Community Work Approach in Addressing Social Problems: Three Community Case Studies from Sri Lanka

Human development is at the center of social work to intervene in diverse problems affecting humanity. Community work is a direct method of community development that attempts to serve many people at a macro level. A community case study documents a local experience about delivering services to meet an identified need. This paper aims to illustrate three examples of community case studies that were developed while working with three diverse communities in Sri Lanka. The first community case study describes efforts to efforts to promote social harmony through child engagement in a rural community with ethnoreligious diversity in the Polonnaruwa District. The second community case study documents prioritizing several problems faced by an urban, underserved community located close to the Kolonnawa Garbage dump in the Colombo District. The third case study is on women's engagement in community development and harmony in a peri-urban community in the Gampaha District. The paper provides evidence for the effectiveness of community work in addressing diverse social issues in communities.

Refinement of a Parent-Child Shared Asthma Management mHealth App: Human Centered Design Study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The school-age years, approximately ages seven through eleven, represent a natural transition when children begin assuming some responsibility for their asthma management. Previously, we designed a theoretically-derived, tailored parent-child shared asthma management mHealth application (app), Improving Asthma Care Together (IMPACT). OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to use human centered design (HCD) to refine IMPACT to ensure that a developmentally appropriate, engaging app emerged. METHODS This study used a mixed methods design from December 2019 through April 2021. Our app refinement used the HCD process of research, ideation, design, evaluation, and implementation, including six cycles of design and evaluation. The design and evaluation cycles focused on core app functionality, child engagement, and overall refinement. Evaluation with parent-child dyads entailed in-person and remote concept testing and usability testing sessions, after which rapid cycle thematic analyses identified key insights that informed future design refinement. RESULTS Twelve parent-child dyads enrolled in at least one round of this study. Eight of the 12 child participants were male with a mean age of 9.9 + 1.6 years and all parent participants were female. Throughout evaluation cycles, dyads selected preferred app layouts, gamification concepts, and overall features with a final design prototype emerging for full-scale development and implementation. CONCLUSIONS A theoretically-derived, evidence-based shared asthma management app was co-designed with end users to address real-world pain points and priorities. An eight-week pilot testing app feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy is forthcoming.

Early Second Language Learners, Staff Responsiveness and Child Engagement in the Swedish Preschool Context in Relation to Child Behaviour Characteristics and Staffing

Preschool staffs' responsiveness affects children’s behaviour, their difficulties, and engagement in the preschool context, but children’s behaviour and characteristics also affect staff responsiveness. Early second language learners (L2-learners) have been shown to have more problems with behaviour and emotions and lower engagement in preschool. Being engaged in preschool activities predicts future academic performance, attitude towards school and well-being in the short and long term, and can be promoted by the preschool staff. Knowledge of which factors support engagement in preschool for L2-learners can help prevent, in the early years, negative pathways based on low engagement and problems with behaviour and emotions. This cross-sectional study used data from a longitudinal study to investigate the relationship between child engagement and staff responsiveness as well as how child age, child problems with behaviour and emotions, child group size, and the child:staff ratio impact child engagement and staff responsiveness. The study also investigated whether these relations differ between L2-learners and children learning Swedish as their first language (L1-learners). Preschool staff (N = 611) reported through questionnaires on engagement, age, problems with behaviour and emotions and emotional symptoms of 832 children aged 13–71 months, as well as on staffing and staff responsiveness. With a path analysis extended by multi-group analysis, we found two models suggesting that age, problems with behaviour and emotions and preschool staff responsiveness influence child engagement, irrespective of background. The study also found that child engagement significantly influenced staff responsiveness. The multi-group analysis only weakly supported the hypothesis that the child’s age affects staff responsiveness more strongly for L2-learners. The results indicate that individual children and child groups themselves can affect the responsiveness of their staff, and that children with low engagement risk being neglected. L2-learners are at increased risk since they tend to display lower engagement and more behaviour problems in preschool in general. If not attended to early, the lower engagement already apparent among L2-learners in preschool can create stable patterns of low engagement and problems with behaviour and emotions that extend beyond the preschool years and having negative effects on the children’s later well-being and school performance.

Sampling Engagement in Shared Reading Activities With Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Generalizability Study

Researchers seeking to make valid conclusions about engagement for young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) must first determine the reliability of estimates obtained across the conditions sampled. Working from that premise, we conducted a secondary data analysis of shared book readings between caregivers and their children with ASD, examining the contribution of measurement error on estimates of four states of child engagement. Caregivers read two different book types, each three times, with their children. With book type and occasion as measurement facets, we conducted a generalizability study and a series of decision studies. With the interaction of Persons × Book Type × Occasion contributing most measurement error for four engagement variables, we only found stable estimates for unengaged behaviors. For the variables of active engagement, visual engagement, and disruptive, four, five, and more than 10 book types, respectively, were necessary to obtain stable estimates across two occasions.

Estimating Children Engagement Interacting with Robots in Special Education Using Machine Learning

The task of child engagement estimation when interacting with a social robot during a special educational procedure is studied. A multimodal machine learning-based methodology for estimating the engagement of the children with learning difficulties, participating in appropriate designed educational scenarios, is proposed. For this purpose, visual and audio data are gathered during the child-robot interaction and processed towards deciding an engaged state of the child or not. Six single and three ensemble machine learning models are examined for their accuracy in providing confident decisions on in-house developed data. The conducted experiments revealed that, using multimodal data and the AdaBoost Decision Tree ensemble model, the children’s engagement can be estimated with 93.33% accuracy. Moreover, an important outcome of this study is the need for explicitly defining the different engagement meanings for each scenario. The results are very promising and put ahead of the research for closed-loop human centric special education activities using social robots.

Parental Engagement in Grief Programming Is Related to Children’s Outcomes

A multivariate model was used to study outcomes of childhood bereavement. The model included exogenous factors such as engagement and within-person resilience factors. Sixty-two parent-child dyads were recruited from a local children’s grief center and completed measures of engagement in the programming, resilience and grief. A complex model was revealed in which parental engagement in the grief program was related to child engagement and the child’s control beliefs which in turn were significantly related to the child’s grief symptoms. These variables existed within a system, rather than within an individual.