Social Work (e-books)

E-book

Eva Žiaková - Tomáš Šeďo (eds.)

Peer-reviewed collection of contributions from an online scientific conference (9^th year of Košické dni sociálnej práce) with international attendance held on the 26^th of November 2021.

The present peer-reviewed collection of contributions titled “Metanoia in social work theory and practice” is an output of the 9^th year of Košické dni sociálnej práce, an online conference with international attendance held on the 26^th of November 2021. As the name of the conference implies, the pivotal topic of submitted contributions is metanoia, which represents a change in life attitude. Various interesting and actual issues concerning diverse aspects of social work are discussed in the individual contributions.

The present collection comprises contributions oriented towards the issues of social pathology and its prevention, supervision, the importance of digital technologies in social work, research methods, self-care and so forth. The collection further contains several contributions devoted to the exceptionally actual issues of radicalism and extremism, which are widespread and serious occurrences in the present time. The contributions are highly original and beneficial from the point of view of theoretical conceptions and methodological procedures apart from offering quality empirical processing and interesting results.

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E-book

Eliška Župová

University textbooks are dedicated to the theoretical issues of sociological aspects for the needs of students in the study program of public administration and the study program of European public administration.

The publication's first chapter focuses on the attention of sociology from the perspective of its subject and its relationship to other scientific disciplines. The second part consists of chapters two to five and is dedicated to the history of sociology and the most significant figures in sociology from its inception to the present, as well as the developmental directions of classical and contemporary sociology. The third area addresses systematic sociology.

From a range of sociological topics, paradigms, and problems, this part of the publication is structured to provide students with fundamental knowledge from selected sociological aspects for their studies.

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E-book

Lukáš Šutor (ed.)

The fifth volume of Doctoral Miscellanea was created as a conference proceedings, returning to the original idea of the entire project: to establish a publication space for contributions from emerging scientists.

The first two issues of Doctoral Miscellanea consisted of outputs from departmental seminars, which involved internal discussions. Compared to direct publication, it proved more beneficial for doctoral students to verify their initial research results in multiple stages and present them in diverse ways (reaching more listeners and readers). The length of the texts in the first two issues was adapted to the duration of the presentations, but this practice was slightly disrupted by the omission of seminars in previous issues. In the current issue, the scope of the studies is somewhat more uniform.

An added value of the fifth volume was the meeting of all contributors at a joint conference, the Autumn School for Doctoral Students of the Faculty of Arts at UPJŠ in Košice, which took place on October 17, 2018, and October 18, 2018, in Danišovce.

We believe that this unique experience—often the first for many—of actively presenting at a scientific event could contribute to a better final version of the submitted contributions. At the same time, it allowed doctoral students to broaden their horizons within the humanities and social sciences, at least within the scope of the currently addressed dissertation research.

Lukáš Šutor

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E-book

Lucia Tóthová - Katarína Šiňanská (eds.)

Proceedings of the scientific conference with international participation held on November 30, 2018, in Košice

Current social work addresses the serious development problems of society such as poverty, unemployment, chronic diseases, socially vulnerable groups and others. We must not forget that enough attention must be paid to the discovery of causes and a detailed analysis of these problems. The thing is that social problems have been around for a long time, they just changed their shape, old forms of social risks were replaced by the new ones that need to be explored and analyzed in order to be able to perform measures and remove the causes of social risks of the 21st century. Proceedings of the scientific conference with international participation entitled Social Risks in the Society of the XXI. Century is therefore devoted to various perspectives related to social risks of modern society in the variety of contributions, indicating the broad-spectrum not only of the proceedings, but also the social work itself.

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E-book

Ján Kahan - Eva Žiaková

The monograph focuses on the issue of loneliness among substance-addicted people in the context of abstinence prospects and re/lapse prevention. In the monograph these phenomena, several theories were integrated and applied in the context of the ecosystem meta-framework of social work and practical contexts. The ecosystem meta-theory serves as a meta-construct with the ability to encompass the complexity of social phenomena as well as that of human beings within the structure of their living and social environment, formal and informal networks, and close intimate relationships.

In this monograph are presented research sample consisted of 235 respondents – hospitalised addicts undergoing urgent treatment, abstaining A-club members as well as members of psychotherapy and self-help groups. The research showed that abstainers were statistically less lonely than the hospitalised respondents. Quantitative data of research are complemented by qualitative data collected in four case studies; two of them focused on two long-term abstainers from alcohol and drugs, while the other two case studies dealt with two respondents in post-hoc treatment undergoing the resocialization process. The research also showed that respondents who broke abstinence felt lonelier than their successfully abstaining counterparts.

The results were supported also by the fact that a statistically significant inversely proportional relationship was identified between the duration of abstinence and loneliness rate. Gender differences were found between the hospitalised addicts in all loneliness dimensions. Naturally, the combined research was limited in certain aspects, mainly in terms of the size and proportional distribution of the research sample and its subgroups, test battery extent, and general nature of the population studied. Triangulation among quantitative and qualitative with the theoretical starting points confirmed the existence of a relationship among loneliness, addiction, and prospect of abstinence.

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E-book

Jana Bajusová - Dušan Šlosár

The integration of immigrants into society is currently of interest to many professionals and to the general public. Immigration is a consequence of a variety of factors, mainly due to political, social, economic or security conditions in the countries of origin. Immigration is subsequently linked to the process of integrating immigrants into the host country. The integration of immigrants into society or integration, as this process is called in the monograph, is a complex phenomenon that extends to many spheres of everyday life for the citizens of the receiving country, and at the same time is often difficult for immigrants. Many governmental and non-governmental organizations are involved in the process of social integration of immigrants, who develop different strategies and mechanisms to streamline the outcome of this process.

In relation to immigrants, the Slovak Republic is bound to provide social and legal protection and therefore it is necessary to deal with the issue of social services, which could potentially significantly contribute to their social integration into Slovak society. From the legislative point of view, however, these services are unified and do not take into account the differences of immigrants resulting from their culture, religion, social, ethical or other characteristics. That is why the monograph focuses on social integration of immigrants in Slovakia in the context of provided social services.

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E-kniha

Pavol Kačmár - Jozef Bavoľár - Ladislav Lovaš (eds.)

This publication introduces a body of papers presented at scientific conference Work And Organizational Psychology that took place on May 23 and 24 in Košice. The theme of the conference was Past, Present, and Challenges to the Future. All papers were peer-reviewed.

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E-book

Lucia Tóthová - Dušan Šlosár

The presented monographic processing of the issues of groups, as a basic phenomenon of our social life, draws a lot of current knowledge from realized researches, their empirical results and practical work with the group, which offers a comprehensive view of the social group. Social group looks both as a natural part of human life and it is analyzed and studied, so that knowledge of the social group can be rewarded.

This has been transferred to artificially created groups to help individuals through group work. At the same time, the monograph also considers the method of social work with a group as one of the methods used in various helping professions.

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E-book

Lucia Tóthová

Social work with a group, along with social work with individuals, social work with the community and social work with society, is one of the basic methods used in the field of social work, but also in other helping professions. The work of a social worker requires knowledge of these methods but also of the techniques through which these methods are implemented and fulfilled. Understanding and acquiring individual methods for the needs of social practice requires the theoretical mastery of those institutes that are the basis of the method and the interrelationships between these institutes. Therefore, the author proceeded to elaborate a university textbook in which she focuses on one of the basic methods of social work, namely social work with a group.

The university textbook is designed for university students who are focused on social work studies, but also psychology, ethics and other disciplines using the method of working with a group, as it aims to present some facts about social groups and behaviour in them.

The author offers an insight into social work with the group from its historical foundations to today's latest knowledge of this method in accordance with the latest research of work with the group.

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E-book

Ján Šimko - Dušan Šlosár

The monograph is dealing with the issue of homosexuality and homophobia in the context of social work and it is divided into five chapters, which are devoted to individual fields of the tackled issue. The first chapter is describing the phenomenon of homosexuality in the society; the focus is put on human sexuality and sexual orientation. The following chapter is clarifying the formation of homosexual identity in connection to coming out and it describes its frequently utilized models. The third chapter is devoted to the concepts of heteronormativity and heterosexism in the social context.

Furthermore, the chapter is dealing with the formation of attitudes towards this issue from the point of view of religion and masculinity. Another chapter is describing homophobia as the result of heteronormativity, stereotypes and prejudice.

In the last chapter, the authors are introducing selected social work theories dealing with the homosexual minority, the approaches to LGBT+ community and suggestions towards elimination of homophobia within the social work environment.

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E-book

Margita Mesárošová - Miroslava Köverová - Soňa Lovašová

Intervention Program for Supporting Self-Care in Helping Professions: "How Do I Take Care of Myself?" The intervention program "How Do I Take Care of Myself?" was developed as part of the research project APVV14-0921, "Self-Care as a Factor in Coping with the Negative Consequences of Engaging in Helping Professions." Its uniqueness lies in being created based on specific research outputs from the program's authors and project.

In the first chapter, the authors offer insights into the preparation of the intervention program, justifying its theoretical foundations, methods, and specifics of the program participants. They also provide an overview of research on the effectiveness of various intervention programs aimed at reducing the negative consequences of helping and enhancing self-care and other positive effects of engaging in helping professions. Subsequent chapters focus on a detailed analysis and evaluation of the effectiveness of the intervention program "How Do I Take Care of Myself?" and its comparison with the effectiveness of other programs, which were differently focused, targeted at different populations of helping professionals, and had different theoretical and practical orientations and foundations. Most of these studies demonstrated positive changes only in isolated cases, due to various methodological shortcomings often related to practical application.

What differentiates the intervention program presented in this monograph is the participation of helping professionals actively practicing in the social field, unlike most intervention programs compiled and validated for students of these professions. The student population, being more accessible to researchers, allows for better methodology, including a larger number of participants, as well as experimental manipulation and group balancing. In the case of participants in the validation of the program "How Do I Take Care of Myself?", it involved practitioners who are engaged in the daily work process and completed training during their work breaks, which placed high demands on balancing their work and personal tasks. We believe that the effects we discovered during the validation of the effectiveness of the presented intervention program were not always clearly mathematically graspable but were evident from individual feedback.

We present the text of this monograph to the professional public with the aim of highlighting the benefits, limitations of the intervention program, as well as inspiring researchers and practitioners to further work in this area.

Authors

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E-book

Gabriela Kravčáková - Jana Lukáčová - Taťjana Búgelová

The first study, which concentrates on the characteristics of teachers' work, describes broader theoretical foundations and defines basic concepts related to work.

It also provides an analysis of the work of university teachers, identifying several shortcomings. The research findings revealed significant differences in the time demands of tasks performed by teachers and in the perceived importance of these tasks. Teachers utilize their working time fund beyond 100%, and it can be expected that the teacher population considers their tasks as rather important to definitely important. There is a relationship between the estimated time demands of certain tasks and the perceived importance of these tasks. Based on the findings, conclusions and proposals for intervention measures are formulated, and a construct of key competencies of university teachers is presented, which includes basic, social, pedagogical, research, and managerial competencies.

The second study analyzes the level of satisfaction, self-fulfillment, competencies in teachers' work, and the prestige of the teaching profession in relation to gender, academic rank, seniority, and the specific field of expertise.

The third study, which deals with the topic of teacher career, provides an overview of theoretical foundations of career.

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