Caregiving revisited

In my bibliography:

Memoir is in the content analysis family and is an unobtrusive generally qualitative method of research. Qualitative meaning that the data is essentially non numerical in data collection and analysis. The variables are predominately nominal.

"The  Caregiver's Tale" is in my bibliography as Dr. Burack-Weiss was one of my Columbia University professors. She volunteered in a program that I helped to initiate, a shelter for homeless women who were non-compliant with psychiatric treatment.  She created a weekly group for women to talk about whatever. I am totally biased in terms of the researcher.  Dr Burack-Weiss has had a long history of helping through her work at the Jewish Home for the Aged, and being among the first volunteers at the Gay Men's Health Crisis. 

In her project, Dr. Burack-Weiss created the independent variables of caregiving situation and relationship out of an inductive process of reading through memoirs. I knew several of the memoirs and a favorite author Paul Monette was included in her sample. She has that heuristic sense of what works from the breadth and depth of her experience.  The hypothesis is that these variables inform the caregiving situation. The variables are nominal: how can one rank alzheimer's or AIDS, or a child with a neurological disability. They could be ranked perhaps in terms of cost, years to caregive, other variables, but as a distinct variable, the situations and relationships have no order. The memoirs have a detailed highly individual quality to them that gives meaning to caregiving and to the paradigm.

Homelessness, power of ethnography

Working on my online Methods of Research course. Teaching about ethnography and using homelessness as a paradigm to explore. A source in my bibliography:

I attached four pages about the Baxter and Hopper (1981) ethnography report. The first two pages are from the text. One can look in Google Books for more on the report. The third page is copy of a meeting to which Ms. Baxter and I attended to talk with NYC government about this phenomena. Lastly, copy of a journal request for an article about why homelessness was then a problem.

These are some of the issues on the importance of research. The ethnography study changed ideas on homelessness creating a whole new paradigm on homelessness. The Coalition for the Homeless was started. Government began systematically looking at homelessness. It continues to be a major issue. This report shows how dynamic and forceful research can be in changing the world!

You can post your thoughts in discussion if you would like.

synchronicity .. Mary Daly

Thoughts of Boston...

So love Mary Daly.. when I was a doctoral student I spent so much time reading her works as part of my intellectual life. Her ideas actually run through my mind everyday. I loved her notion of time of the day having some meaning and those times that seem to come up all the time. Def have several time of the days that kind of give me a sense that I am in the here and now, doing what I should be doing at that time! Thanks Mary Daly!

thoughts on how research happens

Paradigm and paradigm change are integral in research. In my Methods of Research bibliography is an Open Society Institute video on their drug policy advocacy around the world. 

http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/what-world-can-learn-switzerlands-drug-policy-shift

As ever one's  personal experience is just that, one's personal experience.  Most of my interest in drug policy has been in terms of clinical social work since 1982 with clients having substance abuse concerns. Caregiving as presented in the work of Ann Burack-Weiss has so informed my practice. I routinely refer to mindfulness as per Buddhist thought.

Policy is another lens. In my experience, luck has had it that I have known several drug policy advocates who are also tied to the Open Society. The first is a Swiss legislator who I visited in Zurich in the early 1990s and was then involved in the work presented in the Open Society video. I also observed the experiment to allow drug use in a Zurich park. My trips were in the time of my doctoral study in cross-national social policy, and I visited social work programs in Berlin and Rotterdam. 

Secondly, I have known the strategic planner for Open Society programs throughout the world and heard about initiatives since the 1990s. Third, I have done recent consulting with a drug policy organizer in San Francisco whose program is funded by the Open Society.

The work of these advocates as well as my lens as a social worker qua researcher are examples of how research can and does happen, and is utilized. The Zurich project initiated as action research  for real life social welfare activity and is presented as a case study video (case study is a method of intense focus on a case, group, community,  program or policy).  My friend at Open Society has put together resources around the world about drug policy, i.e, meta=research. The San Francisco activity is  case study and action research: the process of needs assessment and implementing solutions with real time evaluation feedback.

Thinking from the lens of Kuhn, paradigm shifts. Drug policy is changing as data analysis shows best practices from real life activity. There are many ways of knowing. 

RIP Eda Goldstein

RIP Eda Goldstein! Re-reading "Ego Psychology and Social Work Practice", 1995. A brilliant seminal text and paradigm. Amazing writing of case studies. She definitely had major impact as a theorist. She was also a girl who could party!

Of course, I have no idea to the context nor reason, and it was summer in one of the 10 richest towns in the USA, and all women. A friend shared stories of Eda and a friend topless in the Hamptons. Def a European-inspired woman! I loved to say hello to her at social work events. She had no clue I knew the stories, but I always thought what a fun person. What a contrast to the boors when I think of the clinicians who are "all that" with their officiousness and hocus pocus jabber!

Dr. Goldstein def was da big BOSS in social work and I loved her for being a real mensch! Always to be missed and remembered, and reading her writings! I wish I could have given her a big hug!

http://www.nyu.edu/socialwork/news/79378