School of Social Work News

Analidis Ochoa, Luke Shaefer and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor’s 2021 study on blood plasma donations and poverty was cited in the recent Washington Post article "Surviving Inflation One Plasma Donation at a Time."

Welcome, Dr. Santa J. Ono, named by the Board of Regents as 15th President-Elect of the University of Michigan. “I fiercely believe that higher education — through our scholarship, our service, and our graduates — can deliver the changes we need to build healthy, sustainable, and just communities,” he said.

Associate Professor Matthew Smith’s research is cited in a Chicago Tribune story exploring the ways to support people with autism to enter the workforce. “Virtual job training programs such as one at the University of Michigan can help fill in these gaps in training. A computerized program developed for virtual job training provided 15 practice job interview sessions of increasing difficulty. This program resulted in greater success in obtaining a job within six months, improved job interview skills and reduced anxiety about interviewing.”

Associate Professor Terri Friedline submitted written comments about the elimination of overdraft fees to the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services March 31, 2022 hearing. “If private banks remain unable or unwilling to take the steps necessary for creating equal, dignified access to retail financial services, then they should step aside and enthusiastically support options such as postal banking, public banking, mission-driven Community Development Financial Institutions, and mutual aid or solidarity economy networks, which are dedicated to serving people in need without charging expensive fees and adding to burdensome debt,” she writes.

Professor Brian Perron has been invited to speak with members of the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee regarding his investigation of a Russian academic paper mill. Such entities provide fraudulent services – ghostwriting, brokering authorship on accepted papers, and falsifying data–to researchers seeking to publish articles in peer-reviewed journals. Perron has identified approximately 200 papers in the published literature that have evidence of being brokered through this paper mill. His investigation led to the retraction of 30 published articles from the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, representing the largest number of retractions from a single social science journal.

“I have seen the nature of scientific publishing change so much, “Perron says. “It used to be, you identified the right journals and you knew you were competing with the best work.” Then Perron saw a blog post about people selling scholarly articles. “You find these articles in the published literature,” he says. “Some are brokered through open access journals, and there's the pay-to-publish model; with a few thousand dollars, you get any paper published you want.

“We should have stronger restrictions if somebody's getting federal funding,” he says. “There is a push to make research more widely available, and open access journals were going to solve that. We want government funded science to be more accessible, but we want to weed out the profiteers.”

“It’s exciting that lawmakers are interested in this topic,” Perron says. “You might call what I’m doing ‘citizen science.’ What I dig up is not peer reviewed. It is more like investigative journalism, like doing citizenship and science together.”

Kaitlin Ward, Joint Doctoral Program in Social Work and Psychology, has successfully defended her dissertation entitled “Ecological Influences of Parental Discipline Behaviors and Child Outcomes among Families in Low-and Middle-Income Countries.” Her committee consisted of Shawna Lee and Andy Grogan-Kaylor.

Ward has accepted a position at Google.

Two Michigan Social Work PhD students have received 2022 Next Generation Initiative Awards from the Institute of Social Research. Analidis Ochoa was awarded a Marshall Weinberg Endowment for her project “Blood Veins for Hire: Plasma Donation in an age of Inequality, Instability, and Precarious Work.” Briana Starks received a Sarri Family Fellowship for Research on Educational Attainment of Children in Low Income Families for her project “Diapers, Debt, & Degrees: The Practical and Theoretical Implications of Maternal Postnatal Educational Attainment.”

PhD student Matthew Bakko explains in The Conversation the history of bail funds and why they matter. “More than 80% of the over 650,000 people in jail in the U.S. have not been convicted and are presumed innocent but can’t afford bail,” he writes. “Helping people pay bail is important because it means that they can return home and remain employed or in school. They are also less likely to be pressured to accept a plea deal, in which they plead guilty to a lesser charge to serve less time, whether they committed the alleged offense or not.”