Perceptions of older adults as a societal burden (hereafter referred to as “societal-burden view”) are hostile stereotypes undermining the health and well-being of older people. From the perspective of the intergenerational contract, the societal-burden view may manifest differently between the younger population (the contributors) and the older population (the beneficiaries), with varying age-specific factors associated with it. This study examines age-related differences in the societal-burden view and age-specific associated factors in China. Using 2021 China General Social Survey data (N = 2524), we found older adults were more likely than younger adults to endorse this view (38.74% vs. 13.81%). For younger adults, higher education, urban residency, life satisfaction, and belief in shared eldercare responsibility correlated with a lower societal-burden view. For older adults, better health and urban residency, being married, and belief in shared eldercare responsibility are associated with a lower societal-burden view. This study urges longitudinal research and policies to promote intergenerational harmony and challenge decline-centered aging narratives.

This study examines public attitudes towards corporal punishment (CP) and child protection system (CPS) involvement in Denmark, England, and Norway. Using representative population samples (N = 3844) and logistic regression, we investigate the roles of rights orientation, country context, and confidence in the CPS. The findings reveal stark cross-national variation, with 40% of English respondents accepting CP, compared to 7%–8% in Norway and Denmark, reflecting differences in political, legal, cultural and social frameworks. Acceptance of CP is the strongest predictor of opposition to CPS involvement, showing the impact of normative values. In Denmark and Norway, both child rights-oriented child protection systems, there is lower acceptance of CP and higher support for CPS involvement, compared to England. Confidence in the CPS does not predict involvement of CPS. The findings suggest that child rights orientation and legal bans within child rights-protective institutions mutually reinforce societal norms in which violence against children is not accepted and public authorities are involved.

Welfare chauvinism, that is, the desire to limit immigrants' opportunity to be awarded the benefits and services of the welfare state, has become a prevalent social phenomenon across European societies over the last decades. Studies have previously explored how subjective and objective economic vulnerability can be related to welfare chauvinistic attitudes. Likewise, studies have also explored how the economic context shapes these attitudes. However, this study goes one step further by exploring the interplay between individual economic experiences and the context these individuals live in. It is hypothesized that economic threat perceptions can be maximized in situations where one struggles economically, while at the same time living in a more economically deprivated region, which in turn can be associated with welfare chauvinism. The study uses the European Social Survey (ESS) from 2016–2017 to examine this relationship across 115 European regions (NUTS 2) using cross level interactions. By exploring the relationship on a regional level, it also increases the statistical powers in the models, as well as measuring a reality that is closer to the individuals lived lives. The study finds limited evidence for a relationship between individual level economic vulnerability and the economic context. It is argued that the lack of significant findings may be explained by self-interest perspective among the employed, and group empathy among the unemployed.

Despite artificial intelligence's (AI) established use in healthcare, its application in social work remains nascent. Therefore, this scoping review examines AI's applications, outcomes or perceived effects, and challenges in social work practice for children and youth, especially regarding human–AI collaboration. Searches across eight databases yielded 17 studies spanning four tiers of evidence, ranging from empirical findings to theoretical discussions. AI's applications centered on identifying service users in the five empirically evaluated studies but varied widely in theoretical accounts. Regarding outcomes, only those five studies provided rigorous evaluations, with mixed results. Across all tiers, AI played a supporting role, while social workers retained professional judgment and final decision-making authority. Last, AI's challenges ranged from technical limitations to ethical and structural concerns, including algorithmic bias, privacy risks, contextual complexity, and unclear accountability. Such limited, uneven evidence suggests priorities for future research and AI's responsible integration in social work for children and youth.

China has eradicated absolute poverty nationwide, yet relative poverty remains a major governance challenge. Understanding public perceptions of poverty causes is important for refining national poverty alleviation strategies. Using data from the 2023 China National Survey of Public Welfare Attitudes (N = 15,038), this study employs latent class analysis to identify four distinct attribution types among the Chinese public: internal, rejection, compound, and neutral. The compound attribution class accounts for the largest share, suggesting that poverty is most commonly understood as the combined outcome of individual capacities and structural constraints. Multinomial logistic regression further shows that attributions are shaped by both macro-level determinants, such as region and residence, and micro-level determinants, including self-rated happiness, self-rated life prospects, subjective social class, and socio-demographic characteristics. These findings move beyond the conventional internal–external dichotomy and provide a multidimensional account of poverty attribution in China.

This study examines the relationship between welfare receipt and multidimensional welfare attitudes within South Korea's productivist welfare model. Using pooled cross-sectional data from the Korea Welfare Panel Study and applying entropy balancing to control for selection bias, the analysis employs the Karlson–Holm–Breen method to decompose the total association between welfare receipt and welfare attitudes into components potentially linked to recipient stigma and individual-responsibility attributions. Because the pooled design cannot firmly establish the temporal ordering of welfare receipt, moral–cognitive evaluations, and welfare attitudes, these decompositions are interpreted as evidence of potential, rather than confirmed, mediating pathways. Results indicate welfare receipt is significantly associated with higher support for expanding welfare spending. Laziness-based stigma toward National Basic Livelihood Security System recipients accounts for approximately 41.51% of this association, consistent with a potential mediating pathway, while for universal welfare preferences this control-dimension stigma shows a suppression pattern, offsetting non-recipients' support by approximately 27.52%. Conversely, individual-responsibility attributions show no significant association with these outcome gaps. These findings suggest South Korean welfare attitudes are shaped more by moral evaluations of recipients' deservingness than by abstract beliefs about the causes of poverty, underscoring the importance of addressing institutionalized laziness-based stigma toward recipients in selective welfare systems to foster universal solidarity.

This article examines whether the available empirical evidence supports descriptions of the field of environmental social work (ESW) as a social movement. Drawing on classic movement criteria—collective intentionality, organisational coherence, and consequential impact—it interrogates the gap between ESW's normative ambitions and its empirically demonstrable capacity. It combines social movement theory with findings from a companion bibliometric and text-based mapping of 761 peer-reviewed ESW articles (1966–2025), classified across conceptual-theoretical, qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, and review-based research designs. While qualitative and participatory approaches provide important forms of contextual and experiential knowledge, relatively few studies across methodological traditions examine intervention outcomes, policy influence, or sustained collective environmental effects. The findings suggest that ESW operates primarily as a normatively driven scholarly and professional project, while retaining significant potential for future movement-oriented development.

The child welfare system has increasingly adopted phase specialisation, in Sweden and internationally, dividing work into distinct stages. This study examines these changes through the retrospective perspectives of 15 long-serving child welfare professionals, highlighting three key organisational shifts: the separation of statutory and supportive tasks, the division between intake and investigation, and the emerging split between investigation and follow-up. Respondents describe these changes as motivated by concerns related to quality and workload. While the changes are perceived to have improved work in certain respects, respondents note unintended consequences, such as fragmented services and professional tensions. We interpret phase specialisation through the lens of broader quality and workload discourses and discuss how the changes may relate to intergroup status dynamics and facilitate workload buffering, temporarily masking resource challenges. The findings highlight the importance of assessing how specialisation shapes workers' roles and working conditions, ensuring that reforms benefit both professionals and clients.

Social work is held to be unified by a stable, coherent value base across time and jurisdiction. Drawing on articulation theory and infrastructure studies, this paper provides the first systematic historical analysis of eight Canadian Association of Social Workers codes (1940–2024) as assembled within an ecology of moral infrastructure. Frequency analysis and multiple correspondence analysis identify three configurationally distinct moral grammars across three historical periods. Justice entered the codes in 1983 within an administrative risk configuration, not in opposition to it. The 2024 code's past-harms temporal orientation and decolonial justice grammar produce three incompatible justice grammars with no mechanism to resolve them. The apparent coherence of ethical commitments across time is theorised as homogeneous ethical time, a produced effect of the ecology whose breakdown registers individually but is ecological in origin. The findings suggest that code revision requires attending to the ecology as a whole, not the normative domain alone.

This study examines the association between meaning in life and smartphone addiction among vulnerable children in China, alongside the moderating role of satisfaction with social work services. Utilizing propensity score matching on a random sample of 1025 vulnerable children from City A, the analysis revealed an unexpected paradox: a higher level of meaning in life was significantly associated with increased smartphone addiction. This reflects a “high aspiration-low opportunity” mismatch, wherein vulnerable children with high internal agency turn to digital environments as a compensatory space when real-world support is deficient. Crucially, moderation analysis demonstrated that high satisfaction with social work services significantly buffered the association. These results suggest that high-quality social work services can act as a vital social conversion factor, successfully reactivating the protective function of meaning in life. Consequently, effectively combating smartphone addiction requires a practical transition from isolated psychological support to a comprehensive formal support system.