Social Work (e-books)

E-book

Magdaléna Hovanová (ed.)

The collection of works originated from the event of the eighteenth annual nationwide Student Scientific and Professional Activity (ŠVOČ) in the field of social work, which took place on May 12, 2022. It was organizationally overseen by the Department of Social Work of the Faculty of Arts at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice.

Every year, this event provides an opportunity for selected top students—future professionals in social work—to meet, as well as a chance to present the level of their knowledge and their ability to apply theoretical insights and acquired skills to future social work practice.

The contributions in this collection address topics such as the risks of modern technologies in the context of social work, social support and risk factors within families in the context of adolescent radicalization processes, the issue of cyberbullying in elementary schools, Ukrainian student migration in Slovakia, factors influencing job satisfaction among social workers, and the social support of families as clients of social work during the current pandemic situation.

Download the e-book for free (pdf)

E-book

Dušan Šlosár

The monograph offers an insight into radicalization pull and push factors, influencing which is the competence of helping professionals.Radicalization is conditioned by the current social, economic, cultural and political context, i.e. the time-space in which radicalization occurs.It is this fact that directs the content of the monograph to factors that can be considered triggering and influencing factors of radicalization processes as well as radicalization itself.

The monograph systematizes knowledge about radicalization from the point of view of pull and push factors, which have been identified as factors of radicalization in professional literature, research reports and other verified sources, including Internet resources focused on radicalization and processes of radicalization, as well as available interventions to influence or prevent radicalization.The monograph mainly focuses on the analysis of pull and push factors that are related to radicalization and radicalization processes.

The monograph offers the results of research carried out through qualitative methodology.The research focused on issues related to radicalization in the research sample consisting of radicalized and non-radicalized respondents.The research focused on the investigation of pull and push factors related to radicalization, which can occur in the family, school or work environment, among peers, in the wider social environment related to the social and political climate in society and the influence of mass media.

Download the e-book for free (pdf)

E-book

Vladimír Lichner - Tomáš Šeďo

Peer-Reviewed Collection of Contributions from a Scientific Conference with International Participation Held on November 25, 2022 in Košice

"The presented peer-reviewed collection of contributions titled "Present and Future of Social Work in the Reflection of Social Changes" is the output of a scientific conference with international participation, marking the 10th anniversary of the Košické dni sociálnej práce, held on November 25, 2022.

The conference was dedicated to the vision of social work, its methods, and techniques in the context of societal changes. With the changing times come new challenges to which social work must be prepared to respond. The central focus of the collection is the search for answers to pre-defined questions: "Is the current social work system adequately configured for current societal problems? Can social work promptly respond to new and unknown challenges? Are the known methods of social work effective in dealing with contemporary negative phenomena? Do we need additional methods?

If so, what are they?" Individual contributions touch on theoretical concepts in the search for answers, but they also include empirically based contributions that reflect research results from various areas of society and problematic situations, with a view to providing recommendations for both the theory and practice of social work.

Download e-book for free (pdf)

E-book

Magdaléna Hovanová

The monograph is devoted to social support, set in the adolescent's environment. Social support can also be described as relational support from the environment in which the individual lives, and thus increases his resistance to stress and the desire to overcome life's failures and crises. It is for this reason that social support was also defined in the context of social-ecological theory. An innovation in the relationship with social support was the "Push-pull" theory, oriented to the individual's motivation.

The defining anchoring of social support was built on its most famous theories. However, the greatest attention was focused on the possibilities of measuring social support, because its multidimensional measurement is necessary to determine the mechanism by which it works. The monograph therefore offered the author's validation processing and verification of psychometric properties of two separate methodologies Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) - (Zimet, Dahlem, Zimet, Farley 1988) and Social Support Survey (MOS) - (Sherbourne, Stewart 1991).

The monograph results in two validation-verified separate methodologies for measuring types and sources of social support, which are reliable for use in a group of Slovak adolescents (MOS-SK and MSPSS-SK).

Download e-book for free (pdf)

E-book

Magdaléna Halachová - Denisa Rovenská

The monograph theoretically analyzes the virtual environment and its aspects, offers insight into the identity of the child in the virtual environment, the necessity of social support and the diversity of social relationships in the real world and virtual reality.

Furthermore, it contains the fundamental training program designed to minimize the risks of the virtual reality, because adolescents are often exposed to risks uncontrollably. For that reason it focuses on adolescent and empowering optimal self-image, as well as creating and maintaining real social networks.

The set of experiential-educational activities is conceptually divided into two main areas. The first one is content-focused on the adolescent, his/her psychological capability including opinions, attitudes, emotions, competences, and self-reflection.

The second one focuses on interpersonal real and virtual relationships, the recognition of the advantages and disadvantages of internet communication and face-to-face interaction, and last but not least for more optimal use of the Internet and preference for real social interaction.

Authors

Download the e-book for free (pdf)

E-book

Vladimír Lichner - Dušan Šlosár

The scientific monograph focuses on the issue of adolescent risk behaviors on the internet in the form of its problematic use in the context of valid theories and practices of a social work. Text of the monograph is divided into four parts.

The first part focuses on the multidisciplinary definition of a risk behavior on the internet. It offers an up-to-date literary overview of the issue through the latest, especially foreign, theoretical knowledge.

The second part focuses on the problematic use of the internet in contexts of valid origins of the social work. The third part focuses on the presentation of the most important psychosocial factors correlating with the problematic internet use in the adolescent´s group. The theoretical knowledge is supplemented by the authors research into the present factors.

The final part is application-oriented and focuses on the possibilities that the social work offers at the praxis level to prevent and solve the presented problems.

Download the e-book for free (pdf)

E-book

Lucia Tóthová - Eva Žiaková

The current time is fast, hasty, with strongly asserted women's emancipation, absorbed by information and communication technologies that overcome distances but create them at the same time. The lifestyle of humans is changing, many diseases are on the rise, and cancer is becoming a "trend of the present". Claims on man, and especially on women, are now too great. Women perform multiple roles and perform many tasks. They become caregiving mothers, understanding and surrendered wives, workers with professionalism and flexibility, and idols the myth of beauty too. Due to the overlapping of the traditional gender division of labor, the life of women takes place on several levels. Their work day does not end when they leave the job, but they continue to care for their household and their own family. Besides all, they strive to fulfill not only personal expectations, but also the expectations of the family, social environment and society, reject failure and strive for perfectionism.

In our lives, situations that affect and burden us more or less appear. Even though we can not in control everything and everyone, we are able to control situations that are of direct concern to us. In life, we encounter problems in employment, financial problems, illness or death of near. As well as negative, also positive situations affect us. Each responds to each situation different ways.

Monograph is one of the ways in which we aim to draw attention to the so "C-coping style" as a maladaptive way of managing the burden that is typical of oncological ill patients. It is one of the possible concepts that affect the manifestation of breast cancer. Based on this, we have focused on the used coping strategies and we consider the life events to be a significant burden in the lives of cancer patients. The research is aimed at synthesizing the life events and the coping strategies used to coping them, conceived as a risk behavior of patients with breast cancer. As the coping of the burden can be different between men and women, the monograph is intended predominantly for women, to which we have also focused in realized research. They can be patients with oncological diagnosis, but also women who want to prevent this disease by use effective coping life events. We also believe that the monograph will enrich everyone who is interested in the same target group.

Download the e-book for free (pdf)

E-book

Eva Žiaková - Lucia Tóthová et al.

The scientific monograph was developed within the framework of the grant project Vega 1/0230/15 entitled "Social and Personality Characteristics of Oncological Ill Men and Women as one of the most important factors of sociotherapy with this group of men and women clients", with the aim of finding some common personal characteristics oncological men and women patients, to focus on choosing their coping strategies that can be significant in terms of oncological disease as well as suggesting ways and means of using the basic methods of sociotherapy as one of the most important methods of social work in working with this group of men and women clients, from the knowledge of their personal and social characteristics.

It is also a starting point for other necessary steps, namely to link the results of research to prax the themselves oncologists to hospitals, their outpatient clinics and patients as well as to support the merit of developing the sociooncology, a specific science discipline.

Download the e-book for free  (pdf)

E-book

Eva Žiaková (ed.) 

The 5th edition of the Košice Days of Social Work

Proceedings of the scientific conference with international participation held on November 25, 2016, in Košice

The issue of re-education and resocialization is not new, but it is an increasingly urgent problem as various types of dependencies grow in both scope and content. It can be said that this issue represents one of the central themes of social work in its theoretical foundations as well as practical contexts.

This was the main reason for selecting this topic as the central theme of the 5th edition of the Košice Days of Social Work, which was the sixth continuation of the professional community’s gatherings to address social problems currently troubling our society. The presented proceedings include nearly three dozen contributions from more than twenty authors from Slovakia, as well as Poland and the Czech Republic. The content of the contributions deals not only with theoretical foundations and perspectives on the issue of resocialization and re-education but also with the consequences of these processes in various client social risk groups—whether it involves the addicted, aggressive, chronically ill, convicted, divorced, bullied, cyberbullied, etc.

I believe that such a wide range of contributions will enrich all those who work and study in the theoretical, research, and practical fields of social work.

Download the e-book for free (pdf)

E-book

Iveta Jeleňová - Gabriela Kravčáková (eds.)

Proceedings of the International Scientific Conference, October 16, 2014, Košice

In mid-October 2014, the second annual conference "Human Capital and Society" was held, organized by the Department of Social Studies of the Faculty of Public Administration at P. J. Šafárik University in Košice, in collaboration with another department of the faculty, the Department of Economics and Management of Public Administration. Today, you have before you the proceedings encompassing contributions presented by participants of this conference. In preparing it, the editors had to deal with the diversity of the participants' profiles, which was reflected in the authors' approaches to the issues they addressed, and subsequently had the contributions reviewed by experts from various fields. The individual contributions address traditional topics, as well as newer and emerging themes, reflecting current problems and questions related to human capital, organizational behavior, and primarily, public administration.

At the conference, researchers specializing in management, psychology, political science, social work, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, as well as individuals who do not belong to just one scientific discipline, came together. It was interesting to see how people from different disciplines view the same phenomenon. The conference demonstrated that an interdisciplinary approach can highlight the shortcomings in identifying and understanding problems from the perspective of just one discipline.

Download the e-book for free (pdf)

E-book

Soňa Lovašová (ed.)

Proceedings of the Scientific Conference with International Participation held on November 28, 2014, in Košice

Social work is among the helping professions that can be considered highly risky from various perspectives. The clientele utilizing social services is very diverse, often consisting of individuals in extreme life situations. It is typical for help to be sought only when the client is at rock bottom. Along with other factors, this can lead to the emergence of various risky situations. The proceedings were created within the framework of the VEGA task No. 1/0332/12 titled Analysis of Selected Risk Factors of Client Violence in Social Work with an Emphasis on Prevention of Client Violence and Preparation of Social Workers - National Mapping of the Occurrence of Client Violence Against Social Workers in Slovakia. The thematic focus of the proceedings is broader, as client violence is only one of many risks in social work. In the proceedings, the reader will find 52 articles that address the riskiness of social work from many perspectives. They offer an interesting overview of theoretical foundations as well as research findings. The numerous thematic contributions indicate that the issue of risk in social work is highly relevant and that attention is paid to it in both theory and practice.

Download the e-book for free (pdf)

E-book

Soňa Lovašová a kol.

Violence in the workplace has been a problem that has received attention for fifty years. Client violence is one of its forms. These are cases where the aggressor is a person coming to an institution to use its services. Client violence affects all helping professions. This monograph deals with the specifics of client violence in social work.

In addition to theoretical outputs, it also offers research results conducted on a sample of 1170 respondents, frontline workers in selected entities providing services in the social field in Slovakia. The monograph represents a summary of three years of work by eight experts. Each author contributed within their area of expertise and brought a different perspective to the issue. The main aim was to bring a variety of views on the issue and attempt to combine them into a cohesive whole. Thus, a monograph was created that contains interesting theoretical foundations included in six theoretical chapters, starting with the introductory chapter on the position of client violence in the area of workplace violence.

The following chapters address the risk and riskiness of social work, ethical aspects, the personality of the social worker, and risk areas of social work. The research chapter presents the research project to the reader and three subchapters of findings processed in tables and described in detail.

The final part of the monograph deals with prevention and group work. An important part is also the appendices, which include a questionnaire battery, a program implemented for social work students, and a proposed program for workers in the social field.

Download the e-book for free (pdf)