participation in youth services, it is argued that youth work offers a type of public and civic engagement that is not on offer from consumption-based activities. While certain activities attract young people into youth work, what maintains their participation is the sense of belonging they experience and the opportunity to participate meaningfully in decision making. In this regard the youth work sector needs to recognise and promote the value of its own contribution to the construction and maintenance of youth participation as a public good – something the market cannot or will not provide.

Early Literacy and Numeracy Matters

Geraldine French — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 10:14:49 PDT

Identifying Subjective Statements in News Titles Using a Personal Sense Annotation Framework

Polina Panicheva et al. — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 07:06:13 PST

Subjective language contains information about private states. The goal of subjective language identification is to determine that a private state is expressed, without considering its polarity or specific emotion. A component of word meaning, “Personal Sense,” has clear potential in the field of subjective language identification, as it reflects a meaning of words in terms of unique personal experience and carries personal characteristics. In this paper we investigate how Personal Sense can be harnessed for the purpose of identifying subjectivity in news titles. In the process, we develop a new Personal Sense annotation framework for annotating and classifying subjectivity, polarity, and emotion. The Personal Sense framework yields high performance in a fine-grained subsentence subjectivity classification. Our experiments demonstrate lexico-syntactic features to be useful for the identification of subjectivity indicators and the targets that receive the subjective Personal Sense.

‘Moving In’: Difficulties and Support in the Transition to Higher Education for In-Service Social Care Students

Fiona McSweeney — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 07:04:40 PST

This paper reports on the difficulties and supports experienced by social care practitioners within the educational institution during their transition to higher education. A life transition such as entering higher education causes stress for individuals and social support is essential in successfully dealing with this stress (Anderson et al., 2012). Fifteen social care practitioners were interviewed twice during and once at the end of their first academic year in college. Findings indicate that participants were reluctant to approach staff for help despite anxiety about classes and assignments. Discussion and debate in class helped learning and contributed to feelings of being valued. ‘Moving in’ was a slow process with a physical and emotional impact for which they were unprepared. Student peers were a source of emotional and cognitive support but developing relationships took time. By the end of the transition phase participants noted changes and gains in themselves and their work practices. Recommendations are made to aid the transition to higher education for in-service social care practitioners.

Connectedness in the Lives of Older People in Ireland

Carmel Gallagher — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 04:06:48 PST

This paper presents an analysis of the connectedness of older people in two sample areas, one urban and one rural in Ireland. The paper is based on a study of the communal participation of older people in two geographic localities, Rathmore, a suburban area of Dublin, and Rathbeg, a rural area in County Donegal, conducted between 2000 and 2005. A multi stage study that used both qualitative and quantitative methods examined significant communal interactions of older people across a range of arenas, including leisure interests, involvement in clubs, religious practices, voluntary work, relationships with kin, friends and neighbours, helping activities, use of social services and informal interactions in neighbourhoods and other communal settings. The paper describes their experiences of connectedness, explains how older people co-create and sustain communal ties and explores the significance of social practices and social groupings involved. The study demonstrated that among a diverse group of older adults engagement with others outside one’s immediate family was a significant source of satisfaction and meaning in life. It provided evidence that place-based friendships are important contexts for the development of collective solidarities and transformative relationships. The paper underlines the contribution of older people to the lives of others, and argues that community should be understood as involving both place and type of relationship instead of a symbolic attachment to identities. The policy implications of the findings are also briefly considered.

Walking in Sunshine, or Away From It? Creating a Unified Transparency Index

John Hogan et al. — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 01:30:53 PDT

Abstract: Despite the strengths of the two bodies of literature on Freedom of Information (FOI) and Lobbying Regulation, a main inadequacy is that they fail to meet each other. The reason why both the FOI and lobbying regulation literatures need to be synthesized is that both should be seen as the two sides of the deliberative democracy coin: FOI legislation aims to regulate the actions of state officials, while lobbying laws seek to regulate the actions of private interests attempting to influence such officials. The novelty of this paper is that we thus extend and link the ideas raised in these two bodies of literature, by performing a comparative analysis across 16 jurisdictions in North America, Europe and Asia. Our first main goal is to identify a measure for the effectiveness of FOI legislation throughout the world that can be compared on a normalized scale. Secondly, we combine these scores with those from the extant literature on lobbying regulations, producing what we refer to as an overall ‘sunshine score.’ This score will represent one of the first encompassing transparency measures in the literature, which helps us better conceptualize a unified understanding the relationship between FOI and lobbying rules, as well as the openness of democratic systems throughout the world.

Creating a Framework for a Single European Sky:the Opportunity Cost of Reorganising European Airspace

Niall Neligan — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 03:24:45 PDT

The object of this article is to critically evaluate the legal framework for a European Single Sky project in light of the recent European Court of Justice decision in International Air Transport Association v The Department of Transport. The article will examine in detail the framework regulations outlining the major provisions from the recommendations of the Commission's High Level Group in 2000, to the implementation at a micro-level by national authorities of the legislation adopted in 2004. Furthermore, this article will examine whether the savings to air service providers from the Single European Sky project in the long term will be negated by the short term outgoings associated with compensating passengers in the event of delays, cancellations and denied boardings caused by non-systemic factors.

Child Sexual Abuse, Links to Later Sexual Exploitation/High-Risk Sexual Behavior, and Prevention/Treatment Programs

Kevin Lalor et al. — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 07:58:39 PST

This paper reviews the literature on the nature and incidence of child sexual abuse, explores the link between child sexual abuse and later sexual exploitation, and reviews the literature on prevention strategies and effective interventions in child sexual abuse services. Our understanding of the international epidemiology of child sexual abuse is considerably greater than it was just 10 years ago, and studies from around the world are examined. Childhood sexual abuse can involve a wide number of psychological sequelae, including low self-esteem, anxiety, and depression. Numerous studies have noted that child sexual abuse victims are vulnerable to later sexual revictimization, as well as the link between child sexual abuse and later engagement in high-risk sexual behaviour. Survivors of child sexual abuse are more likely to have multiple sex partners, become pregnant as teenagers, and experience sexual assault as adults. Various models which attempt to account for this inter-relationship are presented; most invoke mediating variables such as low self-esteem, drug/alcohol use, PTSD and distorted sexual development. Prevention strategies for child sexual abuse are examined including media campaigns, schoolbased prevention programmes, and therapy with abusers. The results of a number of meta-analyses are examined. However, researchers have identified significant methodological limitations in the extant research literature that impede the making of recommendations for implementing existing therapeutic programmes unreservedly.

Student, practitioner, or both?:Separation and Integration of Identities in Professional Social Care Education

Fiona McSweeney — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 04:39:26 PST

This paper presents and discusses some of the findings from a qualitative study of identities in work-related learners. The theoretical framework of structural symbolic interactionism is outlined and the two identities of interest, that of student and practitioner discussed. The aim of professional education is viewed as enabling the practitioner to deal with ambiguity and change through critical examination of work practices and location of these within theoretical frameworks. It is argued that for knowledge and behaviour to transfer to the work setting the student and worker identities need to be integrated rather than kept separate. Factors identified as influencing the integration and separation of the social identities of student and social care practitioner are discussed.

Child Sexual Abuse and HIV Transmission in Sub-Saharan Africa

Kevin Lalor — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 05:57:31 PST

The purpose of this paper is to examine the risks of HIV transmission to children through sexual abuse and exploitation in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper is based on a review of pertinent literature. Child sexual abuse in this region must be defined broadly enough to encompass widespread coercion or violence in early sexual relations in some regions, the practice of ‘transactional sex’ and constructions of masculinity, emphasising multiple sexual partners and power over women and girls. The high HIV prevalence in SSA is briefly described. Research evidence showing the link between child sexual abuse and HIV transmission is reviewed, although this is a topic where very little direct empirical work has been conducted. Particular methodological and ethical difficulties have been encountered by researchers. Future research directions are indicated.

Rewarding Community Engaged Scholarship

Elaine Ward — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 05:57:29 PST

The Same, but Different: Salary Scales, Progression Arrangements and Duties in Institutes of Technology (IOTs) and Universities

Kevin Lalor — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 10:07:31 PDT

Arís is Arís Eile: Scéalta Mar Ais Teanga sa Naíonra

Maire Mhic Mhathuna — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:52:29 PDT

Achoimre Déantar cur síos san alt seo ar ról na scéalta agus na leabhar mar áis fhoghlamtha teanga is scéalaíochta sa naíonra Gaelach. Déantar anailís ar an teoiric a bhaineann le forbairt na teanga is na scéalaíochta féin sa chéad is sa dara teanga. Deineadh cluastaifeadadh ar na seisiúin scéalaíochta i naíonra Gaelach amháin gach coicís ar feadh sé mhí. Scagadh na hathscríbhinní chun féachaint cén modh scéalaíochta a bhí in úsáid ag na stiúrthóirí is cén dul chun cinn a bhí á dhéanamh ag na páistí. Tugtar cuntas anseo ar na straitéisí scéalaíochta a bhí in úsáid ag na stiúrthóirí sin agus ar na naisc a dhein siad idir na scéalta is na gníomhaíochtaí eile sa naíonra. Tuigeadh gur chabhraigh an modh inste rialta leis na páistí chun páirt a ghlacadh sa scéal. Tuigeadh freisin go raibh tábhacht ag baint leis an scéal céanna a léamh go minic chun seans a thabhairt do na páistí dul i dtaithí ar an mbrí is ar an bhfoclóir is chun deis a thabhairt dóibh ceangail a dhéanamh idir na scéalta is imeachtaí an naíonra is a saol féin.