Margaret McKenzie

The jungle of quality of life: Mapping measures and meanings for elders

The literature on quality of life (QOL) can be described as a jungle: vast, dense and difficult to penetrate, especially for those entering the field without a specialist QOL background. While QOL as a term is entwined in an extensive body of work from many disciplines and covering diverse perspectives, it has been most extensively documented and operationalised within the domains of health‐related socioeconomic drivers and is largely quantitative in nature. Subjective and qualitative measurement is less fully developed and documented. This review paper provides a map through the QOL literature by constructing a tabular framework to position the measures and meanings of QOL prior to undertaking a phenomenological study with older people. It concludes by arguing for attention to the further development of qualitative experiential measures specific to life‐stage QOL for older people, having found these perspectives rarely visible.

What Can We Do to Bring the Sparkle Back into this Child's Eyes? Child Rights/Community Development Principles: Key Elements for a Strengths-based Child Protection Practice

Working from practice experiences, Social Work educators from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Norway and Western Australia have developed a framework for child welfare work . The framework brings together the Rights of the Child, Community Development and Child Protection. This article describes the principles and theoretical underpinnings of this framework, and illustrates its use through practice examples. The development of this approach draws from lengthy engagement in child welfare in our respective countries. Indigenous practices and community development principles, which embody strengths approaches, are complemented by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) articles and assist to move child protection from a uni-dimensional reliance on expert assessment of the “best interest” criterion to a multi-dimensional response of centring childrens participation and attending to cultural, family and identity considerations. We link Ifes description of first-generation, second-generation and third-generation rights to Qvortrups categorisation of childrens rights: protection, provision and participation. We extend this link by examining key Articles of the UNCRC in relation to their generational protective, provisionary and participatory functions and propose a framework for practice that is informed by child rights and community development principles. The framework identifies key practice elements necessary to work with a strengths-based perspective at the third-generation and participation rights levels in child protection and welfare. We maintain that the use of this framework can provide Social Workers with additional knowledges and skills in their child welfare work.