Bøger i SAGE Focus Editions serien

As cultural diversity is increasingly placed on the organization agenda, managers and policymakers need to learn more about the impact of Hispanics in the workplace. Little research exists on this issue, even though Hispanics are the fastest growing minority in the US and comprise a significant portion of the work force. This volume presents original contributions from key researchers on such critical issues as acculturation and bias, mentoring and support systems, employment discrimination, and the special issues faced by Chicana and Puerto Rican women workers.

This volume provides valuable insights into how researchers can successfully gain access to elite settings. Using their actual experiences, the contributors provide constructive advice as well as cautionary tales about how they learned to manoeuvre and become accepted in worlds otherwise closed to them.

The evaluation of social programmes for families and children that focus on keeping the family intact - rather than those that emphasize removing the child from the family - is discussed in this volume. Written primarily for evaluators and administrators involved in analyzing family services, chapters raise issues pertinent to the design of both comprehensive and special focus studies.

Organizational surveys are becoming increasingly popular with social science researchers and are used for a wide range of purposes, such as measuring employees' needs, obtaining consumers' opinions about the goods and services they receive, and monitoring the effectiveness of organizational interventions. This book presents the latest tools, techniques and applications for conducting successful organizational surveys throughout a wide range of settings - private, governmental and military.

Practical ways of undertaking research into psychotherapy are explored in this unique volume, which surveys the latest developments in psychotherapy process research and examines their implications for clinical practice.Giving equal weight to both paradigmatic and narrative approaches to explanation of the therapeutic process, contributions exemplify both relatively `pure' uses of either approach and their joint application. Each mode is seen to be especially suited to explaining a particular aspect of the overall therapeutic process and the question arises of whether or not the two approaches can be integrated. This question is addressed in terms of the implicit assumptions supporting each approach.

As ever-increasing numbers of children live apart from their parents, how can policymakers and professionals who work with families address the emotional and financial needs of such children? The editors draw on research, policy and practice sources in order to identify a rich array of roles that nonresidential parents may play in the lives of their children. They also explore such issues as: variation in nonresidential parenting across ethnic groups; the financial implications of parenting separately; patterns of involvement of nonresidential parents; and implications for further research and social policy.

This volume provides valuable insights into how researchers can successfully gain access to elite settings. Using their actual experiences, the contributors provide constructive advice as well as cautionary tales about how they learned to manoeuvre and become accepted in worlds otherwise closed to them.

Are there effective ways to support a family with problems (for example, neglect, abuse, HIV, terminal illness) in order to prevent it breaking up, and make a positive change possible? This book examines Intensive Family Preservation Services, tracing the history of these services, their success at solving family problems, how families respond to the services and how their effectiveness varies according to the type of problem a family is experiencing. Through an exploration of these issues, the contributors offer their own experience as a basis for tracing the evolution of IFPS and the advances that have been made in the field.

In this book, leading methodologists address the issue of how effectively to apply the latest developments in social network analysis to behavioural and social science disciplines.Topics examined include: ways to specify the network contents to be studied; how to select the method for representing network structures; how social network analysis has been used to study interorganizational relations via the resource dependence model; how to use a contact matrix for studying the spread of disease in epidemiology; and how cohesion and structural equivalence network theories relate to studying social influence. The book also offers some statistical models for social support networks.

Conflict is a fact of organizational life, though much of it is expressed "behind-the-scenes". This book takes examples from a number of organizational settings, arguing that far from being an occasional occurrence, conflict is an embedded phenomena.

How do you gain entry into a research setting? What tricks are there to learning the rules of the community without alienating the people you came to study? How are good relations maintained with informants? What happens after you leave the field? This title addresses these questions.

Why do men batter their wives? How do women define their experiences of violence? Is wife abuse related to child abuse? How do medical authorities react to wife abuse? This volume brings together well-known academics, activists and clinicians who approach these questions from a distinctly feminist perspective.

This volume discusses a philosophy in which the researcher is involved in the process of organizational learning and change. The contributors outline the method behind participatory action research and present a series of cases where it was used in industry and agriculture in four continents.

Bringing together the empirical work of researchers from a variety of disciplines, this title provides insight into the physical, psychological and social needs of the growing number of elderly people caring for adults with developmental disabilities.

Bringing together the empirical work of researchers from a variety of disciplines, this title provides insight into the physical, psychological and social needs of the growing number of elderly people caring for adults with developmental disabilities.

This book brings together information from both researchers and practitioners on a wide range of community-based services that are available to and needed by the rural elderly in the United States.Specific topics examined include: senior centres; referral systems; housing and transportation; employment and retirement; and health promotion and health care. Krout provides section overviews as well as an informative, thorough introduction and epilogue that highlight common themes and issues.

The transition from viewing organizations as bureaucracies towards seeing them in metaphoric terms is a contemporary break with past organizational theory. But to investigate the similarities between real organizations and the metaphors describing their functions and context, a shift in both methods of inquiry and organizational theory must take place. This volume explores the paradigm shift at three levels: an overview of historical roots; an explication of terminology, metaphors and constructs; and the practical application of these new organizational inquiry methods, especially for actual research practices and policy analysis applications.

Changing Men assembles some of the most innovative and exciting research on men and masculinity. As such, it contributes to the demarcation of the new field of men's studies and to the examination of masculinity within traditional academic disciplines. The contributors deal with broad topical and methodological issues such as reformulating the male role, men in domestic settings, male/female relationships, sexuality, race and gender, and future directions for men's studies.

Much has been missed by social researchers in their attempt to understand the human experience as a series of rational, cognitive choices. Human subjectivity in lived experience, both that of the subject and that of the researcher, is the topic of this volume, an important corrective to the detached stance of most previous social research.The contributors examine various aspects of the subject - the emotions, the gendered nature of experience, the body-mind relationship, perceptions of time, place and setting, understanding of the self - and explore how these elements provide a fuller understanding of the human condition.

By highlighting the commonalities across a range of disciplines, this volume provides a unique and broad-based perspective on communication and ageing. This integrative approach brings together the best of current research and theory from communication, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and medical sociology.Centring on three topics - cognition, language and relationships - the book explores the individual areas as well as the ways in which they intersect. It brings to light the implications of individual differences among members of the elderly population as they affect communication, and illustrates the positive as well as the negative effects of the ageing process on language production, relational satisfaction and other communication-related variables.

Studying across race and ethnic lines creates many problems for the researcher involving practical, strategic, ethical and epistemological questions alike. The contributors to this volume examine the array of methods used in quantitative, qualitative and comparative/historical research to show how ethnic-sensitive research can be carried out.Among the methodological traditions discussed are survey research, demography, testing and assessment, ethnography, discourse analysis, comparative methods and archival research.

Until recently, race relations research has been an understudied and stigmatized area of the social sciences. This volume traces its emergence as a central topic, highlighting the major milestones that established it as a legitimate research domain.The contributors, key figures in the post-war development of United States race research, relate their own experiences with race and racism and the developing interest in the understanding of race as a social force, giving the reader an insider's view of the field.

In the 1960s many sociologists proclaimed traditional religion to be in its death throes. But, just as secularization gained nearly universal acceptance among scholars, religious resurgence burst forth from many directions - new religious movements and the growth of Islamic fundamentalism for example. In A Future for Religion?, contributors ask whether, if such dynamic forces are at work, is religion really dying? They discuss issues usually excluded from books on the sociology of religion - including religious experience, emotional renewal, religion and the body.

What is the role of fit measures when respecifying a model? Should the means of the sampling distributions of a fit index be unrelated to the size of the sample? Is it better to estimate the statistical power of the chi-square test than to turn to fit indices? Exploring these and related questions, well-known scholars examine the methods of testing structural equation models (SEMS) with and without measurement error, as estimated by such programs as EQS, LISREL and CALIS.

Gathering an internationally renowned group of scholars in urbanization and development studies, this work explores the impact of internal and international migration on cities in the Third World. Vital issues such as demographic trends, economic development, environmental impact, welfare and housing policy are examined across a variety of geographic locations. The book will be an invaluable resource for anyone engaged in policy or programme work in Third World development.

An introduction to the social and behavioural foundations which create a form of equilibrium sought by legal systems, known as the "sense of justice". The text draws upon new discoveries and legal insights from the biologically-based behavioural sciences.

The integration of a broad array of interventions is described in this comprehensive, practical guide for those working with seriously mentally ill adults. It draws on the experience of clients who struggle with severe and disabling problems in a challenging urban environment.The contributors argue that psychological and practical issues are intertwined and therefore such interventions must be delivered concurrently. They also emphasize that understanding and using the resources of a client's culture is critical to the successful implementation of care, and that families and natural support systems are essential components of the care system.

Considers important issues of what theory and research on human development can teach us about adolescents' vulnerability, how to reduce that vulnerability and under what circumstances parental consent does not protect children's rights.

This in-depth study of grassroots politics - `micropolitics' - in schools, which includes examples from the UK and the USA, explores how teachers, administrators and their students use political power to protect their interests and to bring about change in the status quo.

Directed towards researchers and practitioners in family studies and gerontology, this book provides a collection of research-based descriptions on family relations of older people. It addresses topics such as: sibling relationships in later life; widowhood; ethnic differences; elder abuse and mistreatment; family care; and health problems.