Search results

The need to support independent advocacy at a national level has been officially recognised in Scotland by the creation of two new agencies. The Advocacy Safeguards Agency has five core functions: independent evaluation, policy development and implementation, technical support for commissioners, research, and dispute resolution. The Scottish Independent Advocacy Alliance will be a membership body providing information, networking and training services to its members and helping the sector to organise collectively when needed.

This is an opinion piece about exploring fresh approaches to advocacy for older and disabled people. The purpose of the paper is to suggest a new role for professional advocates. Professional advocacy help can be an important first step to a stronger life or it can be a revolving door. It makes all the difference when we've got people around us who can help us to get over problems, and not feel we're stuck on our own. But most users of services have no one whom they can turn to when things get tough for them. What if we designed advocacy services so they acted on the causes of demand for advocacy, rather than delivered a number of advocacy transactions?

This article uses the experiences of Grapevine in Coventry and draws on the findings of a project conducted with advocacy organisations in the Midlands and South East, many of whom felt that professional advocacy was not getting to the root of the problem.

Advocacy practice is about being a corrective to failures in other services and an intermediary between service users and providers. It can be very vulnerable at times to being seen as an “add‐on” of unproven value.

The article asks practitioners to consider the new role advocates might play in developing and connecting networks of local people for mutual help and support. This “community‐powered” advocacy could provide effective root cause help and protect the sector's legitimacy during unprecedented financial austerity.

The paper is of value to practitioners and commissioners of advocacy services.

This commentary reflects on peer advocacy in relation to citizen advocacy in the context of the vital need for advocacy in all its different forms.

The authors reflect from the standpoint of developing peer advocacy in secure mental health settings as an organisation based on self-advocacy and co-production.

By reflecting on peer advocacy and citizen advocacy side by side, the authors affirm both and all kinds of advocacy as being vital to people with learning disabilities living full and free lives as citizens.

The authors hope this commentary will enrich people’s understandings of the essential role of peer advocacy within different kinds of advocacy, and the need to enlarge the range of possibilities and choices open to a person.

Advocacy has long been identified as a valuable mechanism for providing support to individuals who experience difficulties in accessing services and whose voices often remain unheard in decisions relating to meeting their individual needs. However, the advocacy needs of older people age 65 and over with mental health problems remains a relatively under‐researched area.This paper presents findings from a small study undertaken in partnership with Sandwell Advocacy, a voluntary sector organisation, and researchers from Coventry University in one local authority area in the West Midlands. The aims of the study were to explore the advocacy needs of people aged 65 years and over with mental health problems and to determine the current level of demand or need for advocacy among this user group. A key motivation for this study was to explore the ways in which advocacy could provide a ‘voice’ to those whose needs are often marginalised in both social care service provision and wider society.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that both the processes and outcomes of advocacy can be evaluated in ways that can help with learning and accountability. The paper reviews the literature on evaluating advocacy, with a particular focus on development work, and describes an example of the systematic evaluation of the Business Environment Strengthening in Tanzania-Advocacy Component business advocacy programme in Tanzania.

The evaluation uses a Scientific Realist methodology to give a disaggregated, contextual analysis of advocacy, asking the typically Scientific Realist question: “What works for whom in what circumstances?” Complementary methods are being applied longitudinally over a five-year period and include stakeholder interviews, business surveys, diagnostic tools and learning seminars.

The paper argues that advocacy evaluation is no more complex or difficult than other aspects of development. Rigorous, cost-effective methods can be developed, so long as clear conceptualisation is carried out as an initial step. Systematic analysis of influencing tactics and capacity building demonstrates the relative skill of the advocacy organisations and allows the funder to see intermediate indicators of progress which are otherwise invisible.

Consistent conceptualisation and measurement allow comparison over time, and between different types of projects and organisations. Integrating methods with the operation of campaigns or programmes allows the evaluator to give feedback in real time and minimise the burden on evaluands.

The paper is based on original research/evaluation. The field is heavily concentrated on social change. The paper makes a contribution by providing an example of advocacy evaluation in the field of business advocacy and economic development. In addition, the example extends the field of advocacy evaluation by considering the systematic evaluation of a whole programme of individual advocacy projects.

Parental advocacy is an emerging area of research and policy interest in Wales and across the UK. Although there is little research in the UK context to date, international research has indicated that parental advocacy can improve the relationship between parent and professional in the field of child protection social work. This paper aims to ascertain how the implementation of a parental advocacy programme supports parents to play a meaningful role in decision-making when children’s services are working with them and their families.

This study used interviews, surveys and focus groups to obtain qualitative data from 18 parents, seven parent advocates, two advocacy managers and four social workers, to explore the potential impact of parental advocacy on decision-making. The study identified challenges in implementing parental advocacy, particularly relating to awareness of the service. Participants also discussed experiences of the child protection system and how parents are supported by advocates.

Despite challenges surrounding implementation, initial findings were encouraging, and generated examples of how parental advocacy services have helped parents to understand children’s services and develop relationships of trust with social care professionals. In doing so, this study identified potential mechanisms that may be useful to support future service delivery.

This paper and research is novel as it explores parental advocacy within the Welsh context. Although there has been research conducted into parental advocacy, this has largely come from the USA. This research comes from the evaluation of an innovative and promising parental advocacy scheme in Wales.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of celebrity endorsers on consumer advocacy, customization and entertainment intentions based on the notion of the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) framework. In addition, this study aims to examine the mediating and moderating role of customization and entertainment intentions on the proposed relationships. The authors also intend to highlight the comparative effects between male and female young social media consumers on those proposed associations.

In the pursuit of comprehensive and rigorous data collection, this study adopted a quantitative methodology using a meticulously crafted questionnaire. The questionnaire survey was conducted in major cities of Malaysia using the convenience and snowball sampling techniques. A total of 576 responses were collected, even though 549 retorts were used for data analysis. In this investigation, the authors strategically used covariance-based structural equation modeling through the use of AMOS v. 24 as the primary data analysis tool. Augmenting the analytical depth, the authors also conducted a supplementary bootstrap analysis. The additional layers of examination were crucial for appraising the mediating and moderating effects inherent within the model, in which the PROCESS MACRO v.4.20 was used.

The results of this study revealed the significant direct positive effects of celebrity endorsers on consumer customization, entertainment and advocacy intentions. Consumer customization and entertainment intentions also found significant direct affirmative effects on consumer advocacy intention, along with the significant direct positive effects of consumer entertainment intention on consumer customization intention. The results further revealed that consumer customization and entertainment intentions cannot mediate the relationship between celebrity endorsers and advocacy intention. The entertainment intention also declined the mediating effects between celebrity endorsers and consumer customization intention. On the contrary, consumer customization intention significantly and positively, and entertainment intention also significantly but negatively, moderate the association between celebrity endorsers and consumer advocacy intention. This study also illustrates that the effects of those examined relationships differ between male and female young social media consumers.

This study investigates the impact of celebrity endorsers on consumer behavior, focusing on their customization, entertainment and advocacy intentions. It extends current SOR framework, enhances source credibility theory, fills gaps in the literature on social media brand engagement and underscores the significance of customization and entertainment intentions. The findings provide insights for managers aiming to harness consumer brand advocacy through celebrity endorsers effectively.

This study documents that an outcome-favorable bias is greater when the quantity of information describing a balanced tax-decision context is substantially increased. Second, the study demonstrates that an outcome-favorable bias can be offset by the use of principles-based ethical standards. Specifically, we examine the effect of AICPA Code of Conduct Section 54 for integrity and Rule 102-6 for advocacy. Students volunteered to participate in this study examining the manner in which accounting novices initially process principles-based standards. Prior studies using student subjects in an audit setting have found that principles-based standards were effective only when students had high levels of moral reasoning (Herron & Gilbertson, 2004), and rules-based technical standards had no impact on student subjects when making financial adjustments (Pflugrath, Martinov-Bennie, & Chen, 2007). If professional standards increasingly rely on principles-based standards, then understanding the impact of such standards on future entrants into the profession would provide guidance in the creation and implementation of future standards, as well as assist educators in the development of accounting curricula. We extend the pattern of past research to a tax setting and show that tax-saving recommendations are a function of the presence of a professional standard and the level of contextual detail.