Extension S Focus On Family

Organized by content areas rather than by theory, this comprehensive, accessible handbook helps readers gain greater insight into how key theories have impacted today’s family research. Most competing books, organized by theory, do not provide a strong sense of the links between theory and research. Using the 2000 and 2010 decade-in-review issues of the Journal of Marriage and Family as a resource, the book addresses the most important topics impacting family studies research today. The introductory chapter, written by the editors, provides an overview of the role family theories have had on the field. This chapter is followed by 23 others on family-related content areas written by renowned scholars in the field. The book is organized around the most important domains in the field: parenting and parent-child relationships, romantic relationships, conflict and aggression, structural variation and transitions, demographic variations, and families and extra-familial institutions. Each of the contributors describes how theory has been used to generate new knowledge in the field and suggests future directions for how theory may be used to extend our knowledge base. The book helps readers acquire a working knowledge of the key family science theories, findings, and issues and understand how researchers make use of these theories in their empirical efforts. To maximize accessibility, each of the renowned contributors addresses a common set of issues in their chapter: • Introduction to the content area • Review of the key topics, issues, and findings • A description of each of the major theories used to study that particular content area • Limitations of the theories • Suggestions for better use of the theories and/or new theoretical advances • Conclusions about future theoretical developments. An ideal text for graduate and/or advanced undergraduate family theories courses, this book’s unique organization also lends itself to use in content-based family studies/science courses taught in family studies, human development, psychology, sociology, communication, education, and nursing. Due to its comprehensive and current approach, the book also appeals to scholars and researchers in these areas.

Following in the groundbreaking path of its predecessor, the second edition of the 'Social Workers' Desk Reference' provides reliable and highly accessible information about effective services and treatment approaches across the full spectrum of social work practice.

Contested changes: "family values" in local religious life -- |t Religious involvement and religious institutional change -- |t Religion, family, and work -- |t Styles of religious involvement -- |t "The problem with families today ..."--|t Practice of family ministry -- |t Religious familism and social change.

Productivity underpins business success and national well-being and thus it is crucial to understand the factors that influence productivity growth. This volume provides a comprehensive exploration into the significance of productivity growth for business, the economy, and for social economic progress. It examines how productivity is defined, measured and implemented. It also surveys the dispersion of productivity across time and place, focusing on the productivity dynamics that either leads to a reallocation of resources that reduces dispersion and increases aggregate productivity or, conversely, allows dispersion to persist behind barriers to productivity-enhancing reallocation. A third focus is an investigation of the drivers of, or impediments to, productivity growth, some of which are organizational in nature and under management control and others of which are institutional in nature and subject to public policy intervention. The Oxford Handbook of Productivity Analysis contains contributions of distinguished productivity experts from around the world who analyze a wide range of timely issues. These issues concern purely analytical topics surrounding the measurement of productivity in various situations, beginning with the ideal situation in which all inputs and all outputs, and their prices, are observed accurately. They also include service sectors such as education in which the services provided are hard to define, much less measure, and other sectors that generate undesirable environmental externalities that are difficult to price and complicate the very definition of productivity. The issues also involve business management topics ranging from the role of business models and benchmarking to the quality of management practices, the adoption of new technologies, and possible complementarities between the two. The relationship between productivity and business performance is also explored. At a more aggregate level the issues range from the impacts of market power, incentive regulation, international trade and global value chains on productivity, to the contribution of productivity to economic development and economic welfare.

When situated in the wider European context, ‘the Irish family’ has undergone a process of profound transformation and rapid change in very recent decades. Recent data cites a significant increase in one parent households and a high non-marital birth rate for instance alongside the emergence of cohabitation, divorce, same sex families and reconstituted families. At the same time, the majority of children in Ireland still live in a two-parent family based on marriage and the divorce rate in Ireland is comparatively lower than other European countries. 21st century family life is, in reality, characterised by continuity and change in the Irish context. This book seeks to understand, interpret and theorise family life in Ireland by providing a detailed analysis of historical change, demographic trends, fertility and reproduction, marriage, separation and divorce, sexualities, children and young people, class, gender, motherhood, intergenerational relations, grandparents, ethnicity, globalisation, technology and family practices. A comprehensive analysis of key developments and trends over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is provided.