News

Reposted from Kait the Badger

Emma Fashing was a mischeivious kid, but she was smart about it. “I got into trouble,” she said, “but I was also a good kid. I think I was just bored.”

Today, Fashing studies social work at UW-Madison, specializing in criminal and juvenile justice.

She currently works as an intern with Youth Services of Southern Wisconsin, and her childhood antics help her connect with the young adults that she works with.

“It kind of helps me identify with them,” Fashing explained. “I used to do that too, and things could have gone two very separate ways,” she said. “I could see myself totally being somewhere else.”

Fashing shared, “Somehow I got lucky. I pushed enough buttons, but I knew where to stop.” Today, she hopes to share her experiences with the troubled kids that she works with, teaching them where to stop... continue reading.

Reposted from the Chicago Tribune

Does your debt nag at you and make you miserable? A researcher has now put a number to the emotions. He has quantified just how much debt drags some people down.

Lawrence Berger, a University of Wisconsin at Madison associate professor of social work, has found that when the dollar amount of a person's debt increases by 10 percent, depressive symptoms — like not being able to shake the blues, feeling lonely, or having trouble eating or sleeping — increase by 14 percent. Still, if you are young and have debt that you won't have to pay off for many years, you might be able to shrug it off.

The cruel debt — the debt that brings people down — tends to be short-term debt, like credit cards or payday loans that can snowball. And it especially weighs on people ages 51 to 64, Berger said... continue reading.

The School of Social Work is proud to announce that Associate Professor Lawrence Berger has been selected by the UW-Madison Graduate School to receive an H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship for 2013.  Romnes Fellowships are awarded to recently tenured professors with an exceptional record of research, teaching and service.

The Fellowship carries with it a $50,000 flexible research fund, allowing developing faculty to further pursue major research projects early in their tenured career.  The funding for the award comes from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), and results from income generated from UW-Madison faculty and staff-generated patents.

Professor Berger studies how socioeconomic factors (family structure and composition, economic resources) and public policies influence parental behaviors and child and family wellbeing. His recent research focuses on the roles of factors such as family complexity, consumer debt, and housing (in)stability vis-à-vis individual and family functioning, parenting, and child development. 

While at Wisconsin, Professor Berger has emerged as a preeminent scholar with path-breaking theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of child welfare, public policy, and child and family wellbeing. 

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