Adolescents - target group?

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Katarína Šiňanská - Dušan Šlosár

The presented monograph deals with various views on of the community issue and community work, with which  area of social work or other helping professions is closely connected. It offers theoretical analysis as a basic theoretical framework of the issue, which is necessary to know in the study and in the performance of the practice in the helping profession. The authors consider community work to be one of the possibilities for fully involving the inhabitants in co-responsible decision-making on things that fundamentally affect their lives.

The monograph characterizes in  fifteen chapters the community and the processes that takes place in it, outlines a brief history and approaches in community work. It offers theoretical background, which is used in community work as a necessary prerequisite for a professional approach practice. The monograph also points to the important position of professional help in community.

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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.

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Dušan Šlosár

The monograph "Risk as a Social Category in Adolescence" by Dušan Šlosár was created as part of the VEGA project No. 1-0285/18, which focuses on risky behavior among adolescents as clients of social work due to their loneliness. The monograph explores the issue of risk in a theoretical context and integrates risk as a component of social relationships, contacts, and information exchange. From this theoretical foundation, it defines risk within helping professions. Assessing the level of risk is left to leading managers; however, it currently affects those helping professionals who work with specific client groups, and thus their involvement in assessing the level of risk cannot be overlooked.

The monograph pays special attention to risky behavior among adolescents and discusses the most serious forms of such behavior, ranging from suicidality to crime, substance abuse (both material and non-material), and issues related to sexuality. The conclusion of the monograph consists of three empirical studies that address the topic of risky behavior among adolescents.

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Zuzana Dankulincová a kol.

The scientific monograph is the output of the Care4Youth project, which aimed to map the current system of care for adolescents with emotional and behavioral problems (EBP) in Slovakia. It captures what the care system is and what its possible shortcomings are from the perspective of all those affected (adolescents with problems, their parents, care providers and other institutions involved).

It also looks at the trajectory of adolescents with EBP in the care system, i.e. when and how adolescents with problems enter and leave the care system, or pass from one type of care to another and what impact different trajectories have on them.

Last but not least, the aim of the monograph was to provide expert information on what are the risk and protective factors that will affect their success in the care system or, conversely, that threaten them. All this in order to support the proposal for improvements in the care system that would benefit all stakeholders.

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Miroslava Köverová - Margita Mesárošová (eds.)

The publication „Helping professions and self-care from the perspective of psychology and social work“ includes research studies focused on self-care, and the positive and negative effects of helping among specific groups of helping professionals – psychologists and social workers.

A number of Slovak as well as foreign authors contributed to the book of proceedings. The contributions are theoretical studies, research studies and case studies. The theoretical and research studies are focused on important issues of professional helping: self-care, compassion satisfaction, compassion fatigue, burnout, perceived stress, secondary traumatic stress, mindfulness, empathy, job satisfaction and turnover among psychologists and social workers.

Research interest in the phenomena is especially important in the context of the mental health of helping professionals and in reducing the negative consequences of helping. 

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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.

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Františka Petriková - Vladimír Lichner - Eva Žiaková

The proposed methodological guide focuses on a self-care questionnaire for the target group of adolescents. The creation of this methodology was prompted by its absence in the conditions of the Slovak Republic. The methodological guide consists of both theoretical and empirical parts.

In the theoretical part, the authors present theoretical foundations for the proposed methodology—self-care among adolescents—and also provide theoretical definitions of components of self-care in this target group. The second, empirical part of the methodological guide is dedicated to validation methods used to verify the questionnaire. It also presents results examining differences or correlations in the presented issues.

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Eva Žiaková

Proceedings from the Scientific Conference with International Participation held on November 27, 2015 in Košice

Stress is becoming a part of everyday life in developed societies, which negatively affects both the physical and mental state of individuals. The proceedings from the scientific conference with international participation, titled "Forms of Internal and External Factors in Coping with Stress from the Perspective of Theory and Practice in Social Work," are therefore dedicated to the issue of coping with stress from an interdisciplinary perspective.

It addresses the full spectrum of coping issues, ranging from the most internal, specifically defined factors of the C-system of coping in oncology patients, coping with burnout in helping professions, sociological contexts of oncological diseases, through the level of social support that provides individuals with space for managing stress, to the possibilities of coping with stressful situations in various areas of life.

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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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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.

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Vladimír Lichner

The presented university textbook presents a basic overview of statistical theory and practice intended for students of social work, including examples of their use in specific studies. This text deals with the first part of statistical practice, namely descriptive analysis, which we perceive as a basic condition for the processing of any empirical research and is also important in grasping typical statistical principles and concepts.

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Dušan Šlosár

The monograph Social Institutions and Social Organizations analyzes the issues of society, spheres of society, models of social coexistence, social system, social institutions and social organizations that arise within individual social institutions. From social institutions, the monograph focuses on culture, religion, education, politics, health and economics.Individual social institutions are analyzed from several sociological perspectives, which allows the creation of a broader view of the analyzed issues.

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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).

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Eva Žiaková - Lucia Tóthová (eds.)

Proceedings of the scientific conference with international participation held on December 8, 2017, in Košice

6th Annual Košice Days of Social Work

Social work addresses a wide range of social issues, some of which have been tackled since time immemorial, while others can be considered modern.

The proceedings of the scientific conference with international participation, titled Transformations in Social Work Over Time, are therefore dedicated to diverse perspectives on social work questions that remain relevant across time.

The contributions in this volume highlight not only the broad scope of the proceedings but also the multifaceted nature of social work itself.

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E-publication

Lucia Tóthová

The monograph offers a comprehensive perspective on the theoretical, methodological, and empirical dimensions of participatory visual research within the field of social work. It is grounded in the understanding that social work plays a crucial role in amplifying the voices of vulnerable groups and promoting social justice, with particular attention paid to persons with disabilities who frequently encounter limited opportunities for participation as well as persistent social, communicative, and environmental barriers. The author analyses the concept of participation in alignment with the principle of “Nothing about us without us” and presents the PhotoVoice method as an interdisciplinary tool that integrates participatory action research, critical pedagogy, feminist epistemologies, and documentary photography. The method is understood not only as a research technique but also as a form of visual advocacy, enabling participants to articulate their experiences, needs, and perspectives in ways accessible to both professional audiences and the wider public. The monograph reflects on the development of PhotoVoice in international scholarship and highlights its potential to transcend traditional academic boundaries toward participatory and transformative practice in social work. The empirical section comprises three projects conducted by the author in the Slovak context, focusing on diverse groups of persons with disabilities and their families, who face specific social needs and everyday barriers. The findings demonstrate the potential of PhotoVoice to strengthen participation through accessible and meaningful visual tools. The monograph also addresses methodological, ethical, and terminological considerations and adopts an inclusive understanding of disability consistent with contemporary approaches in social work.

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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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