Domestic Violence and Substance Use: Tackling Complexity

Domestic violence and substance use are issues which pervadesocial work practice, yet are often on the margins of the knowledgebase for practitioners and their managers. This article providesan overview of the literature on substance use and domesticviolence, highlighting the problems with the separation of bothpractice and policy in these areas. Research on substance useand the needs of women survivors of domestic violence are explored,alongside the more substantial literature on perpetrators ofdomestic violence and patterns of substance use. The problemsof a simplistic analysis which suggest that there is a causallink between substance use and domestic violence are highlighted.Using data from an on-going research project, the sources ofthe continuing and dysfunctional separation of work in theseareas are explored.     

Minimum wages and poverty with income-sharing

Textbook analysis tells us that in a competitive labor market, the introduction of a minimum wage above the competitive equilibrium wage will cause unemployment. This paper makes three contributions to the basic theory of the minimum wage. First, we analyze the effects of a higher minimum wage in terms of poverty rather than in terms of unemployment. Second, we extend the standard textbook model to allow for income-sharing between employed and unemployed persons in society. Third, we extend the basic model to deal with income sharing within families. We find that there are situations in which a higher minimum wage raises poverty, others where it reduces poverty, and yet others in which poverty is unchanged. We characterize precisely how the poverty effect depends on four parameters: the degree of poverty aversion, the elasticity of labor demand, the ratio of the minimum wage to the poverty line, and the extent of income-sharing. Thus, shifting the perspective from unemployment to poverty leads to a considerable enrichment of the theory of the minimum wage.      

Promoting psychosocial well-being in unaccompanied asylum seeking young people in the United Kingdom

Unaccompanied minors looking for asylum in industrialized nations come with a host of psychosocial needs associated with separation and settlement. They are also resourceful, and willing to make the best of themselves in their new environments. This paper reviews literature concerning vulnerability and resilience that has emerged from refugee related studies, and those from social work with children looked after by local authorities. In combining these two areas of enquiry, the paper tests the messages they contain in reference to the work of a young asylum seekers project run in the United Kingdom. It confirms the view that unaccompanied minors are children first and foremost, exhibiting understandable vulnerabilities associated with separation and trauma, as well as being carriers of capacities that can help them to recover and settle after arrival. In this paper, it is proposed that promoting psychosocial well‐being for unaccompanied minors involves entering the young people's inner and outer worlds with therapeutic care, to aid the processes of self‐recovery. It also involves finding ways to regenerate a lost sense of belonging and of being in charge of their lives. Examples from the project's work with the young people are used to illustrate the complexity of helping them find a sense of home within their new territories.     

Population growth and poverty measurement

If the absolute number of poor people goes up, but the fraction of people in poverty comes down, has poverty gone up or gone down? The economist’s instinct, framed by population replication axioms that undergird standard measures of poverty, is to say that in this case poverty has gone down. But this goes against the instinct of those who work directly with the poor, for whom the absolute numbers notion makes more sense as they cope with more poor on the streets or in the soup kitchens. This paper attempts to put these two conceptions of poverty into a common framework. Specifically, it presents an axiomatic development of a family of poverty measures without a population replication axiom. This family has an intuitive link to standard measures, but it also allows one or other of “the absolute numbers” or the “fraction in poverty” conception to be given greater weight by the choice of relevant parameters. We hope that this family will prove useful in empirical and policy work, where it is important to give both views of poverty—the economist’s and the practitioner’s—their due.     

ON TWO-STAGE SUCCESSIVE SAMPLING

In repeated sampling enquiries application of method of successive sampling with partial replacement of units is advantageous. In this paper use of successive sampling technique when the sampling design is multi-stage has been studied. Estimates of population mean and its variance have been obtained (a) on the second occasion, and (b) on the h-th occasion under two systems of replacement, namely (i) by retaining only a fraction p of psu's along with their sample of ssu's, and (ii) by retaining all the psu's on the second occasion, but from each psu only a fraction p of the ssu's within them is retained. A cost function suitable to the design has been illustrated, with the help of data collected from a sample survey conducted by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.     

扁平世界中的学习型社区:对中国的分析

中国崛起为先进经济体的可能性为其他国家提供了颇为有趣的发展机遇.本文将主要探讨在地域辽阔、人口众多的中国,能否应用知识政策缩小发达地区和欠发达地区之间的种种差异.本文尤为关注发展学习型社区能否填补知识的鸿沟,弥补发展的差距.根据扁平世界理论,世界可以转化为一个公平的游戏场.中国历史悠久,地缘政治复杂,中国的历史教训为发展中国家众多怀抱梦想的社区提供了各种各样的经验教训.基于这一原因,我们将中国加以个案考察.中国发明了印刷术、火药,开启了足球运动(兹不一一列举),却在其巅峰时期建造了长城(本身就是一个工程上的奇迹),与世隔绝,此后日渐衰微,直至欧洲列强的火炮打开了国门,在沿海设立通商口岸,惊醒了中国人.事实上,已有学者论述,是邓小平的改革开放扭转了这一悲惨状态.此种观点未免过于简单,本文不敢苟同.本文认为,旧中国的衰败,并非由于国门的开放或关闭,而是由于缺少知识和衡量知识的标准.     

Approximation Algorithms for the Multiple Knapsack Problem with Assignment Restrictions

Motivated by a real world application, we study the multiple knapsack problem with assignment restrictions (MKAR). We are given a set of items, each with a positive real weight, and a set of knapsacks, each with a positive real capacity. In addition, for each item a set of knapsacks that can hold that item is specified. In a feasible assignment of items to knapsacks, each item is assigned to at most one knapsack, assignment restrictions are satisfied, and knapsack capacities are not exceeded. We consider the objectives of maximizing assigned weight and minimizing utilized capacity.We focus on obtaining approximate solutions in polynomial computational time. We show that simple greedy approaches yield 1/3-approximation algorithms for the objective of maximizing assigned weight. We give two different 1/2-approximation algorithms: the first one solves single knapsack problems successively and the second one is based on rounding the LP relaxation solution. For the bicriteria problem of minimizing utilized capacity subject to a minimum requirement on assigned weight, we give an (1/3,2)-approximation algorithm.