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In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle provides the most famous account of moral virtue ever offered by a philosopher, but one that proves perplexing, not least because this account culminates in a depreciation of human virtue in Book VI. In light of this background, this essay provides a new interpretation of Aristotle's analysis in Book VII of the Ethics of the Socratic claim that no one "knowingly acts contrary to what is best." The authors contend that Aristotle shows that Socrates's thesis affirming the mastery of knowledge originates in a quest, rooted in spiritedness, to divinize the soul and transcend the limitations of mere human virtue. Accordingly, the essay links Aristotle's analysis of continence and incontinence to the problem of the relation between the human and the divine with which Aristotle introduces and concludes Book VII, as well as Aristotle's largely ignored account of spiritedness (thumos) in Book VII. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study describes the development of an innovative case management team model consisting of functional specialists. Ten years of comparative data demonstrate client satisfaction, a significant reduction of health and safety concerns, and a transformation to a more effective and efficient model of case management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early childhood professionals—social workers, educators, speech therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, pediatricians, and others—create the foundation for a life-long duration of experiences that families, who have children with disabilities, will have with various professional groups. The nature of the early childhood interventionists' interaction, treatment, services or supports of the child and the attitudes conveyed to families during these critical early years may be a significant factor in the willingness of families and young adults to continue to pursue therapeutic and supportive services. With insights into early intervention best practices, social workers are likely to find themselves in a preferred position to plan appropriate family-focused intervention strategies that may encourage success and prevent complications or a worsening of specific initial conditions among children with disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managed care delivery systems seem to be one of the primary vehicles that policymakers have selected to control the accelerating costs of public programs, including services to persons with developmental disabilities. The article provides a case example of a Colorado managed care organization that developed a performance-based funding system to improve supported employment services for individuals with developmental disabilities. The presence of achieved outcomes and quality indicators led to additional funding of service agencies. Contractors were given incentives for reaching certain milestones, such as job placement and job stabilization. To strengthen the milestone system, a three-day intensive skill-building training program was developed for the staff of service agencies to become or enhance skills as supported employment consultants. Service agencies with trained staff could bill at a higher rate for their services. Over a period of 3 years, this payment system led to a 37% increase in the number of long-term job placements in the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of vouchers has great potential as a management tool for improving human service delivery options for individuals with complex service needs. The administration of voucher systems can radically change both the processes by which children are assigned to programs and the mechanism for funding and managing those programs. An evaluative survey compared a voucher payment system to the traditional contracting approach for early childhood intervention services. Parents, who have children with developmental delays or developmental disabilities from birth to three years, reported high satisfaction with the services their children received. Costs of services were lower using vouchers than under the traditional funding system, thus, providing the ability to serve more children without increasing the funding base. Children served through vouchers received substantially more individual therapy and other supportive services than their center-based peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the issues of effectiveness and efficiency under the specific conditions in which a single practitioner evaluates his own clients' performance in the everyday environment. Measures of effectiveness involve the question of whether the desired results have been produced; measures of efficiency relate to whether the desired results have been produced with the minimum of time and effort. Only recently have practitioners had access to a relatively simple technology for measurement of effective intervention in the natural environment. But much progress remains to be made in the use of efficiency measures based on objective data and intended for use by practitioners in the field. Moreover, the modification-and-reversal design is closely associated with behavioral modification, and in the approaching era of ecumenical therapeutic practices, it would seem preferable to have a theory-free measurement procedure. All practitioners, regardless of their theoretical orientation or the specific techniques they use, require objective evaluation to help them attain the goals of their intervention, however defined.

This study compared levels of parent involvement in early intervention services for children under three which were delivered in community settings (children’s homes and child care programs) and specialized settings (early intervention centers and provider offices) in the USA. Respondents reported the highest levels of parental involvement in the home. However, level of involvement in the home was not significantly higher than the provider’s office for parent attendance, quality and content of parent-provider communication, and effective instruction; level of provider communication and instruction to parents was not significantly higher in the home than in the early intervention center. Early intervention services in the child care setting were associated with the lowest levels of parent involvement. With the exception of child care, these results suggest that specialized and natural settings are associated with similar levels of parent involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents the authors' reply to the criticism of their research paper "Evaluating One's Own Effectiveness," which was published in the March 1977 issue of the journal "Social Work." The authors appreciate researchers Geoffrey R. Loftus and Rona L. Levy's response for its constructive advancement of the common cause in seeking better evaluation procedures for social workers in field settings. The first criticism involves the assumption of independence between events being measured. This is an excellent point, previously mentioned in the original source of the procedure. However, not using a statistical procedure because it includes statistical assumptions about which reasonable people may disagree has, perhaps, greater negative consequences than the risks involved in using that procedure. The second major point concerns estimating baseline conditions. This is a complex issue about which the authors have tentatively come to some working decisions in order to get on with the business of evaluation without the presence of computers or teams of researchers.

The article presents comments on an article which deals with the evaluation of the effectiveness of social work intervention on client behavior. In the March 1977 issue of the journal , researchers Martin Bloom and Stephen R. Block presented a practitioner-oriented procedure to evaluate the effectiveness of intervention on client behaviors. This response will discuss the limitations of the Bloom and Block procedure and, whenever possible, will suggest alternatives. Bloom and Block graph the frequency with which a specified client behavior occurs both before and during a period of practitioner intervention. A zone of typical problem events is defined by enclosing two-thirds of the data points during baseline. Points above and below this zone define zones of desired and highly undesired problem events. This procedure involves a simple application of the binomial test for a single sample. Unfortunately, the binomial test is unsuitable for the analysis. The probabilities presented in their table are based on the binomial probability distribution.