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Citizens in advanced industrial democracies frequently have personal experiences with public services and welfare state arrangements. They may have regular contact with public health care services, schools, public transportation, public libraries, and many other types of services. And at one life stage or another they may receive parts of their incomes in the form of pensions, student aid, unemployment insurance, and so on. This study investigates the extent to which personal welfare state expenences affect general political orientations. What are the political effects when a person is discontent with some aspect of, say, the particular health services or the public kindergartens that she has been in personal contact with? Does she lose faith in the weifare state or in leftist ideas about large-scale state intervention in society? Does she take her negative experiences as a sign that the political system and its politicians are not functioning satisfactorily? Will her inclination to support the goveming party drop? Addressing these and other questions, this study develops a theoretical framework that incorporates insights from a muititude of research traditions, including research on voting behaviour, social psychology, rational choice theory, political psychology, and institutional theory. The framework is tested empirically using Swedish primary survey data collected under the auspices of the 1999 West Sweden SOM Survey, and the 1999 Swedish European Parliament Election Study. The results indicate that personal welfare state experiences have substantively significant effects on political orientations. This is a somewhat different conclusion than the one found in much previous research - especially the "economic voting" literature. By and large, this research has reinforced the notion that the personal is separate from the political, in that it has usually found relatively weak statistical relationships between, on the one hand, political attitudes and behaviour, and personal economic hardship and personal unemployment on the other. Rather, the economic voting literature emphasises the political importance of mass media-driven "sociotropic perceptions" of societal events and trends, rather than personal experiences of events and trends. Furthermore, personal welfare state experiences are not uni-dimensional events. Rather, the perspectives of self-interest, distributive justice, and voice oppominities all appear to capture different aspects of these experiences that are consequential for political orientations. Specifically, self-interest is idiuential mainly for political ideology, with those who gain personally from the weifare state being more likely to support state intervention and more likely to stand further to the left. In contrast, experienced distributive justice and experienced voice opportunities have an impact mainly on political trust, where those who have personally experienced injustice are less likely than others to be satisfied with the democratic system and to trust politicians. Finally, the effects of personal welfare state experiences appear systematically structured by "the institutional interface." Customer institutions - where discretion is rare and exit-options frequent - are better at generating positive experiences, and in turn positive effects on welfare state support and political trust, than client institutions - where discretion is frequent and exit-options rare.

The complex issues associated with barriers to treatment entry for parents who are involved with child welfare has not been well explored. Accessing timely treatment is now critical for these parents since the introduction of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, limiting the time until a permanency decision is made. Using a longitudinal, qualitative approach, substance-abusing parents from 15 families, their relevant family members, and service providers were interviewed approximately every 3 months over an 18-month period. The experiences of these parents add to our knowledge of the unique barriers this population faces, and expands our understanding of the mechanisms by which certain barriers may delay treatment.

Mitigating the adverse physical health risks associated with COVID-19 has been a priority of public health incentives. Less attention has been placed on understanding the psychological factors related to the global pandemic, especially among vulnerable populations. This qualitative study sought to understand the experiences of children and adolescents during COVID-19. This study interviewed 48 families during the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, and a national lockdown, to understand its impacts. The study used an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) methodology. Parents and children discussed the negative impact of the restrictions on young people's wellbeing. Children and adolescents experienced adverse mental health effects, including feelings of social isolation, depression, anxiety, and increases in maladaptive behaviour. Families with children with Autism Spectrum Disorders reported increased mental health difficulties during this period mostly due to changes to routine. The findings highlight the impact of severe restrictions on vulnerable populations' wellbeing and mental health outcomes, including children, adolescents, and those with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Deborah Daro and Kenneth Dodge observe that efforts to prevent child abuse have historically focused on directly improving the skills of parents who are at risk for or engaged in maltreatment. But, as experts increasingly recognize that negative forces within a community can overwhelm even well-intentioned parents, attention is shifting toward creating environments that facilitate a parent's ability to do the right thing. The most sophisticated and widely used community prevention programs, say Daro and Dodge, emphasize the reciprocal interplay between individual-family behavior and broader neighborhood, community, and cultural contexts. The authors examine five different community prevention efforts, summarizing for each both the theory of change and the empirical evidence concerning its efficacy. Each program aims to enhance community capacity by expanding formal and informal resources and establishing a normative cultural context capable of fostering collective responsibility for positive child development. Over the past ten years, researchers have explored how neighborhoods influence child development and support parenting. Scholars are still searching for agreement on the most salient contextual factors and on how to manipulate these factors to increase the likelihood parents will seek out, find, and effectively use necessary and appropriate support. The current evidence base for community child abuse prevention, observe Daro and Dodge, offers both encouragement and reason for caution. Although theory and empirical research suggest that intervention at the neighborhood level is likely to prevent child maltreatment, designing and implementing a high-quality, multifaceted community prevention initiative is expensive. Policy makers must consider the trade-offs in investing in strategies to alter community context and those that expand services for known high-risk individuals. The authors conclude that if the concept of community prevention is to move beyond the isolated examples examined in their article, additional conceptual and empirical work is needed to garner support from public institutions, community-based stakeholders, and local residents.

E stablished in 2004, the Alliance for Racial Equity in Child Welfare is a national initiative to improve outcomes for children and families of color who are served by the child welfare system and to address and reduce racial and ethnic disparities associated with those outcomes.The Alliance is a partnership among The Annie E.

Preventing child abuse

This article investigates front-line conditions within two sectors charged with the delivery of social welfare programs public bureaucracies and private contractors. I examine two traditions of public management that operate in these organizations and focus on how each tries to direct front-line action. Drawing upon ethnographic data, I discover a disjuncture between these management frameworks and day-to-day front-line operations. A body of social theory that posits that individuals both create and are constrained by social structures is used to understand these findings. The application of this theory both suggests that there is an ongoing social process not capitalized upon by existing management approaches and offers a new explanation for the persistence of certain management challenges in these sectors. The article concludes with a discussion of research propositions and management techniques that emerge from this inductive analysis.