Volume 23 | Issue 2 | Summer 2016
Where Research Meets Practice
Fellowship at child care agency gives scholar fresh perspective
Building the capacity to maximize our impact in the most ambitious manner requires ongoing effort and commitment. During this past academic year, SSA has devoted significant effort to building and extending our leadership capacity along several key fronts: contributing our expertise to build SSA’s and the University’s broader urban impact, developing a stronger organization at SSA, and adding intellectual leadership to make social change at home and abroad
Girls who grow up experiencing trauma often become women experiencing trauma. In order to help these women and girls, researchers and social workers need to learn more about the sources of their trauma, develop programs that help them better cope with their trauma, and advocate for them. In this issue’s conversation, Gina Fedock, Assistant Professor at SSA, and Candice Norcott, the Director of Behavioral Science at the Cook County-Loyola Family Medicine Residency Program, discuss their work with women and girls who experience trauma.
A new study examines two recent strategies to collect child support from parents who have proven hardest to collect from—the poor. The results, published in the September 2015 Social Service Review, illustrate the difficulty of the problem and suggest that policy makers may want to look for solutions beyond simply enforcement and collection.
In 1995, Pensylvania governor Tom Ridge convened a special session of the state legislature to confront the problem of rising crime. Out of it emerged tough new laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for drug and gun offenses and a new rule that youths as young as 15 who used guns to commit violent crimes be tried as adults.
To learn about the similarities and differences among issues social workers address in various cultures, a group of nine SSA students joined students and faculty from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) to examine Chinese responses to urbanization in the China Winter Institute 2015: Urbanization, Migration and Poverty: State and Community Responses in Hong Kong and Mainland China.
Responding to mental health calls are among the most challenging situations police officers face as they are frequently at the front lines of dealing with crisis situations.“This puts a huge burden on police officers,” said Harold Pollack, the Helen Ross Professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration (SSA) and co-director of the University’s Crime Lab.
