If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.*Related content and download information correct at time of download. Purpose -The purpose of this article is to explore three technical challenges and misconceptions involved in measuring social return on investment (SROI). Although there is considerable information available about the conceptual framework of SROI, its application is a relatively young discipline. As a result, there is great variability in how SROI is applied across interventions. This makes robust and consistent comparisons across social ventures difficult, while rendering the validity of SROI measures vulnerable to contestation. This article looks at some of the least discussed yet significant technical challenges and misconceptions in working with SROI, based on the authors' experience of measuring social investment returns. Design/methodology/approach -The authors' approach is economic, and they approach the misconceptions and challenges of using SROI from a technical standpoint. Specifically, they identify three technical issues: the use of discount values, the incorporation of overhead costs and determinations of the counterfactual. Findings -The authors offer some solutions to these technical challenges and highlight wider issues around the drive to isolate social impact to attract funding for social enterprise.Research limitations/implications -Limitations of the paper relate to the authors' own inability, at this stage, to test out their solutions to these technical challenges with case studies. Practical implications -The practical implications of this paper are that the authors offer social enterprises and social impact practitioners an understanding of little-understood technical challenges related to the SROI process. They also highlight how these might be solved through alternative methods. Originality/value -The originality of this paper is that the authors use an economic analysis to highlight little-understood technical challenges with SROI.
National surveys show that people from minority ethnic groups tend to be less satisfied with social care services compared with the white population, but do not show why. Research indicates that barriers to accessing services include lack of information, perceptions of cultural inappropriateness and normative expectations of care. Less research has examined the experience of minority ethnic service users after they access services. This study conducted in-depth interviews with 82 South Asian and White British service users and family carers, the majority of whom were older people. Thematic analysis was used. The key theme was understanding the social care system. Participants with a good understanding of the system were more able to adapt and achieve control over their care. Participants with a poor understanding were uncertain about how to access further care, or why a service had been refused. More White British than South Asian participants had a good understanding of the system. There was more in common between the South Asian and White British participants' experiences than might have been expected. Language was an important facilitator of care for South Asian participants, but ethnic matching with staff was less important. Recommendations include better communication throughout the care process to ensure service users and carers have a clear understanding of social care services and hence a better experience.
While personal debt has been the subject of intense research activity over the past decade, in particular from think tanks and government bodies, it remains relatively undertheorized and neglected in general by the social sciences. This article offers a novel theoretical frame for the analysis of personal debt – and personal overindebtedness in particular – by highlighting the construction of deviance from financial behavioural normativities. Using Nikolas Rose's concept of ‘ethopolitics’ to describe the relocation of government from questions of rational administration to those of everyday morality and ethics, this article presents two characterizations of deviance from an ethopolitical imaginary of financial citizenship: irresponsibility and incapability. From this framework, the article explores the nature of the state sponsored normalization of indebtedness and the stigmatization of overindebtedness as a corollary of ‘delinquent’ dispositions and dependencies. This article suggests that UK government policy concerning financial responsibility has been shaped by an ethopolitical imaginary of financial citizenship which is based upon a skewed understanding of structure and agency which has its parallel in the attribution of unemployment to ‘worklessness’.
The measurement of customer satisfaction has become widespread in both health care and social care services, and is informative for performance monitoring and service development. Satisfaction with social care services is routinely measured with a single question on overall satisfaction with care, comprising part of the Adult Social Care Survey. The measurement of satisfaction has been problematised, and existing satisfaction measures are known to be under-theorised. In this article the process of making an evaluation of satisfaction with social care services is first informed by a literature review of the theoretical background, and second examined through qualitative interviews conducted in 2012-13 with 82 service users and family carers in Hampshire, Portsmouth, and Southampton. Participants in this study were from White British and South Asian backgrounds, and the influence of ethnicity in the process of satisfaction evaluation is discussed. The findings show that the majority of participants selected a positive satisfaction rating even though both positive and negative experiences with services were described in their narratives. It is recommended that surveys provide opportunity for service users and family carers to elaborate on their satisfaction ratings. This addition will provide more scope for services to review their strengths and weaknesses.
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