Experience Of Agency Research Articles

Community Work in Family Counselling: One Agency's Experience

Community Work in Family Counselling: One Agency's Experience

The APA: An Administrative Conference Perspective

JUNE 11, 1986 marks the fortieth anniversary of the passage of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).1 After four decades of extensive experience with the APA, this symposium issue of the Virginia Law Review offers an opportunity to step back and examine the Act in a broader legal and political perspective. As Chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States, I welcome this symposium and the opportunity to make these comments. Congress established the Administrative Conference as a permanent body to study the efficiency, adequacy, and fairness of the administrative procedure used by administrative agencies in carrying out administrative programs, and make recommendations to administrative agencies, collectively or individually, and to the President, Congress, or the Judicial Conference of the United States, in connection therewith.2 The Conference is, in effect, the administering agency of the APA and the only government agency with a primary and continuing interest in administrative procedure throughout the federal governments Pursuant to its legislative mandate, the Conference has, over the past eighteen years, continually reviewed agency experience under the APA and formulated proposals for improvement of the administrative process. The Conference has adopted over one hundred recommendations since

Management Information Systems: Who is in Charge?

Many agencies are responding to pressures to produce results and to prove themselves by considering computerized management information systems. As one agency's experience demonstrates, the technology cannot be applied effectively without thoughtful planning for data collection and use.

THE MEDICAL PROFESSION AND VOLUNTARY AGENCIES

SummaryThe area of Medical Practice is generally recognised as being an optimal point for both the recognition of dependency problems and for those requesting help with such problems. In this paper the experience of a voluntary agency is seeking to positively influence and interact with the medical profession, with a view to promoting intervention into and referral of dependency problems, is discussed.

Patterns of entry, professional identity, and attitudes toward crime-related education: A study of criminal justice and criminology faculty

In the field of crime-related education, examination of the characteristics of teaching, research, and institutional differences has recently been a concern. This study examines full-time faculty ( N=929) and their patterns of entry, including academic degree held, academic major, past academic and agency experience, and type of institution; and the extent to which differing methods of access are associated with attitudes toward research, scholarship, agency practice, academic collegiality, and orientation toward crime-related study. Dual paradigms seem to exist in crime-related education: one centering on teaching, field practice, and professionalism; the other on research, scholarship, and the more traditional values of academe.

Team Service to the Elderly

This report of a family service agency's experience in a demonstration project describes a team service delivery system for the elderly. The agency found that the system improved staff morale, diminished the institutionalization of older persons, and reduced the cost of service.

Participatory management in public welfare: what are the prospects?

The author analyzes the experience of a state public welfare agency in developing a series of changes in social services using participatory techniques to involve frontline staff. Based on a survey of administrators, social service workers and supervisors, the study reveals staff attitudes toward policy innovation in the agency and their role in it. Staff unanimously want more of a voice in shaping the policies and procedures which govern their work, but efforts to secure their involvement are frequently unnoticed or unappreciated. The author identifies a number of constraints to implementing a participatory approach.

International Mobility in Higher Education: The Experience of an Academic Exchange Agency in the Federal Republic of Germany

The following article is based on the last two years or so experience of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD, or German Academic Exchange Service), the organisation that operates the major share of international exchange programmes for higher education students and staff in the Federal Republic of Germany. Beyond its scholarship and staff exchange programmes, DAAD is involved in general discussion and policy development on international mobility in higher education, and daily receives several hundred inquiries concerning study abroad from German students, or from foreigners concerning study in Germany. Thus, its experience is not limited to dealing with several thousand actual or would-be holders of exchange scholarships and several hundred German university teachers and researchers interested in working in foreign universities. But here the approach will be to take the organisational experience as a starting point, rather than the definition of basic principles, purposes and problems, or the aim of presenting a systematic concept. Moreover, since the reference material is predominantly taken from the German higher education scene, attempts at interpretation and evaluation will be limited to that particular context, without claiming any broader validity.

Faculty characteristics and course content in college programs for police officers

This study measures and attempts to account for variation in the conceptual abstraction of course content in college programs for police officers. The indicator of course content is the type of books assigned in courses in policing as reported in a mail survey of college programs. The books are classified on a six-category ordinal scale of abstraction, from prescriptive texts to explanatory research reports. The median abstraction level of the books used in the programs responding varies moderately, but it is generally low. Faculty education level is positively related to the abstraction level of the books, although the relationship is specified by controlling for institutional characteristics and student vocational orientation. Faculty criminal justice agency experience and the percentage of the faculty serving on a part-time basis are negatively related to book abstraction level, but these relationships generally disappear when institutional characteristics and student vocational orientation are controlled. The Law response rate of 25.2 percent requires great caution in interpretation of the findings. Nonetheless, the findings suggest that police education courses might be made more conceptual and less perspective by employing more educated faculty to teach them.

The issue of reinjury : An agency experience

The issue of reinjury : An agency experience

Selves and brains

This commentary explores an alternative to the view of the mind-body relationship expounded by Sir Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles in their recent book: The Self and its Brain—An Argument for Interactionism 1 . It compares and contrasts their views with the ‘Emergentist Materialist’ position outlined by Bunge in his commentary in Neuroscience, and outlines a third option which seems to fit with available data without entailing the more extreme conclusions of either side. Taking the standpoint of information-engineering, this would argue that there is no more need to postulate interference with brain mechanics in order to recognize that thought can effectively determine action, than there is to postulate interference with the mechanics of a computer in order to recognize that its behaviour is determined by the equation it is solving. Taking our experience of conscious agency (rather than ‘matter’ or ‘mind’) as primary, it would reject as incoherent the materialist equation of ‘mind’ with ‘brain’. The suggestion offered is rather that if our conscious thinking is embodied in (i.e. neither identical with, nor alongside) our cerebral processes, then we have a realistic scientific basis for mechanistic psychophysiological research which requires no rejection of the moral and spiritual significance of human nature. The experimental findings adduced by Eccles in support of his interactionist hypothesis are shown to be open to alternative interpretations. It is suggested that the peculiar facts of our self-conscious experience should make us look for corresponding (self-modifying) features of the cerebral informationflow system, rather than any disturbances of its physical functioning.

American Indians in the Political Kingdom

This note uses information collected by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to assess the quantity and quality of employment of American Indians in that agency. There is a clear-cut pattern of stratification within the BIA, with Indians restricted largely to lower-status positions. Analysis reveals that this stratification is not imply a result of application of merit standards for advancement, for Indian employees are approximately two employment grade levels below non-Indian employees with the same amounts of education and agency experience.

Contributions of Fred Cottrell to the Field of Aging

When Professor Fred Cottrell decided to extend his range of interest to include the emerging field of gerontology, he brought further distinction to an already distinguished company. Colleagues he found in the new field included John E. Anderson, Ernest W. Burgess, E. V. Cowdry, Wilma T. Donahue, Robert J. Havighurst, Sidney L. Pressey, and Nathan W. Shock. Like the scholar we honor today, all had had significant careers in other areas from which they could bring knowledge and experience that helped their contributions to the study of aging. Professor Cottrell?the first to bring a political science background?has drawn, cogently, on earlier research and public agency experience.

Single-Parent Adoptions: An Overview and Some Relevant Research

This article reviews the problems and advantages of single-parent adoptions. It details the limited agency experience with such adoptions, the agency eligibility requirements in such adoptions, and the rationale for such requirements. It is noted that a principal deterrent to agency acceptance of such a procedure is the supposition that single parenthood is necessarily pathological. A review of relevant research is presented suggesting that the single-parent family is merely a variant child-rearing context and not inherently or necessarily pathogenic.

Program Planning for Records in Minnesota

the next few years, most public archival and records management agencies can expect to look at their activities in terms of program planning and program budgeting. The recent experience of Minnesota's State agency in participating in an executive branch program inventory may be of some interest, particularly to other relatively small organizations. The initial results of the program inventory are contained in the State Program and Operations Manual (ist ed., Jan. 1969), prepared jointly by the Minnesota State Planning Agency and the Minnesota Department of Administration under a Federal grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Develop-

Family Life Education: An Experiment in Agency Outreach

This paper reports one agency's experience in reaching out to the community it serves, through a parish worker program and a famiiy life education program. It was found that large numbers of people could be reached—people who would not otherwise seek agency services—through working with interested church, school, and neighborhood organizations.

Planning Agency Experience with Urban Development Models and Data Processing

Abstract Reports of experience with computer models of land development and processing of planning data were obtained from a survey of 26 agencies believed to include most of the leaders in this field. Problems of communication between model development and data processing specialists are very common, and are a major reason for keeping much of this work within the planning agency. Other common problems reflect the underdeveloped state of the art of urban development and policy evaluation modeling, a shortage of technical personnel, and a strong preference for models and data systems specifically designed to fit local situations. Despite the problems, agencies with experience in these fields feel that computer techniques lead to substantially better planning both directly from the analytical results and indirectly through substantive education of staff planners. Most of the agencies that reported difficulties in developing and using models and data files plan to continue and generally to expand their operations in these areas.

A Public Agency's Experience with Group-Care Homes

A Public Agency's Experience with Group-Care Homes

Some Observations on the Character of the Adolescent Ego

Casework treatment of the adolescent depends primarily upon an understanding of the specific nature of the adolescent ego and its characteristic interaction with the environment. The caseworker is, after all, in communication with the ego of the adolescent rather than with any other aspect of the personality. Whatever he knows about the unconscious impulses, the superego, and the real world as his adolescent client sees it, he can know only as it filters through and is presented by the ego. Moreover, whatever effect he is to have on the personality of the adolescent will take place through the ego as intermediary. Improvement in treatment techniques can come only with increased understanding of the psychodynamics of the adolescent personality and especially of the character of the adolescent ego. The observations in this paper are derived from one agency's long experience and study of many and varied problems of adolescent development. Here we shall discuss a few issues that we think are of major importance. Our primary focus will be on the ego of the normal adolescent.

The Merger of a Family and a Children's Agency: Conviction or Expediency?

mergers of social agencies. This trend, which seems likely to continue, raises questions of great importance in the field of community organization. Although no national statistics are available as to the number of mergers already effected, there is obviously enough experience now available to warrant the formulation of certain questions that need to be answered. Among these the following are of prime importance: (1) What are the motivations that inspire a merger? (2) What is the effect of a merger upon the quality of professional practice? (3) What role should professional social workers play in the initiation of and consummation of a merger? (4) What effect does a merger have upon the number and quality of lay participants and upon the intensity of their agency experience? Obviously, an extensive study of numerous mergers would be required to answer these questions and other ancillary considerations of almost equal importance. In the absence of such a study we must be content for the present to learn what we can from the experiences available for evaluation.