Search results

The purpose of this paper is to outline the work of a service provider, service user and carer group created to develop a strategy for service user and carer co-production.

A reflective narrative account is given of the process through which the group formed and began to develop a working model aimed at shaping a cultural shift towards more co-produced services. The paper has been co-produced and includes the collaborative voices of service users, carers, multi-disciplinary staff, third-sector representatives, managers and colleagues from associated services.

The model developed outlines three stages for services to work through in order to achieve meaningful and sustainable co-produced services. The importance of developing associated policies related to such areas as recruitment, payment, support and training is also outlined. Challenges to co-production are noted along with suggested approaches to overcoming these.

The ethos of co-production is relatively new in the UK and so knowledge of the process and model may help guide others undertaking similar work.

This paper seeks to provide a multi-theoretical explanation of the living practice of a public entity found in Uganda, an African developing country, which successfully enhanced public accountability.

A qualitative narrative enquiry through storytelling was used to portray the practices of public accountability. The perceptions of various individuals were obtained using in-depth interviews, from which a coherent story structured under the themes of context, actions, results and lessons was obtained.

Findings show that public entities that put in place oversight mechanisms and management structures, involve stakeholders and create an ethical work climate enhance public accountability. The results further show that the integration of theories (agency, stewardship, stakeholder and ethical work climate) promotes public accountability.

In terms of limitations and areas for future research, the study has been conducted on a single city authority to explain public accountability. Perhaps there is a need to conduct similar studies with other city authorities or a combination of organizations. The study has used a qualitative methodology through narrative enquiry to explain public accountability. Future studies can use a quantitative methodology, more so to test the proposed conceptual model of public accountability. Despite the study limitations, the results of this study remain relevant.

This study uses the positive story of a public entity from a developing country that successfully practiced public accountability. Consequently, from a practical perspective, the findings of this study can be used as a benchmark for promoting effective public accountability practices, especially in developing countries across the globe, where public accountability has proven to be a challenge. Furthermore, governments in developing countries can also use the study findings to strengthen public accountability policies in their respective countries.

The study suggests that enhancement in public accountability practice requires an approach that brings together a multiplicity of factors. The study affords public accountability practitioners an opportunity to replicate the successful accountability practices from the story. When public accountability is enhanced, service delivery in terms of social services by the public organizations is likely to improve, leading to better quality of life in the communities served.

The study is novel in its use of a positive story that depicts an entity from a developing country that successfully enhanced public accountability. To explain this phenomenon, the study uses a multi-theoretical approach, unlike prior studies.

The purpose of this study was to get a baseline understanding of the state of reference services in urban public libraries in the United States.

The researchers surveyed all members of the Urban Libraries Council, a network of public library systems in urban centers across the country. The survey asked about their reference services, including how reference is offered, volume and types of questions and staff responsibilities. Participants were also asked how reference has changed in the past 5–10 years and what changes they anticipate in the future.

This study found that the vast majority of urban public libraries still maintain a physical reference desk, but most also offer reference services in other formats as well. Most libraries have seen numbers of reference questions decline. Reference staff members are engaged in instruction, programming and community outreach as well. Looking ahead, some libraries expect reference questions to continue to decline and demand for virtual services to increase.

Directors and reference staff of public libraries, especially those in urban and suburban settings, will find these results useful for benchmarking against their own experiences and for planning for future changes.

While discussions of changes in reference service and volumes of reference questions are plentiful, as are predictions of how these declines will impact reference services, there is little current research on the actual state of those services. This study fills a gap in the literature by providing a baseline overview of the reference services in urban public libraries.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

Stay-at-home and lock-down orders issued by the Ontario government at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of many community-based programs for people labelled/with intellectual disabilities. L'Arche Toronto Sol Express, an interdisciplinary arts program located in Toronto, is one example of a program that rapidly changed its program delivery to an online format so that participants could remain engaged and collaborative projects could continue. Similarly, participants had to adapt to new programs with virtual formats, and to accessing programs from their own homes as opposed to gathering with others in the community.

To reflect on these changes, Sol Express members and creative facilitators together conducted a participatory research project which considered the impact of the online format on individual participants and the group as a whole. Following the principles of emancipatory and participatory research, a research team was established and focus groups were held to explore people's experiences.

Our findings suggest that while there were many difficult aspects to the pandemic, people also experienced situations of learning and growth. However, our project also points to issues of inequity in the pandemic's effects, such as the inability for technology to incorporate diverse communication methods, and concerns regarding members of the extended community who remain disengaged or ‘lost’ due to a lack of technological and personal support.

Although our research focused on an arts group for people labelled/with intellectual disabilities, our findings can be applied to the broader community, especially regarding the benefits of in-person gathering and what is lost when programs are held exclusively online.

The Child Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI) is a UNICEF-led collective impact intervention aimed at promoting children’s rights at the city and community levels. The CFCI operationalizes the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) for local governments through a framework for action aimed at realizing the rights of young people under 18 years of age: (1) to be valued, respected and treated fairly; (2) to be heard; (3) to access social services; (4) to be safe; and (5) to participate in family, life, play and leisure. This chapter provides an historical analysis of the CFCI globally and in the United States, and how this intervention draws upon and advances sociological research on young people’s meaningful participation. We present three case studies to analyze young people’s participation in CFCIs and the lessons learned from Houston, Texas, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and San Francisco, California.

Life studies are a rich source for further research on the role of the Afro‐American woman in society. They are especially useful to gain a better understanding of the Afro‐American experience and to show the joys, sorrows, needs, and ideals of the Afro‐American woman as she struggles from day to day.