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Background: Professionals play an important role in supporting the social relations of persons with a disability. This study looks at professional practices supporting or strengthening social relations of persons in independent supported living, by integrating the perspectives of adults with a disability, network members and professionals. Method: Fifty-one semi-structured interviews were carried out. Results: Identified practices were: facilitating social situations, connecting with current and new network members, getting to know the person with a disability really well, delivering person-directed work, being a sounding board, being a safety net, working with an empowering attitude, seeing and exploiting opportunities. Influencing factors were related to the person with a disability, the professional, the network members and the broader environment. Conclusion: Identified practices were small actions rather than structured or programmatic interventions. An unique combination and complex interplay of factors was found within each case, where negative factors could be counterbalanced by positive factors.

Young adults experiencing homelessness face multiple challenges and are often confronted with additional barriers stemming from adverse past experiences. Whereas youth homelessness rates appear to increase across Europe, our knowledge on its nature in Belgium remains limited. Based on recent local point-in-time counts on homelessness in Belgium (2020–2022) and a focus group (2022) to interpret these results, we examine the profiles of more than 2000 homeless young adults and distinguish between three distinct groups (youth care leavers, Belgians with no care history, and newcomers). Alongside the need for universal prevention, tailored interventions are crucial for each subgroup to address their unique needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although diverse European welfare states have institutionalized an extensive infrastructure of public welfare services to redistribute resources, governments have been confronted with barriers in realizing the social rights of certain groups of citizens. Decentralization and increasingly local welfare provision has been promoted as a strategy to substantially realize social rights. In that sense, the vital role of frontline social work has been stressed in local welfare systems, being considered as dynamic arrangements in which local policymakers and professional social work actors are involved in the substantial realization of social rights. These trends have been frequently studied from a social policy perspective, but the role of professional social work on the frontline level has received much less attention. In this study, we accordingly rely on neo‐institutional theory to explore how frontline social workers employ their professional discretion during processes of local social policy implementation, related to the broader circumstances in which they operate. Our qualitative study aims to tease out whether their strategic actions might transform and/or change the rules of the local institutional game. The qualitative analysis is based on policy documents and qualitative interviews with key actors in two municipalities in Belgium. Our research findings reveal three central fields of tension: (1) Rescaling of responsibilities to the local welfare system and community level versus in‐built spatial concentrations of social problems and inequalities, (2) Efficient local welfare system organization versus wicked social problems, and (3) Fast local welfare system logics versus slow realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study examines the barriers for social workers to perform tasks in Flemish palliative care and recommendations to overcome them in practice. It consists of two phases: a focus group phase with social workers from Flemish nursing homes, hospitals, health insurance and home care services and an expert panel phase with representatives from relevant care services and civil society organisations in Flanders. Data were analysed according to the Framework Method. Twenty-four social workers and twelve experts participated in this study. Three main barriers were identified along with two or three types of recommendations to overcome them in practice. A three-level strategy can be proposed to improve social workers' ability to perform tasks in palliative care. First, at a micro level, social workers' competencies for palliative care practice should be further increased. Second, at a meso level, the social work role in palliative care should be clarified by social workers themselves or by employers. Third, at a macro level, overarching care practices and policies facilitating the timely and structural integration of social workers should be implemented. Furthermore, this strategy will require the involvement of multiple actors, that is, social workers, education managers, care managers and policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we critically explore the research findings of a qualitative study of local social policy and work interventions, called 'the post-mobile project' in Ghent, Belgium. The project provided temporary housing for families in container units, accompanied by mandatory integration assistance, and was implemented as a potential solution for Romanian Roma families after the dismantlement of two informal settlements in 2020. Our qualitative study explores the underlying ontological assumptions of the social work interventions in this project, and aims to gain insights into the role of contemporary social work practice in Belgium and its impact on advancing or hindering the pursuit of social justice within this Roma community. The study is based on an ethnography as a multi-method approach. Participant observations are complemented by document analysis, semi-structured interviews and focus groups to gain an in-depth understanding of the divergent experiences and opinions of different stakeholders involved in the interventions. The findings reveal different ontological frameworks regarding the way the social problem is defined, the project's goals and the principles guiding practice, thus exposing tensions between the local policy-makers and the social justice orientation of social work practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of a progressive institutionalisation of community-based learning into higher education, relatively little is known about the actual dynamics and correlates of volunteering by students. The study presented seeks a more in-depth understanding of the spontaneous, extracurricular involvement within a university student population. Data are drawn from a postal survey of a representative sample of third-year university students enrolled at a Flemish university (n = 744). In a first step, an exploration of the course and nature of students volunteer involvement is provided. In a second step, an explanatory model is constructed to predict the likelihood of belonging to the categories of volunteers, former volunteers or non-volunteers. Firstly, it appears that a large group of students drop out of volunteering in transition to university, and that volunteering is rarely given priority in students agenda. Furthermore, a bifurcated pattern of involvement with a different pace inside and outside university is identified. Finally, extensive embedding in a volunteer environment as well as the discipline of study are major predictors of volunteering by students. Gender, church practice, being encouraged to volunteer and subjective study pressure produce subsidiary effects.

Traditional interpretations of homelessness focus on people living on the streets or in shelters. However, homelessness encompasses many more living situations. This article reports on a scoping review of studies on hidden homelessness. A systematic search in scientific databanks was combined with an exploration of Google Scholar. The results of the review reveal a lack of consensus regarding the definition of the concept. Moreover, since most studies focus on a certain subgroup in the population, it is hard to compare profile characteristics of people living in different forms of homelessness. The applied research methods prove to be valuable, although they often underestimate the number and/or character of the phenomena. Very little longitudinal research on hidden homelessness seems to be available. Based on the findings of the scoping review, the article draws up an agenda for further research in order to capture the complex reality of contemporary forms of homelessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main characteristics of social work is the fundamental tension between the profession's conservative and critical rationales. In the last three decades, this tension has informed the development of critical resistance to the deprofessionalisation effects of neo-managerial rationality, which establishes cost reduction and fiscal accountability as the basis for professional practice. However, the theoretical conceptualisation of such critical resistance is caught between minor and major operations, both of which are considered insufficient. Addressing this gap, this article builds on the theoretical framework of radical incrementalism to develop a research agenda for the future study of resistance processes, which we conceptualise as operating in the middle range of a power exertion scale, between minor and major forms of operation. We portray the operation of resistance in the middle range of such a power exertion scale and offer a research agenda that includes relevant research directions and methodological considerations. In this way, the article suggests new ways of understanding, conceptualising and operating resistance to enable further development of the social justice-informed professionalisation of social work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]