Healthcare organisations are facing the constant trade off to contain expenditures without sacrificing the quality of patient's care. This challenge to do ‘more with less’ induced healthcare executives to heavily invest in innovations activities in order to increase the efficiency of their organisations. By taking an individual-level perspective, our study focuses on knowledge-sharing behaviour…
Drawing on a longitudinal case study of Alpha Chemicals, we use four complexity theory constructs – adaptive tension, enabling leadership, enhanced cooperation, and boundary spanning – to explain the continuous knowledge creation dynamics in Communities of practice (CoPs). Our findings show that the virtual cycle of knowledge creation results from CoPs oscillating between guided and self-direct…
The concept of absorptive capacity has already been considerably studied from a theoretical perspective, but few, if any, attempts at operationalizing the concept have been studied in ways that would allow its full assessment. The more specific focus provided by the four dimensions identified in some recent literature – acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation – opens up some …
Social work and social services are known to be beneficial to society, but to date no systematic valuation of their contribution has been attempted. The aim of this article is to advance our ability to quantify both the known direct benefits and some of the positive externalities of social work. The authors make the case of why valuation is important for social work and social services. Relying…
Advocacy is central to the social work profession’s commitment to social betterment and justice, yet much of what we know about it is based on conventional wisdom. We have little evidence on the effectiveness of interventions and even less on the costs and benefits of advocacy campaigns. This article discusses some of the conceptual and methodological issues involved with advocacy research and …
This article examines the cost-effectiveness of providing permanent supported housing to homeless people with mental illness. Through the use of billing records and frequency of use charts, researchers were able to map the service usage of a cohort of 268 homeless individuals from both urban and rural communities. The results suggest that significant cost savings can be achieved by establishing…
This article examines the phenomenon of volunteering from a benefit—cost perspective. Both the individual making a decision to volunteer and the organization making a decision to use volunteer labor face benefits and costs of their actions, yet these costs and benefits almost always remain unarticulated, perhaps because the common perception of the do-good volunteer who contributes his or her l…
This article reviews the use of several valuation methods as they relate to drug abuse and places them within the context of U.S. policy. First, cost-of-illness (COI) studies are reviewed and their limitations discussed. Second, three additional economic methods of valuing drug abuse are reviewed, including cost—effectiveness analysis (CEA), benefit—cost analysis (BCA) and willingness-to-pay (W…
Objectives: This article presents a Cochrane/Campbell systematic review of the evidence on the effect of parent training to support the parenting of parents with intellectual disabilities. Method: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing parent training interventions for parents with intellectual disability with usual care or with a control group were included in the review. Outcomes: The …
Objectives: Using baseline survey data, the study examined self-efficacy of 381 lower-income parents who had opportunities to build financial assets for their children by opening college savings accounts in a human service agency. Methods: Of the study sample, 62% of the parents decided to open accounts while 38% did not. Structural equation modeling for multiple group models was performed. Res…
Objectives: Determining a patient’s psychiatric diagnosis is an important first step for the selection of empirically supported treatments and a critical component of evidence-based practice. Structured diagnostic assessment covers the range of psychiatric diagnoses and is usually more complete and accurate than unstructured assessment. Method: We conducted a national survey of training in empi…
Objective: The objective of this study was to test the factor structure of the parent version of the Columbia Impairment Scale (CIS) in a sample of mothers who brought their children for community mental health (CMH) services (n = 280). Method: Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to test the fit of the hypothesized four-factor structure and the empirically validated one-factor structure…
Objective: This paper describes the development of a practice-based evaluation (PBE) tool that allows instructors to represent their student’s clinical performance in a way that is sufficiently authentic to resonate with both instructors and students, is psychometrically sound, and is feasible in the context of real practice. Method: A new online evaluation tool was designed to address several …
Objectives. This study tested the quality of data collected with the online Elementary School Success Profile (ESSP) for Children from a diverse sample of 1,172 third through fifth graders. Methods. Mplus confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) procedures for ordinal and clustered data were used. Results. Of 80 original items, 61 loaded on 13 dimensions in a first-order model that had good fit in 3 …
Objective: To assess the impact of treatment foster care (TFC) on psychosocial and behavioral outcomes, delinquency, placement stability, and discharge status for children and adolescents who, for reasons of severe medical, social, psychological and behavioural problems, were placed in out-of-home care in restrictive settings or at risk of placement in such settings. Method: Electronic bibliogr…
Objectives: This pilot study evaluated the effectiveness of one-session, exposure-based therapy, to treat social anxiety disorder (SAD) with specific fear of public speaking. Methods: A quasi-experimental pre-posttest design with repeated measures-within-subject Analysis of Variance and paired sample t-tests was used to compare pretest, posttest and one month follow-up scores. Individuals (n = …
There are only a few process evaluation studies on positive youth development programs, particularly in the Chinese context. Objectives: This study aims to examine the quality of implementation of a positive youth development program (Project Positive Adolescent Training through Holistic Social Programs [P.A.T.H.S.]) and investigate the relationships among program adherence, process factors, im…
This study evaluated the effectiveness of the HOPE program. Participants included 120 Chinese new immigrant parents with preschool children in Hong Kong from 13 preschools which were randomized into intervention group (HOPE) and comparison group (6-session parent education program). Parent participants completed measures on child behavior, parenting stress, social support and self-efficacy befo…
The present study demonstrates the development and initial examination of psychometric properties of the Intimate Violence Responsibility Scale (IVRS) in a community-based sample (N = 527). The underlying factor structure of the IVRS was tested by the exploratory factor analysis (Principal Axis Factoring), which identifies the four factors: partner blame, distal blame, minimization, and violenc…
This study aimed to develop a scale which could be used as a valid way to show the evidence of recovery-oriented services. A 51-item scale was developed to assess both the component processes and outcomes of recovery. A sample of 471 participants administered the questionnaire. The factor analysis yielded a 45-item scale with six subscales, including three components of process and three outcom…