Group Think?

An interesting article in the Boston Globe Ideas section yesterday discussed a posssible downside of online research. Acknowledging that the internet makes more scholarship available to everyone, the article states:

A recent study, however, suggests that despite this cornucopia, the boom in online research may actually have a "narrowing" effect on scholarship. James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a database of 34 million articles in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and determined that as more journal issues came online, new papers referenced a relatively smaller pool of articles, which tended to be more recent, at the expense of older and more obscure work. Overall, Evans says, published research has expanded, due to a proliferation of journals, authors, and conferences. But the paper, which appeared in July in the journal Science, concludes that the Internet's influence is to tighten consensus, posing the risk that good ideas may be ignored and lost - the opposite of the Internet's promise. "Winners are inadvertently picked," says Evans. "It drives out diversity."

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Promoting Economic Security Through Social Welfare Legislation

The NASW has authored a 24 page report on how welfare legislation can promote ecomomic security for Americans. The report outlines policies for Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, Social Security, TANF, and more..

Internet transforms the poverty fight

From beSpacific: Transforming the Fight Against Poverty: The Internet & Anti-Poverty Strategies

News release: "The Internet will be the catalyst for advancement of programs promoting social justice over the next decade, according to new research from Harvard Professor Elaine C. Kamarck, PhD. The research paper, titled Transforming the Fight Against Poverty: The Internet & Anti-Poverty Strategies, addresses how the Internet has enhanced productivity in government run anti-poverty programs and bridged physical and market isolation gaps prevalent in poor populations."

"While individuals’ access to information technology is important to the fight against poverty, there are many other pressing issues, from health to housing, that have to be dealt with simultaneously, if not before, efforts to increase poor people’s access to the Internet. Unlike many other studies that have documented access issues and their effects on the digital divide, this report will concentrate on the ways in which Internet technology has been transforming more traditional anti-poverty efforts. It will argue that, in the next decade, the Internet will be as central to the transformation of programs promoting social justice as it has been to the transformation of business and culture in the previous two decades. In addition, it will illustrate that we are only just beginning to understand how the Internet can help transform the fight against deprivation and poverty both here in the United States and abroad."

Social workers learn finance

For poor, new focus on money expertise - The Boston Globe

"Against the backdrop of the economic meltdown, a movement is building within the ranks of America's social workers to make their profession more adept at helping clients overcome financial woes."

This article details ways social workers are preparing to help clients with financial issues.

Adopted Children with Special Healthcare Needs

DHHS has just published a new research brief:

Adopted Children with Special Healthcare Needs: Characteristics, health and healthcare by adoption type

Their description: This research brief presents information on adopted children with special health care needs, using data from the 2005-2006 National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs (NS-CSHCN). The analysis takes advantage of questions in the NS-CSHCN that allow adopted children in the sample to be grouped and compared by adoption type, that is, foster care adoptions, international adoptions, and domestic adoptions through sources other than the public child welfare system (for convenience discussed below as “private domestic adoptions”). Findings provide a descriptive profile of adopted children with special health care needs (CSHCN); explore ways in which adopted CSHCN are similar to and different from other CSHCN; and describe their health status, health conditions and health care access and utilization across adoption types. The analysis excludes adoptive families in which a biological parent also resides in the household, which are primarily step-parent adoptions. The data presented are nationally representative of adopted CSHCN. Because only CSHCN are included in the sample, however, results may not be generalized to adopted children overall.