This article introduces social workers to the beliefs and practices associated with Paganism, Witchcraft, and Wicca and describes how social workers can help to create a welcoming environment for children and youths belonging to these religious minority groups. Drawing on social science research, social work literature, and a case example, the author presents suggestions for working with Pagan ...

Social comparison has potentially far reaching consequences in many economic domains. We conducted a field experiment to examine how social comparison affects workers’ effort provision if their own wage or that of a co-worker is cut. Workers were assigned to groups of two, performed identical individual tasks, and received the same performance-independent hourly wage. Cutting both group members...

Important benefits accrue to the profession and to its vulnerable clientele when social workers hold positions with substantial community or policy influence. However, fewer social workers are holding these positions than in the past, and student preferences to pursue macro-specific training have declined. To improve the social work profession's ability to recruit and educate students intereste...

Social organisms face a high risk of epidemics, and respond to this threat by combining efficient individual and collective defences against pathogens. An intriguing and little studied feature of social animals is that individual pathogen resistance may depend not only on genetic or maternal factors, but also on the social environment during development. Here, we used a cross-fostering experime...

This article deals only with social security for workers in China’s urban sector. Social security for the state work force, primarily income-security programs for state enterprises, faces unprecedented challenges caused by a decade of policy changes and experiments in social security and in enterprise and labor-force reforms. Serious problems in funding and administering these programs have sur...

iran has experienced significant changes in the distribution of employed population of ruralareas in major professional categories in the years 1956 to 2006. accordingly, it is important to studythe changes in occupational structure, factors influencing these changes, and their implications. themethodology of this study is documentary and secondary analysis. moreover, in order to explain whythe...

In the field of social work it is hard to measure needs, methods, or results. Social workers are overloaded and do not have either the time or resources to evaluate their efforts. Controversy exists as to whether practical help or specially skilled casework, is more relevant to clients' lives. Miss Goldberg's book is the report of a controlled experiment, the first of its kind in this country, ...

Reproductive and worker division of labour (DOL) is a hallmark of social insect societies. Despite a long-standing interest in worker DOL, the molecular mechanisms regulating this process have only been investigated in detail in honey bees, and little is known about the regulatory mechanisms operating in other social insects. In the fire ant Solenopsis invicta, one of the most studied ant speci...