Master’s student Lynn Panepinto was selected 2017 Student of the Year by NASW/ TX Capital Area Branch. Panepinto is doing a dual degree with Latin American Studies, and is passionate about helping improve the lives of Latinos in the United States.
@TexasSteveHicks: Ideas, findings, people
School-based mental health
Students’ growing mental health needs have resulted in more teachers delivering school-based psychosocial interventions. But we know little about how effective these interventions are to improve students behavioral, emotional, or social functioning. Professor Cynthia Franklin, doctoral student Anao Zhang and colleagues conducted a systematic review of existing studies on the subject. They found that school-based […]
Child abuse prevention is working in Texas
Texas families who receive child maltreatment prevention services do not have a subsequent child protective services case, according to a new report from the Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing. It is the first report to show that receiving services from Texas child maltreatment prevention programs prevents child abuse cases, and that these programs […]
Voices from East Austin
Spending a week crammed in a small house in East Austin with eight other people may not be an ideal Spring Break for most UT students. And yet, this was the choice of social work undergraduates Cassandara Najera, Sarah Hudson, and Renee Palma. This spring, the three of them signed up for Alternative Breaks, a program with […]
Blog it
Professor Cossy Hough has partnered with alumni Will Francis (MSSW ’10) and Anna Stelter (MSSW ’16) to launch 70% (socialworkershealthpolicy.com), a blog about health policy, the social determinants of health, and social workers’ commitment to advance good health in their places of practice. Why 70%? That’s the estimated influence of environment and lifestyle on overall […]
Bullying, ethnicity, and depression
Doctoral student Hannah Szlyk and colleagues examined the relation between depression and general versus ethnic-biased bullying among 534 Latino students in a large North Carolina school district. They found that ethnic-biased and verbal or relational bullying had a direct effect on depression while general and physical bullying did not. Results are published in the Journal […]
What do engineering and social work have in common?
Projects with Underserved Communities (PUC) is a UT Austin program that pairs engineering and social work students in service-learning collaborations around the world. This past summer, a team went to Thailand to install a filtered water transmission and distribution system for the village of Don Kang, and another team went to Guatemala to design and […]
Ties that bind
Professor Elisa Borah argues that we should broaden our understanding of military social work by including not only active duty personnel and veterans abut also their immediate and extended family members. As Borah writes in the Journal of Family Social Work, they all “frequently share in the challenges and sacrifice associated with active and reserve […]
Zeroing on homelessness
As director of the National Homelessness Social Work Initiative, professor Heather Larkin Holloway has partnered with CSWE and social work schools across the country to increase homelessness-related curricular content and internships. “Our aim is to strengthen the ability of schools of social work to prepare students to be leaders in this field while supporting current […]
What makes adoptions successful?
Professors Monica Faulkner, Tina Adkins, Rowena Fong and colleagues reviewed years of research to summarize the risk factors that lead to discontinuity in adoption and guardianship. The purpose of this literature review was to understand the risk factors that lead to post-permanency instability, also termed discontinuity, in adoption and guardianship to guide current and future interventions […]
