Social Pedagogy | Social Education

12

Authors: Albín Škoviera

The author presents the process of transforming residential institutional care and foster family care in the Slovak Republic at three levels. It is a socio-political context that led firstly to the fact that "education" and "health" orphanages passed into the social sector, secondly, the continuity of the changes was disrupted. They rejected any experience from the previous period and gradually liquidated almost everything that was associated with education. On the second level the author states selected "transformation" proclamation expectations, but also some practical steps associated with the transformation campaign. On the third level the author reflects some current technical problems of substitute care arising from 'political' awarding, poor quality and lack of respect for psychological and pedagogical knowledge.

13

Authors: Monika Chrenková, Kateřina Cilečková, Aneta Hašková

Recently, the system of care for endangered children has changed from the institutional as well as legislative point of view. In one of the partial areas of ongoing changes, research activities realised within the Students’ Grant Competition called The Factors Affecting the Form of Substitute Family Care are being focused. We deal with this topic because various forms of substitute family care are distinguished in the Czech Republic, where children are placed for various reasons, but we do not know the correct context of such placements. The main aim of the realised research was to find out the frequency of choosing a given form of placing children in substitute family care according to followed variables. The research sample of the quantitative research was consisted of children placed in one of the forms of substitute family care in the Moravian-Silesian region.

16

Authors: Karla Hrbáčková, Anna Petr Šafránková

The aim of the study is to present the results of research that determine the extent to which professional educators working in educational care centres and children’s homes influence the behaviour of children in institutional care related to their school results, relationships with peers, leisure time and manifestations of risky behaviour. Professionals working in educational care centres are believed to affect the behaviour of children to a greater extent than educators in children’s homes. Educators in children’s homes believe that they affect the school performance and leisure time of children. Educators in educational care centres believe that they largely affect the risky behaviour of children and their relationships with peers. The level of self-efficacy of educators is dependent on education, age and length of their teaching experience. These differences can be observed only in educators in educational care centres.

14

Authors: Bohuslav Binka

The paper “The Scientific Approach to Risk and the Risk Concept of Science” attempts to analyze the relationship between two problematic concepts of empiricism in present-day science (primitive empiricism, brutal empiricism), two characteristics of contemporary operation of science (the short-term effectiveness of scientific research, the pretense of intentional rational-empirical certainty of one’s endeavors), and the ability of social scientists to create and test more complex social science theories. The study begins by presenting and analyzing the so-called primitive and brutal empiricism. Whereas the primitive empiricism endeavors to revive scientific approaches based on the conviction that the only meaningful investigation is empirical in nature and that the empirical findings that emerge from such investigation are by nature (and based on their degree of certainty) diametrically opposed to any other type of knowledge; brutal empiricism (which is present in contemporary economic disciplines or sociobiology) is characterized more by attempts at protecting its own assumptions from its own unsafe reflexive empiricism and at the same time attempts to force the empirical methodology of a given discipline on other (usually closely related) social science theories. The second part of the study examines changes in the social sciences in the last 15 years and attempts to prove that the pressure on the short-term effectiveness of scientific research and the attempts to inspect scientific output on the basis of how well it corresponds to project goals are – in constellation with primitive and brutal empiricism – counterproductive in the end. Scientists are thus pressured into doing two types of research: either research involving metaphysical speculations without any real empirical basis or “safely shallow” empirical studies that are incapable of testing and replacing “core” theories in a given field. Thus, science paradoxically becomes a tool that can ensure security for many social scientists but is becoming useless for analyzing true problems and risks.

15

Authors: Monika Punová

This theoretical essay is oriented towards helping workers who focus on work with the youth. The aim is to indicate the individual and social level of risk in the lives of young people and show possible implications for helping workers, which lie in the application of the concept focusing on the strengths-based approach and the resilience concept. These considerations come out of the present-day trends as well as from the historical experience in the field of social work. According to them, the focus on risk is not the most appropriate approach as the clients did not reach the expected results.