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While there has been the emergence of a substantial body of scholarship on the place of religion and spirituality in social work, the predominant voices in this discourse have primarily been authors from the English-speaking North Atlantic countries. The purpose of this paper is to redress this issue by exploring the impact of other national perspectives.

Using a post-colonial perspective, the author reflects on the issues which emerged in seeking to develop a truly international perspective on religion and spirituality in social work.

There are important historical and contextual differences between countries which influence how social work is practiced, as well as different understandings as to what social work is. These differences are reflected in social workers’ understandings as to how religion and spirituality can be utilised in social work practice. It is also noted that the growing enthusiasm of social workers to embrace religion and spirituality in their practice needs to be tempered by the realisation that religion and spirituality can be harmful in some circumstances.

This paper demonstrates how drawing on a wider range of international perspectives has the potential to enrich social work scholarship and practice.

There is an increasing recognition that health and social care professionals require the knowledge and skills to negotiate religious beliefs and cultures but as yet there is little understanding as to what this entails. The purpose of this paper is to explore what religious literacy means in regard to protecting children from sexual assault in Australia’s Jewish community and Muslim women who experience domestic violence.

Drawing on two ongoing research studies, this paper provides an overview of the diverse perspectives found in the literature on child sexual assault in Jewish communities and Muslim women’s experiences and responses to domestic violence.

Individual and community attitudes and responses to child sexual assault and domestic violence do not fit stereotypes either within or beyond religious communities. Hence, educating for religious literacy needs to ensure stereotypes are recognised as undue simplifications of the truth, and failure to understand this can result in harm. Furthermore, religious literacy is important for health and social care workers if they are to effectively engage with the leadership of religious communities to change community attitudes.

This paper draws together common issues around the need for religious literacy when working with Jewish and Muslim communities in addressing issues of abuse and violence.

The purpose of this research is to explore nurses' perceptions of their current skills and knowledge and training needs to identify cases of child abuse and their understanding of their roles and responsibilities in relation to child abuse. Nurses, including health visitors and midwives, have been recognised as having a key role in the protection and care of children, especially in identifying and referring possible cases of child abuse and neglect.

A structured questionnaire concerning knowledge and training needs in child protection was sent to all nurses employed in a Scottish NHS Primary Care Trust (approximately 1,900), of whom one‐third (667) responded. These survey results were complemented by semi‐structured interviews with 99 members of the nursing workforce.

Almost all training in child protection had been confined to health visitors, resulting in the Trust giving an implicit message that child protection is not a role in which other nurses need have any involvement. In general, those nurses who both worked with children and had involvement in child protection issues, considered themselves to be most in need of knowledge around child protection work, to have the greatest level of knowledge and to consider further training a priority.

Nurses who had an interest or involvement in child protection work were more likely to participate in the research, which may have biased the results.

Training strategies need to address the diversity of nurses' involvements in child protection work through the development of training programmes which are appropriate for different workplaces and different occupational groupings. Nurses in some settings will need to be first convinced they have the potential to play an important role in protecting children from abuse and neglect.

Many NHS Trusts have in recent years introduced mandatory training in child protection for all staff in contact with children. However, previously published studies have considered training issues only in respect of nurses identified as working directly with children, whereas this study explores child protection issues for all nurses employed in a primary care NHS Trust.

The study aimed to explore how student recipients of a full-tuition scholarship envision, define and experience mentorship and the types of relationships they have and expect from mentors. The study adds to the growing body of literature on mentorship as supplemental support for college student success.

Semi-structured interviews of 20 first-year college students in the Mid-West United States were collected as a part of a more extensive mixed-methods study. The authors used a four-phase process to refine, derive meaning and develop themes. Kegan's orders of consciousness explain how students make meaning of mentorship.

Students described mentoring as a service that could provide specific transactional features. Ten participants were unable to acknowledge a mentoring relationship at all, despite describing mentoring experiences and opportunities. Students often align with Kegan's second order, which focuses on self and valuing transactional, short-term relationships. Adjusting approaches to explaining mentorship and the value of building relationships appear to be an opportunity for research and practice.

This study illustrates an apparent disconnect between the intent of mentorship and the experiences of mentees. The students' experiences add a valuable perspective that supports the need to further refine mentoring practices in meaningful ways to impact student success, persistence and retention.

Women’s reproductive circumstances and choices have consequences for their experiences of social connectedness, inclusion and support across the life-course. Australia is a pronatalist country and women’s social identity remains strongly linked to motherhood. Yet the number of women foregoing motherhood is increasing. Despite this, women without children are perceived as failing to achieve womanhood as expected by pronatalist ideologies that assume all women are or will be mothers. Defying socially determined norms of motherhood exposes women without children to negative stereotyping and stigma, which has consequences for their social connectedness, inclusion and support. This chapter examines theories of social connectedness, inclusion and support, drawing on Australian empirical data to explore how women without children experience social connectedness, inclusion and support in a pronatalist society within their daily lives.

Charitable Choice Policy, the heart of President Bush’s Faith‐Based Initiative, is the direct government funding of religious organizations for the purpose of carrying out government programs. The Bush presidential administration has called for the application of Charitable Choice Policy to all kinds of social services. Advocates for child‐abuse victims contend that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy would further dismantle essential social services provided to abused children. Others have argued Charitable Choice Policy is unconstitutional because it crosses the boundary separating church and state. Rather than drastically altering the US social‐policy landscape, this paper demonstrates that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy already is in place for childabuse services across many of the fifty states. One reason this phenomenon is ignored is due to the reliance on the public‐private dichotomy for studying social policies and services. This paper contends that relying on the public‐private dichotomy leads researchers to overlook important configurations of actors and institutions that provide services to abused children. It offers an alternate framework to the public‐private dichotomy useful for the analysis of social policy in general and, in particular, Charitable Choice Policy affecting services to abused children. Employing a new methodological approach, fuzzy‐sets analysis, demonstrates the degree to which social services for abused children match ideal types. It suggests relationships between religious organizations and governments are essential to the provision of services to abused children in the United States. Given the direction in which the Bush Charitable Choice Policy will push social‐policy programs, scholars should ask whether abused children will be placed in circumstances that other social groups will not and why.

Attention was called in the March number of this Journal to the promotion of a Bill for the reconstitution of the Local Government Board, and the opinion was expressed that the renovated Department should contain among its staff “experts of the first rank in all the branches of science from which the knowledge essential for efficient administration can be drawn.”

The Social Norms Approach (SNA) is a health behaviour intervention which promotes positive behaviour change by challenging and reducing misperceived social norms of peer behaviours and attitudes. This study reports a novel qualitative evaluation of an in-school SNA intervention which aimed to reduce 11-to-12-year-old students’ unhealthy snacking behaviours by reducing misperceived peer norms.

A qualitative evaluation of seven teachers’ and eighteen students’ experiences of taking part in the SNA intervention based on focus group discussions and an open-ended survey.

An inductive reflexive thematic analysis indicated that the SNA intervention was an effective and engaging means of delivering normative feedback to younger adolescents. The use of a paper-and-pens creative poster-making activity, where students were tasked with designing the intervention materials featuring normative feedback based on their baseline data, encouraged students to discuss and reflect on the discrepancies between their perceived norms and the actual reported unhealthy snacking norms. Challenges were identified with ensuring intervention fidelity and in students’ understanding of how to record survey responses using Likert scales.

This study demonstrates the usefulness of exploring post-intervention perceptions of SNA interventions, particularly from the perspective of the intended recipients. The study also provides useful information for those intending to develop in-school SNA interventions in the future, particularly the importance of involving participants in the designing of intervention materials as a means of promoting engagement with an SNA-based dietary behaviour intervention.

The purpose of this paper is to gain deeper insight into the meanings that structure and impel consumer choice by overlaying findings from a metaphor elicitation study onto the results of a traditional means‐end laddering study.

First, laddering interviews were conducted to elicit the reasons that structure the college choice decision of students. A second study using metaphor elicitation techniques surfaced additional meanings that constitute and connect students' thoughts and feelings about their experiences at the college. Together, the two modes of interviewing yield deeper insight into personal relevance and consumer choice than offered by either alone.

Combining two modes of interviewing provides views at various levels of detail. Whereas laddering interviews use direct questioning to identify consumers' choice criteria, projective techniques rely on indirect questioning to surface the enduring and ephemeral feelings that charge consumer beliefs. Panning and zooming from the general structural overview provided by means‐end research to the nuance and detail surfaced by metaphor elicitation provides uncommon insight into the drivers of consumer choice.

The time, effort, skill, and expense required for data collection, analysis, and interpretation are non‐trivial and may limit adoption of the two study approach.

The superimposition of metaphoric meanings onto consumer decision maps provides tremendous added value to managers aiming to enhance the creativity, relevance, and effectiveness of their marketing initiatives.

Melding two interview methods adds depth to means‐end research and lends structure to projective associations. The deeper insights into personal relevance and choice benefit academics and practitioners alike.