This paper explores the ways in which national governments address the social inclusion of disadvantaged and disenfranchised groups in official strategy documents of the state. Data for this study comes from a corpus of four key government strategy papers concerning Roma inclusion published by the Romanian Government between 2001 and 2015. This paper specifically looks at the ways in which strategy documents frame the problem of "crime" in the context of Roma inclusion. Texts were analysed using a critical frame analysis approach complemented by insights from discursive research. The findings highlight that although generally government policy on the Roma adopts and promotes a progressive/liberal agenda that aligns with EU strategic goals, pronounced ambivalence toward Roma people and subtle forms of racism are still present and persist.

A B S T R AC TThis paper presents the findings of a study that looked at social workers' perspectives on parental engagement in making the difficult choice of either taking the child into care or keeping the family together. The paper first explores the specific context of children at risk in Romanian society and explains that in this middle-income nation there is an absence of evidence-based risk assessment tools, which prompts social workers to use their own 'common sense' risk assessment indicators. The findings of this small-scale, nonrepresentative study on several public non-voluntary child protection services in Romania suggest that social workers' perceptions of specific dimensions of parental engagement in non-voluntary child protection may influence service delivery decisions and outcomes.

In this paper, we explore the potential of short-term ethnography in a collaborative and participatory research project on experiences with and perceptions of migration from fieldwork with Roma groups in north-western Transylvania. We discuss particularly the challenges we encountered in engaging Roma women in terms of existing cultural and gender norms evident in some Roma communities. We argue that, in the context of working with women in patriarchal communities, short-term ethnography offers researchers a unique opportunity to (a) find and take advantage of safe spaces in which to talk to women and (b) manage sensitively access and rapport. In this study, ethnography gave insights into alternative ways of engagement in the research process based on categorisations that emphasise alternative aspects of social identity (Roma 'mothers' vs. Roma 'women') as an effective means of breaking down some of the barriers to participation. Finally, we argue that short-term ethnography can be used successfully in collaborative and participatory research projects alongside traditional ethnographic work to explore the perspectives of mobile and vulnerable or marginalised groups including, but not limited to, patriarchal group contexts.

In this research 30 graduate students were asked to complete the Need for Cognition Scale. The individual scores were compared with: (1) school performance and the desire to engage in cognitive activities measured by: grade point average, the last three books read and interest in recent social events; (2) number of members in family of origin—especially the number of siblings—parental educational attainment, perceived cognitive abilities of siblings, rural-urban differences and parental encouragement of education; (3) gender, age and sibling position. A qualitative analysis of students’ subjective perspectives on need for cognition scores was also included. The results of this research show that participants with a higher need for cognition were more likely to have a higher level of school performance and a greater desire to engage in effortful cognitive activities. Participants that had a higher sibling position, parents with a higher level of educational attainment and that came from an urban background scored higher on need for cognition scale. Participants with a lower need for cognition had a larger number of siblings and perceived the cognitive abilities of siblings as higher. Parental encouragement of education, gender and age of participants were unrelated to the need for cognition scores. Key words: cognitive activities, family of origin, need for cognition.

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