David Wilkins
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 196185 |
|---|---|
| NOME | David Wilkins |
| PRENOMES | David |
| SOBRENOME | Wilkins |
| ASSINATURA | WILKINS D |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Cardiff University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2780-0385 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 65 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 311 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 65 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1973 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Implementing Schwartz Rounds in children's social care
Children's social care services can be a challenging place to work, with staff regularly reporting higher stress levels relative to the general population and other public sector settings. Thus, it is important to provide staff with good support. Previously, we completed a randomised controlled trial (RCT) of Schwartz Rounds (SRs) and reported a series of non-statistically significant differences between intervention and comparison groups. We als…
Unwanted variability in child welfare decision-making
Assessing a parent’s ability to provide safe, nurturing care is critical yet difficult. Child welfare professionals must make such judgements, but they are complex and prone to noise, understood as unwanted variability. Noise arises when decisions rely on ambiguous information and discretion-laden criteria, a common feature in child welfare. In Study 1 (N = 49), professionals independently rated the overall quality of care in ten vignettes varyin…
Family Voice
Family group conferences (FGCs) in child welfare brings wider family members together to engage in the best way to meet a child’s needs. Shared decision-making is hypothesised to result in more even power-sharing between families and professionals, and greater trust. Previous research suggested FCGs may reduce more intrusive state intervention
Making Accurate Judgements in Child Welfare
This study compares the judgemental accuracy of child and family social workers ( n = 581) with ChatGPT, a generative AI model. Using 12 anonymized referrals, participants were asked predictive questions to evaluate accuracy through Brier scores. ChatGPT outperformed the average social worker on 11 of the 12 referrals, though the difference was not statistically significant. These findings highlight the potential and the limitations for AI to sup…
Echoes and ripples
A Scoping Review of Factors Associated With the Mental Health of Young People Who Have “Aged Out” of the Child Welfare System
Young people who grow up in care and then exit care around the age of 18 (care-leavers) are a particularly vulnerable group, at increased risk for mental health problems even relative to other care-experienced groups. Yet, little is understood about the factors underpinning this association. We used scoping review methods to synthesize the quantitative and qualitative literature on factors that are associated with mental health problems for care-…
Improving the accuracy of social work judgements
Child and family social workers routinely make professional judgements involving significant legal and moral questions (e.g. whether a child has been abused) and more ‘everyday’ issues (e.g. will the child be re‐referred again if we close the case now?) Yet the world is capricious, and we rarely know with certainty what is going to happen in future or the likely impact of our different choices. Given the consequences of their judgements and decis…
Risk perceptions and experience in child protection decision-making
Decision making in child protection is the product of interacting factors between workers, organizations, families, and macro social structures. Individual perceptions of risk, safety, and harm, as one piece of this complex puzzle, are important to understand. This article reports on a comparative study of social work students in two countries: Wales and Aotearoa New Zealand. Using a mixed methods survey and a staged vignette (in which the situat…
Can Social Workers Estimate the Likelihood of Future Actions and Events? A Forecasting Accuracy Study
Social workers routinely make decisions and formulate care plans in the course of their work with children and families. These decisions and care plans are based at least in part on the professional judgement of the worker. An important component of judgemental quality is the extent to which explicit or implicit forecasts about the likelihood of different future actions and events are made with accuracy. In this article, we report an analysis of …
Family Group Conference Provision in UK Local Authorities and Associations with Children Looked after Rates
Family group conferences (FGCs) in child welfare share decision-making with family members by bringing the immediate and wider family together to make a plan to meet a child’s needs. This paper reports survey findings on FGC provision in the UK in 2022 and explores whether in England the presence of an FGC service and the rate of FGC provision is associated with the rate of children in care, entering care, in kinship foster care and leaving care.…
Seven Principles of Effective Supervision for Child and Family Social Work
Supervision is widely regarded as an essential component of social work practice. Yet the gap between the ‘rhetoric’ of supervision (what it should be) and the ‘reality’ (what it is) is often significant. In this article, based on my own reflections on a decade spent researching the topic, I propose seven principles of effective supervision for child and family social work – (i) collaboration, (ii) thinking aloud, (iii) emotional reflection in re…
Measuring the ratio of true‐positive to false‐positive judgements made by child and family social workers in England
Social workers routinely make judgements and decisions as part of their everyday practice. The nature and quality of these can have a significant and long‐lasting impact on the children and families concerned. In this paper, we present an analysis of more than 20 000 judgements ( n = 21 193) made by social workers ( n = 586) in relation to case vignettes, based on a series of anonymized referrals ( n = 12) to social services in England. We do so …
How Did Levels of Psychological Distress and Perceptions of Workplace Support amongst Children’s Social Work Staff Change during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Covid-19 brought about drastic changes in day-to-day life and working practices, and had a profound impact on the mental health and well-being of the general population. Certain professional groups have also been particularly affected. This study sought to explore how levels of psychological distress and perceptions of workplace support amongst social work staff changed during the pandemic. We present the results from a series of surveys conducte…
(How) are decisions made in child and family social work supervisions
Supervision is widely recognised as a core activity for social work. In this paper, we explore the nature of decision-making in supervision, using a collection of twelve audio-recordings from one child protection team in England. We apply Conversation Analysis to see how potential actions are put ‘on the table’, by whom, and the interactional work that occurs before any final decision is made. Within these data we find that supervision may not be…
Eliciting third person perspectives in social work case discussions
Reflective supervision is widely recommended as an effective way to support social workers to think about their practice and to make better decisions. Although previous research has proposed methods of pursuing reflective supervision, little is known about how supervisors attempt this in actual supervision meetings. One proposed method for supervisors is to elicit third person perspectives so that social workers can consider a situation from diff…
Conversation analysis in social work research
Given the emphasis on communication in social work, the empirical study of social work interactions is an important area for research. By examining recordings of naturally occurring social interaction and analysing participants’ practices in close detail, conversation analysis (CA) provides rigorous resources for understanding the practical challenges and opportunities of professional intervention. Since the origins of CA in the 1970s, this appro…
What Do Child Protection Social Workers Talk about When They Talk about Helping Children and Families? An Observational Study of Supervision
Social work is often described as a helping profession. Yet in the context of child protection services, the kind of ‘help’ on offer is not always welcome. Relatively few parents or children request the assistance of child protection services, and child protection investigations are often highly stressful. Workers and family members may have different ideas about the nature of the family’s problems, and the type of support they need. So, how do c…
Repeat missing child reports
There are around 200,000 reports of missing children each year in England and Wales, and around 65 per cent of these relate to repeat disappearances. Such repeat disappearances are a social care and policing concern due to the multiple risks that children are exposed to while they are missing from home, including exploitation, substance misuse, and violence. Understanding the characteristics of children who go missing repeatedly could help servic…
Disorganised attachment does not indicate child maltreatment
"Disorganised attachment does not indicate child maltreatment." Journal of Social Work Practice, 35(2), pp. 219–220
What is Supervision? The Views of Child and Family Social Workers and Supervisors in England
The importance of supervision is largely taken for granted within social work. Yet it can often seem as if policy-based descriptions of what supervision ‘should be’ are disconnected from the realities of practice. In this study, we sought to understand the perspectives of social workers and supervisors about what supervision is and what it is for. Interviews were undertaken with social workers (n = 56) and supervisors (n = 10) in one authority in…
What do parents think about statutory child and family social work services in the UK
Higher levels of ‘service user’ satisfaction are associated with more positive outcomes in many service settings. They are also an important measure of service quality in their own right. In this article, we report the results from a survey of 500 parents in relation to statutory child and family social work services in the UK. Our primary outcome measure was the Client Satisfaction Questionnaire, a valid instrument that has been used in a range …
Do performance indicators predict Ofsted ratings? An exploratory study of children’s services in England
Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore whether performance indicators in children’s services can be used to predict the outcome of Ofsted inspections. Every local authority in England is inspected by Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education, children’s services and skills) and given a single, overall rating – outstanding, good, requirements improvement or inadequate. These ratings carry immense significance. Persistently inadequate …
Systematic review of economic evaluations of children’s social care interventions
Ofsted and Children’s Services
‘Failing’ an inspection of The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) has severe consequences on a local authority. Senior managers may lose their jobs and the workforce as a whole can be destabilised. In extreme cases, central government can decide whether the authority is no longer capable of running children’s services. On the other hand, receiving positive Ofsted judgements often brings with it a national r…
Ofsted and Children's Services
The British Journal of Social Work, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcy100 \n \nOf the above mentioned paper, an incorrect version was initially published. The correct version has been published to amend errors including the sequence of tables. \n \nThis has been corrected online. The author apologises for the error.
Semantic Typology and Spatial Conceptualization
This project collected linguistic data for spatial relations across a typologically and genetically varied set of languages. In the linguistic analysis, we focus on the ways in which propositions may be functionally equivalent across the linguistic communities while nonetheless representing semantically quite distinctive frames of reference. Running nonlinguistic experiments on subjects from these language communities, we find that a population's…
In the Mind's Ear
This article tests earlier claims about the universality of patterns of polysemy and semantic extension in the domain of perception verbs. Utilizing data from a broad range (approx. 60) of Australian languages, we address two hypothesized universals. The first is Viberg's (1984) proposed unidirectional pattern of extension from higher to lower sensory modalities (i.e. intrafield extensions, like ‘see’ > 'hear'). The second hypothesized universal …
What happens in child and family social work supervision
Supervision is fundamental to the social work profession. However, increasing concern has been expressed over the managerial capture of local authority social work and the use of supervision as a way of enabling management oversight (or surveillance) of practice. Despite the importance of supervision, we have little evidence about what happens when managers and child and family social workers meet to discuss casework and less about how supervisio…
Particle/clitics for criticism and complaint in Mparntwe Arrernte (Aranda)
A golden thread? The relationship between supervision, practice, and family engagement in child and family social work
Within the social work profession, supervision is highly valued. Yet it is not clear how supervision supports good practice or how supervision makes a difference for children and families. In this study, using paired observations of group supervision and family meetings alongside interviews with parents, we explored the link between supervision, practice, and engagement. Considering each data set separately, we found a range of skill levels withi…
Conceptual problems in dependency research
Conquest by Law
Journal Article Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands Get access Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands. By Robertson Lindsay G.. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xviii + 239 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.) David Wilkins David Wilkins University of Minnesota Search for other works by this …
Linguistic research under aboriginal control
How is supervision recorded in child and family social work? An analysis of 244 written records of formal supervision
Written records belie the complexity of social work practice. And yet, keeping good records is a key function for social workers in England (and elsewhere). Written records provide a future reference point for children, especially those in public care. They are foundational for the inspection of children's services. They provide practitioners and managers with an opportunity to record their thinking and decisions. They add to result from and caus…
Refugees and British Administrative Policy in Northern Kenya, 1936–1938
Journal Article REFUGEES AND BRITISH ADMINISTRATIVE POLICY IN NORTHERN KENYA, 1936–1938 Get access DAVID WILKIN DAVID WILKIN David Wilkin is presently with the Foreign and Comparative Studies Program at Syracuse University, USA, and was previously at the University of Zambia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 79, Issue 317, October 1980, Pages 510–530, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjou…
What do children think about their social worker? A Q‐method study of children's services
Understanding how children experience social work interventions is an important part of gauging whether what is provided is genuinely helpful. In this paper, we describe the findings from a research project using Q‐method, aimed at understanding what children involved with statutory services think about their social workers and how they experience the time they spend together. Using a pre‐existing practice framework, we explored skills including …
What Does Supervision Help With? A Survey of 315 Social Workers in the UK
What does social work supervision help with? There are many different models of supervision and an increasing amount of research. Much of this is concerned with the content of supervision and how supervisors (and supervisees) should behave — and these are important concerns. But even more important is the question of who or what supervision helps with. Supervision is widely considered to have many different functions but in the context of UK loca…
Transformative Justice, Reparations and Transatlantic Slavery
This article considers lessons recent debates concerning transitional and transformative justice, and surrounding transformative reparations, could offer to discussions regarding reparations for transatlantic slavery. Even transitional justice programmes aiming to provide transformative reparations in the form of development programmes (such as healthcare, education and housing provision) have enabled governments to avoid addressing structural ca…
Balancing Risk and Protective Factors
This paper is based upon the findings of a qualitative study of how child protection social workers and social work managers analyse referrals. The study involved interviews with eighteen participants based on four vignettes of children potentially at risk of emotional, physical or sexual abuse or neglect. Three themes in particular are discussed—the balancing of risk, protective and resilience factors; the use of family history and the child's w…
What is Supervision? The Views of Child and Family Social Workers and Supervisors in England
The importance of supervision is largely taken for granted within social work. Yet it can often seem as if policy-based descriptions of what supervision ‘should be’ are disconnected from the realities of practice. In this study, we sought to understand the perspectives of social workers and supervisors about what supervision is and what it is for. Interviews were undertaken with social workers (n = 56) and supervisors (n = 10) in one authority in…
Ofsted and Children’s Services
‘Failing’ an inspection of The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) has severe consequences on a local authority. Senior managers may lose their jobs and the workforce as a whole can be destabilised. In extreme cases, central government can decide whether the authority is no longer capable of running children’s services. On the other hand, receiving positive Ofsted judgements often brings with it a national r…
Simulating supervision
Supervision is fundamental to child and family social work practice, in England as elsewhere, yet there is little research regarding what managers and social workers do when they meet to discuss the families they are working with. Recent years have seen a growing interest in the use of simulated clients and objective structured clinical exams to help develop and evaluate the abilities of social workers and students. This paper describes a study o…
Using Q methodology to understand how child protection social workers use attachment theory
Child and family social workers in England are expected to integrate theory and research into their practice. This study investigated how a small sample of social workers from three Local Authorities in Southern England used key ideas from contemporary attachment theory when working with children who may have been abused or neglected. Twenty‐four social workers completed a Q‐sort of 49 items. Four factors emerged from the data, each representing …
A comparison of two survey measures of health status
The Lumbee Problem
This article examines the historical construction of Lumbee Indian identity in Robeson County, North Carolina. Challenging previous scholarship that emphasized either cultural isolation or assimilation, Wilkins and Blu argue that Lumbees actively negotiated their identity within the changing political and social landscape of the American South. They trace how Lumbees, facing racial discrimination and denied recognition as a tribe by the federal g…
What do parents think about statutory child and family social work services in the UK
Higher levels of ‘service user’ satisfaction are associated with more positive outcomes in many service settings. They are also an important measure of service quality in their own right. In this article, we report the results from a survey of 500 parents in relation to statutory child and family social work services in the UK. Our primary outcome measure was the Client Satisfaction Questionnaire, a valid instrument that has been used in a range …
Do performance indicators predict Ofsted ratings? An exploratory study of children’s services in England
Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore whether performance indicators in children’s services can be used to predict the outcome of Ofsted inspections. Every local authority in England is inspected by Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education, children’s services and skills) and given a single, overall rating – outstanding, good, requirements improvement or inadequate. These ratings carry immense significance. Persistently inadequate …
The activity does not archive well
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast what is spoken about in supervision case discussions in Children’s Services with what subsequently appears in the written record on the child’s file. As an exploratory study, the authors set two research questions – how do supervision conversations and corresponding records compare? And how do social work supervisors make use of these records? Design/methodology/approach The authors sam…
Doing Child-Protection Social Work with Parents
For many social workers, participatory practice may seem an unachievable goal, particularly in the field of child protection. In this paper, we discuss a significant programme of change in one London local authority, as part of which we undertook 110 observations of practice and provided more than eighty follow-up coaching sessions for workers. Through these observations, we saw many examples of key participatory practice skills such as empathy, …
Does reflective supervision have a future in English local authority child and family social work
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the underlying assumption that social workers need reflective supervision specifically, as opposed to managerial or any other form of supervision or support, and to consider whether our focus on the provision of reflective supervision may be preventing us from thinking more broadly and creatively about what support local authority child and family social workers need and how best to provide it. Desi…
The Assisi Problem and the Art of Giotto
Alastair Smart. The Assisi Problem and the Art of Giotto: A Study of the Legend of St. Francis in the Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. 110 pls.+ 310 pp. $25.75. - Volume 26 Issue 1
Refugees and British Administrative Policy in Northern Kenya, 1936–1938
Journal Article REFUGEES AND BRITISH ADMINISTRATIVE POLICY IN NORTHERN KENYA, 1936–1938 Get access DAVID WILKIN DAVID WILKIN David Wilkin is presently with the Foreign and Comparative Studies Program at Syracuse University, USA, and was previously at the University of Zambia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 79, Issue 317, October 1980, Pages 510–530, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjou…
The Lumbee Problem
This article examines the historical construction of Lumbee Indian identity in Robeson County, North Carolina. Challenging previous scholarship that emphasized either cultural isolation or assimilation, Wilkins and Blu argue that Lumbees actively negotiated their identity within the changing political and social landscape of the American South. They trace how Lumbees, facing racial discrimination and denied recognition as a tribe by the federal g…
Services for the Mentally Handicapped in Britain (Book)
Particle/clitics for criticism and complaint in Mparntwe Arrernte (Aranda)
Ensuring the survival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages into the 21st century
There were over 200 distinct languages in Australia at the time of European settlement. Today less than 40 of these are still being passed on to new generations, and all of these are under threat of extinction. Aboriginal people are struggling to adapt themselves to the massive European presence without losing their identity. The greatest threat to Aboriginal languages is the physical, economic and social situation in which their speakers find th…
Conceptual problems in dependency research
A comparison of two survey measures of health status
Elderly People, Their Medicines and Their Doctors (Book)
Who's in Charge of U.S. Indian Policy? Congress and the Supreme Court at Loggerheads over American Indian Religious Freedom
Our interest in Indian self-government today is not the interest of sentimentalists or antiquarians. We have a vital concern with Indian self-government because the Indian is to America what the Jew was to the Russian Czars and Hitler's Germany. For us, the Indian tribe is the miner's canary and when it flutters and droops we know that the poison gasses of intolerance threaten all other minorities in our land. And who of us is not a member of som…
Linguistic research under aboriginal control
Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock
Semantic Typology and Spatial Conceptualization
This project collected linguistic data for spatial relations across a typologically and genetically varied set of languages. In the linguistic analysis, we focus on the ways in which propositions may be functionally equivalent across the linguistic communities while nonetheless representing semantically quite distinctive frames of reference. Running nonlinguistic experiments on subjects from these language communities, we find that a population's…
In the Mind's Ear
This article tests earlier claims about the universality of patterns of polysemy and semantic extension in the domain of perception verbs. Utilizing data from a broad range (approx. 60) of Australian languages, we address two hypothesized universals. The first is Viberg's (1984) proposed unidirectional pattern of extension from higher to lower sensory modalities (i.e. intrafield extensions, like ‘see’ > 'hear'). The second hypothesized universal …
Rereading Camara Laye
1. Late colonialism and decolonization: a context for L'Enfant noir 2. The Life of Laye Camara 3. Critical reactions to the work of Camara Laye 4. Le Regard du roi: Internal evidence 5. The Women: Aude Joncourt and Marie-Helene Lefaucheux 6. The Belgian connection I: Introducing Francis Soulie 7. Francis Soulie after the war 8. The Belgium connection II: Robert Poulet 9. Robert Poulet at Plon 10.
Aaron Gould Sheinin
Grammars of Space
Spatial language - that is, the way languages structure the spatial domain – is an important area of research, offering insights into one of the most central areas of human cognition. In this collection, a team of leading scholars review the spatial domain across a wide variety of languages. Contrary to existing assumptions, they show that there is great variation in the way space is conceptually structured across languages, thus substantiating t…
Conquest by Law
Journal Article Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands Get access Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands. By Robertson Lindsay G.. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xviii + 239 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.) David Wilkins David Wilkins University of Minnesota Search for other works by this …
The Shaping of Art History
Patricia A. Emison. The Shaping of Art History: Meditations on a Discipline. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. xii + 108 pp. index. illus. bibl. $40. ISBN: 978–0–271–03305–1. - Volume 61 Issue 4
Ethical Dilemmas in Social Work Practice with Disabled People
This paper discusses ethical dilemmas related to social work practice with young adults with autism. It does so via the use of a case study taken from real life practice. The different viewpoints and ethical frameworks of the young person, the young person's parents and the Local Authority (or the Local Authority social worker) are considered and discussed. The competing rights of the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with D…
Ethical Social Work Practice in Direct Work with Carers and Children
This article considers some of the ethical implications of social workers undertaking more direct work with carers and children in the field of child protection. Following the UK government's near-complete acceptance of the recommendations of the Munro report into child protection in England and Wales, it seems inevitable that direct work will become more and more a feature of practice for child protection social workers. Whilst this development …
The impact of ‘being assessed’ by a disabled children's team
The body of ‘service user’ literature confirms the value of parental perceptions of child and family social work and the insight parents and others can offer. This paper lends my voice to the literature regarding parental perceptions, inspired by the work of P amela D avies, who provided a personal account of the impact of a child protection investigation. This paper draws upon my experiences of being a father of two ‘disabled children’ and under…
Reflective Practice (Key Themes in Health and Social Care)
Reflective practice, as noted by the authors of this book, is generally accepted as being a ‘good thing’, certainly in social work, but also in other areas of health and social care more generally as well. However, somewhat refreshingly for a book on the topic, the authors also make a case for the relative paucity of evidence we have as to why reflective practice is a good thing and how reflective practice might make a difference, either in terms…
Balancing Risk and Protective Factors
This paper is based upon the findings of a qualitative study of how child protection social workers and social work managers analyse referrals. The study involved interviews with eighteen participants based on four vignettes of children potentially at risk of emotional, physical or sexual abuse or neglect. Three themes in particular are discussed—the balancing of risk, protective and resilience factors; the use of family history and the child's w…
Using Q methodology to understand how child protection social workers use attachment theory
Child and family social workers in England are expected to integrate theory and research into their practice. This study investigated how a small sample of social workers from three Local Authorities in Southern England used key ideas from contemporary attachment theory when working with children who may have been abused or neglected. Twenty‐four social workers completed a Q‐sort of 49 items. Four factors emerged from the data, each representing …
Political science (43 obras) · Psychology (41 obras) · Law (29 obras) · Social Work (28 obras) · Social Psychology (27 obras) · Social Work Education and Practice (22 obras) · Medicine (21 obras) · Sociology (21 obras) · Computer Science (20 obras) · Law (20 obras)