Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology

The team of students from Utah Valley State College wrote the winning proposal to address the needs of SOS Community Services. SOS helps at-risk and homeless families with children to achieve economic and residential stability. Most of these families are headed by single women who have incomplete educations, erratic work histories and poor job skills. As a result, their income usually is far below 25% of the area median income. They cannot afford decent, affordable permanent housing.

In addition to basic case management, SOS therefore offers employability support services that focus on identifying vocational interests, increasing education and improving job readiness. The program, which is our community’s only poverty reduction strategy for homeless families, includes a limited number of apprenticeships, most of which emphasize clerical skills. SOS pays half the wages for each apprentice for up to six months in return for employer pledges to hire the apprentices once they complete the program. Seventy-five percent of employability program participants (including non-apprentices) increase their income, but those finding employment remain locked into low-income positions. Recruiting private-sector employers for the apprenticeship program also has been difficult. SOS wanted to know what combination(s) of education, job training and employer relations programming would be most effective in helping homeless female-headed households to achieve significant improvements in economic opportunity.

Gary Bell, Executive Director of SOS, found the Utah Valley State College proposal “innovative and clever, and blends nationwide resources with those available to SOS and its consumers in the immediate community. The team not only conducted extensive Internet research, but drew on the experiences of its own members and those of UVSC program personnel to devise its strategy. It also contacted key resource organizations in Michigan and elsewhere in the country to ensure the feasibility of its proposed strategies and linkages.”

Visit the SOS website to learn more about their important work in the Ypsilanti area.

Jacksonville, Florida – Oct. 16-18, 2008

Submit a session or paper proposal (By August 24 to Kevin Mulvey)

Register for the Conference On-Line   (You can also renew your 2008 memberships here.)

Crowne Plaza Riverfront Hotel

The United States is in the middle of a major primary election period – one that promises an exciting Fall of give and take, thrust and parry, over important issues of the day. Equally important, is that the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology (AACS) is in the middle of our own election cycle, where we will be selecting the leadership of the organization for several years to come. To that end, I wanted to invite all of you to join AACS, and be a part of making history by voting on officers and board members to lead us into the next decade. Attached you will find the current group of AACS members who are running for leadership positions in the organization. As required by the AACS bylaws, we are presenting this slate to the membership (and affiliated persons) for review. In about four weeks, we will send out the final ballot for a vote. Only current up-to-date (i.e. dues paid for 2008) members will receive a ballot and be eligible to vote. There is still time to renew, or begin, your membership on-line. 

For those of you who are not yet members of AACS but are interested in learning more – or more importantly, joining, please check out the exciting direction the organization is going. I believe you will be impressed.And for all of you who are interested in Applied and Clinical Sociology, I strongly encourage you to join us in Jacksonville, FL in October for the Annual Conference. This website also contains the Call for Papers and Registration for the Jacksonville Conference. I look forward to working with you all over the coming years. It is an important time for applied and clinical sociologists.See you in Jacksonville,

jw

Jeffry A. Will, President, AACS
Professor of Sociology and Director
Northeast Florida Center for Community Initiatives
University of North Florida
ph: (904) 620-4408
FAX (904) 620-4415
http://www.unf.edu/coas/cci/

President-elect: (vote for one) Kevin Mulvey, Senior Technical Advisor for HIV and Drug Use Interventions with Family Health International (FHI).  Kevin’s time is evenly split between Vietnam and Asia Pacific Regional Office. He has responsibilities to work with 10 Asian Nations in the development and implementation of Drug Use Intervention. An Applied Sociologist who prior to joining FHI was with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP), Division of Systems Development as the Acting Division Director, and the Chief of the Performance and Technical Assistance Branch. He has also held position at SAMHSA within the Office of Applied Studies and the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. He received his PhD in 1993 from Northeastern University and his areas of expertise are Deviance, Applied Sociology specifically Program Evaluation, and Quantitative Methodology. He also has a Master’s Degree (1986) in Applied Sociology from the University of Massachusetts at Boston, as well as a Certificate in Public Health (2004) from the University of North Carolina. Kevin is also a Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts at Northeastern University where he received the 1998 Garth Pittman Award for Teaching Excellence and currently teaches distance learning courses in Sociology of Drinking, Sociology of AIDS, and Drugs and Society, research methods and statistics. Kevin’s Statement: I have been a member of the Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology since it founding formation through a merger of two previous organizations and have served as the Vice President Elect and currently serve as its Vice President. The history of the association goes back only a few years but we have many exciting possibilities, we need to learn from our past, and not repeat it but also we need as an association to embrace the future. The dominant issue facing AACS is that we need to develop the membership, link to the existing programs in applied sociology and clinical practice, and enable the association to be seen an organization and conference venue for exciting papers, communications, and networking. If given the opportunity I would be pleased to serve as the association President

J. Steven Picou, Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, Anthropology; Social Work, University of South Alabama. J. Steven Picou (Steve) has held academic appointments at The Ohio State University (1971-74) and Texas A&M University (1974-87). Dr. Picou’s applied policy research has been conducted in the areas of education, organizations, disasters, environment and risk. He has served as an at-large member of the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology board for two terms, as well as a council member of the Sociological Practice Section of the ASA and the Executive Council of the Society for Applied Sociology. Dr. Picou has also served as President of the Mid-South Sociological Association, Vice President for Alpha Kappa Delta and Chair of the Environment and Technology Section (ETS) for both the ASA and SSSP. In 2001, he received the Fred Buttel Distinguished Contribution Award from the ETS of the ASA for his applied research projects in communities impacted by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (EVOS). Dr. Picou has published over 75 articles and book chapters, as well as being co-author and co-editor of four books. His articles have appeared in a wide variety of journals such as Sociological Practice, Social Forces and Law and Policy. Most recently, Dr. Picou drafted and coordinated the preparation of an Amicus Brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the EVOS litigation. He is co-editor and contributor to The Sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a Modern Catastrophe, Rowman-Littlefield (2007) and is currently directing research on the community impacts of Hurricane Katrina (www.drpicou.com/) Steve’s Statement: If elected, I would like to promote applied sociology as an important component of the increasing public nature of our discipline. I also believe that we need to expand our membership by reaching out to non-academic sociologists and younger professional sociologists who are becoming increasingly sensitive to “applying sociology” through the recent discourse on public sociology. In sum, I would encourage the use of applied sociology as a tool to reimagine the entire discipline. Given the ASAs recent focus on clinical, applied and public sociology, the time for the promotion of AACS has never been better.

Vice-President -elect: (vote for one) Elizabeth A. (Libby) Larsen, Ph.D., C.S.P. Assistant Professor and Director of Applied Sociology –California University of Pennsylvania. Libby Larsen has worked with clients such as Carnegie Mellon University, Magee Women’s Hospital, and various social service and mental health services agencies, delivering research products that have brought about positive social change for these organizations and for those they serve. She has several articles published in professional sociology journals, such as Contemporary Ethnography, Gender, Work and Organization, and Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering. She teaches courses in Applied Sociology, Field Research Methods, and Evaluation Research. She has served as the Secretary, Vice President, President-Elect, and is currently President of the Pennsylvania Sociological Society. In October 2007, she organized and hosted the annual PSS meeting under the theme “Practicing Sociology: New Directions in Applying Sociology to Create a Better World.” Her Applied Sociology program at California Univ. of PA was recently (April 2008) evaluated by an accreditation from CACS. Ph.D. (Univ. of Pittsburgh), M.A. (George Mason Univ.), B.A. (Univ. of Virginia). Libby’s Statement: I would like to help the association enhance the educational component of its mission, especially with respect to developing improved marketing materials on career possibilities for undergraduate applied sociology students. Often, career information clearly focuses on jobs available only to those at the Ph.D. level. Other listings assume the student is of traditional age with little previous work experience, thereby neglecting the needs of more experienced adult learners. We need to collect, combine, and circulate better information for applied sociology education and to outline practical career paths that are broad enough to encompass the scope of the field, but specific enough to provide concrete direction to students. Indeed, this would be an attractive internship project to be carried out by a student in collaboration with myself and the office of career services at my institution, with the results distributed to the AACS membership at completion.

Secretary: (vote for one) Paulina Ruff Assistant Professor, School of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Lenoir-Rhyne College

Treasurer: (vote for one) Eleanor Lyon Associate Professor in Residence, School of Social Work, and Director, Institute for Violence Prevention and Reduction, University of Connecticut

BOARD: (Vote for four)

Douglas Klayman, President, Social Dynamics, LLC

Andrew Scott Ziner, President, Atlantic Social Research Corporation & Associate Professor, Sociology Department, Cedar Crest College

James Daniel Lee, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, San José State University

Robert Dotzler, Adjunct Professor, Tidewater Community College, Strayer University, and Southern Illinois University

Lubomir Popov, Associate Professor, Interior Design Program, School of Family and Consumer Sciences, Bowling Green State University

Ross Koppel, University of Pennsylvania: Principal Investigator and Research Director, Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Medicine; Adjunct Professor, Sociology Department; Professor, Graduate School of Education; Also, President, Social Research Corp.