Integration of religion in community health and wellbeing interventions is important for achieving a good life among faith-based populations. In countries hosting Muslim-minorities, however, relatively little is reported in academic literature on processes of faith integration in the development and delivery of interventions. We undertook a review of peer reviewed literature on health and wellbeing interventions with Muslim-minorities, with specific interest on how Islamic principles were incorporated. Major databases were systematically searched and PRISMA guidelines applied in the selection of eligible studies. Twenty-one journal articles met the inclusion criteria. These were coded and analyzed thematically. Study characteristics and themes of religiosity are reported in this review, including the religious tailoring of interventions, content co-creation and delivery design based on the teachings from the Quran and Sunnah, and applicability of intervention structures. We reviewed the philosophical and structural elements echoing the Quran and Islamic principles in the intervention content reported. However, most studies identified that the needs of Muslim communities were often overlooked or compromised. This may be due to levels of religio-cultural knowledge of persons facilitating community health and wellbeing interventions. Our review emphasizes the importance of intellectual apparatus when working in diverse communities, effective communication-strategies, and community consultations when designing interventions with Muslim-minority communities.

The aims of this integrative review included examining the intervention characteristics, religious tailoring, and behavioural outcomes of health and social care interventions with Muslim-minorities in Australia, Canada, UK, and the USA. Nineteen articles were included, and each showed some level of improved health and social care outcomes associated with interventions that were religiously tailored to Islamic teachings, and when notions of health were extended to physical, psychological, spiritual and social domains. Future studies should measure levels of religiosity to understand whether religiously tailored interventions produce a significant intervention effect when compared to non-religiously tailored interventions with Muslims.

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An emerging body of scholarship suggests that "Western" notions of policy analysis may not be relevant in "Eastern" jurisdictions, and that non-Western countries, particularly in Asia, may have their own local policy analytical style or tradition. However, in many Asian countries, little is known about the work that public sector policy analysts do. Using data from a survey and focus groups, this article investigates policy analysis and analytical capacity in the provincial government of West Java, Indonesia. We find ample signs of policy analytical activity as it would be understood by Western scholars, with little evidence of any specific Asian style.

In recent years, social network analysis has had its own distinctive theoretical and methodological underpinnings. This article proposes a novel method for the application of a fused mixed-methods approach and social network analyses that incorporates the critical aspects of numerous characteristics of children’s social development in a statutory care setting. We collected data from children involved in the Mockingbird Family out-of-home care model, following its implementation in Australia. Our approach involves three steps: social-developmental network indicators, relational dynamics, and social-developmental network narrative. We contend that this approach has the potential to provide powerful data representation that facilitates the understanding of the complexities of children’s social development, the links between different positions and roles of children, and their social network in the Mockingbird family. Using exemplars, we show the potential of the research method to unearth rich data for seeking to understand the system change important for strengthening children’s safe and protective environments.

Muslims have a strong sense of obligation in which Islam informs their ways of life. As a religious minority within Australia, these obligatory practices may not be well understood by mainstream policy, health, and welfare services. This mixed-method, cross-sectional study assessed the self-reported quality of life (QoL), worldviews, and subjective experiences of religiosity and/or cultural identity of adults from a Muslim community affiliated with the Adelaide Mosque, metropolitan South Australia. Data were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic using the Multicultural Quality of Life Index (MQLI) and focus group discussions. Survey results (n = 98) showed women had lower MQLI scores than men did, and married participants had better MQLI scores than not-married did. Focus group participants (n = 18) reported feeling overwhelmed and isolated due to social distancing requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, compounded by a lack of available ‘Muslim-friendly’ social support services. While results do not represent all Muslim perspectives in Australia, they reveal a dialogic interchange between gender and matrimonial differences, and cultural variances that may exist in the concept of wellbeing. Greater opportunities for social support integrating Muslim religiosity and culture in multicultural practice, in discrete and mainstream services, would benefit this South Australian community.

Women in Indonesia’s civil service ( n = 320) were surveyed about their career advancement. Analysis of variance identified differences in career progression, and post-hoc comparisons were tested using Fisher’s Least Significant Difference method. We found that family support and interpersonal relationships, paired with superior education to men, were critical to women’s successful leadership progression, especially through the echelon ranks. Qualitative results suggest that interpretations of hadith outweighed more contemporary textual readings, which required strategic maneuvering if women wanted to advance. This is because women’s own career aspirations required their ongoing loyalty to men and strategic maneuvering among filial, societal, and organizational constraints.

In this article, we used a novel hybrid approach to review literature concerned with family and domestic violence (FADV) perpetrators. Our intention was to chart the research and publication activity of authors with Australian affiliation to identify homegrown evidence related to stopping the perpetration of violence. This involved systematic searching of literature from the Scopus electronic database, utilization of VOSviewer to sort keyword co-occurrences and authorship linking for 1,494 publication records over a 30-year period, and the review of 21 articles with perpetrator focus, identified from the 50 most cited publications. We found that Australians’ authoring interests in FADV, over the last three decades, with perpetrator focus were predominantly concentrated on gender, rape and sexual assault, coercive control, and child abuse. In the most cited literature, six major themes were identified: perpetrator motivations, perpetrator interventions, patterns of violence, pandemic duet, perception of blame, and cyberstalking and violence. An upward curve in Australian authoring activity in the period under review aligns with societal shifts in which FADV was once considered a private issue and has now become ubiquitous in the public domain. Our findings revealed that research into perpetrators is insufficient to promote a zero-tolerance approach to FADV. Our corresponding in-depth literature review provides valuable insights surrounding perpetrator intervention programs with the goal of more effectively addressing the emerging challenge of technology-facilitated coercive control.