This paper is based on the writers' clinical experience with children and adolescents who receive kidney transplants and members of their families who are involved in the process of identifying the best donor match. Specific concerns of the patients and their significant others are described, and two cases are used as illustrations. The role of ambivalence in donor selection is investigated and selected intervention sites are suggested.

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Current welfare reform legislation raises a number of questions about how the field of human services will broaden its analytical and educational functions in a context of uncertainty about what welfare will look like in the years to come. How can information and insights about the distribution of welfare dollars and the process of leaving welfare by a heterogeneous population of clients become the basis of contrastive analysis? We describe information sources which can provide a framework for positioning academic work to use longitudinal quantitative tracking sources to lay out qualitative inquiry suggestions for collecting process data that will emerge over time. We suggest that such data will be valuable to practitioners working with persons composing their own histories in the face of the admonishing welfare construct "get off welfare."

Social policy researchers and policy rules and regulation writers have not taken advantage of advances in assessing ways in which social representations of ideas about people can convey alternative explanations of social life. During the past decade a growing number of scholars have considered how representational practices and the representations that are outcomes of such practices have value. Neglecting to consider representational practices has consequences including failure to mobilize and sustain alternative ideologies that reject narrow perspectives on families and communities. As evidenced by recent OMB rulings on census categories, the dominant sense of meaning of population-and hence family and community-is quite similar to the 17th century sense of people as objects of a particular category in a place from which samples can be taken for statistical measurement. However, the contrastive analysis presented in this paper points out how sustained attention to consequences of use of sets of information categories collected to enumerate population to inform social policy can still materialize. In the wake of federal welfare reform, policy makers are particularly interested in 2 of 15 questions of benefit relative to social service delivery and community revitalization. The presentation includes lessons learned from several dozen family, youth, school and community research projects.