Adaptive responsivity: a Youth-Driven Model for Thriving in Foster Care.

With notable and growing exceptions, there is a dearth of research on mechanisms by which youth in foster care build resilience and achieve positive outcomes. We report on data from an interview study with young adults exiting or recently exited foster care in Maryland (N=15) designed to understand what facilitates their engagement with courts. Our findings indicate that despite challenges of ?being in foster care?, youth found ways to pursue their goals and make their voices heard through developing stable relationships with supportive adults (including judges, caseworkers, or lawyers) and demanding that child welfare professionals ?speak to me not at me.? Youth indicated that their needs, capabilities, and goals changed as they matured and as their circumstances changed. Such changes helped them find their voices but also created tensions within their child welfare system interactions. This led us to develop the theory of adaptive responsivity, according to which child welfare stakeholders should respond appropriately to developmental and circumstantial changes to help child-welfare involved youth face difficult circumstances and thrive. Such responses include providing developmentally and situationally appropriate information and decision-making power to youth in their own cases as well as opportunities to weigh in on systems change.

Exploring Social Justice in Mixed/Divided Cities: From Local to Global Learning.

BACKGROUND: University of Haifa and the University of Maryland, Baltimore faculty developed a parallel binational, interprofessional American-Israeli course which explores social justice in the context of increasing urban, local, and global inequities. OBJECTIVES: This article describes the course's innovative approach to critically examine how social justice is framed in mixed/divided cities from different professional perspectives (social work, health, law). Participatory methods such as photo-voice, experiential learning, and theatre of the oppressed provide students with a shared language and multiple media to express and problematize their own and others' understanding of social (in)justice and to imagine social change. FINDINGS: Much learning about "self" takes place in an immersion experience with "others." Crucial conversations about "the other" and social justice can occur more easily within the intercultural context. In these conversations, students and faculty experience culture as diverse, complex, and personal. CONCLUSIONS: Students and faculty alike found the course personally and professionally transformative. Examination of social justice in Haifa and Baltimore strengthened our appreciation for the importance of context and the value of global learning to provide insights on local challenges and opportunities.

Revisiting the benefits debate: does qualitative social work research produce salubrious effects?

Social work discussion about the intersection of therapy and research has been heated. There is ongoing theoretical debate about the fit of qualitative research and social work practice, as well as the proper goals and potential impact of clinical research. In this article, two qualitative researchers report empirical findings and discuss the implications of their research participants' unsolicited identification of the benefits of engaging in intensive interviews. These benefits include therapeutic benefits such as telling a story to an interested, empathic researcher and experiencing social validation in having one's story accepted; a sense that participants' experiences may be joined with others through the research process to create or enhance voices of stigmatized or marginalized populations; and the possibility that the research, through publication and dissemination, will influence individuals and society to become aware of the social justice and political implications of research participants' experiences.