“It's hard work,believe me!”: Active efforts to optimise housing by people who live with mental illness and access housing assistance

Secure and appropriate housing is critical for the well‐being of people living with mental illness (consumers). Yet it is often difficult to achieve. Housing assistance is available, but is often difficult for consumers to access and negotiate. While the need for support is well‐recognised, little is known about the active part consumers play in finding and keeping appropriate accommodation. This paper addresses the research question: How do consumers who use housing assistance actively manage their housing situations? In‐depth interviews were conducted with 18 consumers who had used housing assistance within the past five years. These were analysed using constant comparative analysis, based on a grounded theory approach. Participants engaged in a range of activities to address six major concerns: working toward my home; following the rules to keep what I have; managing and improving my accommodation; working with housing services; living within my current situation; and finding and using supports. All participants described times when their mental health negatively affected their ability to do these activities. The findings highlight the need for housing services and mental health services to collaborate to develop policies and protocols that place reasonable demands on consumers and support their abilities to actively manage their housing situations.     

Managing the Revenue of Sales Platforms: Insights into Service Fees

Online sales platforms have grown substantially in recent years. These platforms assist sellers to conduct sales, and in return, collect service fees from sellers. We study the fee policies by considering a fee‐setting platform, on which a seller may conduct a sale with a reserve price to a group of potential buyers: the seller retains the object for sale if the final trading price is below the reserve price. The platform may charge two types of fees as in current practice: a reserve fee as a function of the seller's reserve price and a final value fee as a function of the sale's final trading price. We derive the optimality condition for fee policies, and show that the platform can use either just a final value fee or just a reserve fee to achieve optimality. In the former case, the optimal final value fee charged by the platform is independent of the number of buyers. In the latter case, the optimal reserve fee is often a decreasing, instead of increasing, function of the seller's reserve price. An increasing reserve fee may make the seller reluctant to use a positive reserve price and hurt the platform's revenue. In general, the optimal fees are nonlinear functions, but in reality, linear fees are commonly used because of their simplicity for implementation. We show that a linear fee policy is indeed optimal in the case that the seller's valuation follows a power distribution. In other cases, our numerical analysis suggests close‐to‐optimal performance of the linear policy.     

Evaluation of free to grow: head start partnerships to promote substance-free communities

Free to Grow: Head Start Partnerships to Promote Substance-free Communities (FTG) was a national initiative in which local Head Start (HS) agencies, in partnership with other community organizations, implemented a mix of evidence-based family-strengthening and community-strengthening strategies. The evaluation of FTG used a quasi-experimental design to compare 14 communities that participated in the FTG intervention with 14 matched comparison communities. Telephone surveys were conducted with two cohorts of the primary caregivers of children in HS at baseline and then annually for 2 years. The survey was also administered to repeated cross-sectional samples of primary caregivers of young children who were not enrolled in HS. No consistent evidence was found in changes in family functioning or neighborhood conditions when the 14 FTG sites were compared to 14 matched sites. However, caregivers of young children who were not in HS in three high-implementing FTG sites showed evidence of improvements in neighborhood organization, neighborhood norms against substance abuse, and child disciplinary practices. Results provide highly limited support for the concept that family and neighborhood conditions that are likely to affect child development and well-being can be changed through organized efforts implemented by local HS programs.     

Bahadur efficiency of the F-test

Extremal problems in large deviations of the F-statistic are considered. It is shown that the slowest rate of convergence over a specified class of distributions of the F-statistic is slower than exponential, and that the Bahadur efficiency of the F-statistic with respect to some distribution-free competitors is identically zero.     

What We Can’t See? Understanding the Representations and Meanings of UAI,Barebacking, and Semen Exchange in Gay Male Pornography

Since the late 1990s, the use of condoms within gay male pornography has been on the wane. Moving from a niche category into more mainstream forms of commercial pornography, unprotected anal sex has become a dominant theme within this sphere of gay male sexual representation. However, while the definition of what constitutes bareback pornography may at first sight appear unproblematic, this article argues that meanings and understandings of unprotected anal intercourse (UAI) are not constant across all genres of gay male pornography. Using textual analysis and focus group methods, the authors demonstrate how subcultural understandings of UAI are dependent on a variety of textual factors. These include the age, body type, and racial identities of the performers; the setting, context, and mise-en-scène of the pornographic scene; and the deployment of power relations between the insertive and receptive partners.

The article concludes by suggesting that the recognition of the diverse representations of “barebacking” found in contemporary gay male pornography should influence the ways in which health promotion strategies address discussions of UAI and bareback pornography.     

Letter to the Editor: Respecting Multiple Epistemologies in Social Work

This article is an invited response to “Toward a Learning Environment That Supports Diversity and Difference: A Response to Dessel, Bolen, and Shep - ardson,” by David R. Hodge (Journal of Social Work Education, 47(2), pp. 235-251).     

Book reviews

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Ira Berlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1998. x, 497pp. $29.95. ISBN 0–674–81092–9.

More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas. Edited by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. xi, 341 pp. £14.99 (paper). ISBN 0–253–21043–7.

From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery. Seymour drescher. Foreword by Stanley L. Engerman. London: Macmillan. 1999. xxv, 454pp. £55.00. ISBN 0–333–73748–2.

Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit. Shane White and Graham White. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 1998. xv. 301pp. £23.95 (cloth). ISBN 0–80143179–4.

Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. W. T. Lhamon, Jr. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. 1998. 269pp. $25.95 (cloth). ISBN 0–674–74711–9.

Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan. John W. Quist. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1998. xi, 562pp. £45.90. ISBN 0–8071–2133–9.

Frccdpeople in the Tobacco South: Virginia, 1860–1900. Jeffrey R. Kerr‐Ritchie. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina press. 1999. xv, 345 pp. $49.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). ISBN 0–8078–2460–7; 0–8078–4763–1.

The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Texans. Barry A. Crouch. Austin: University of Texas at Austin Press. 1999. xix, 187pp. $12.95 (paper). ISBN 0–292–71219–7.

Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912. B.W. Higman. Kingston: The Press University of the West Indies. 1998. xv, 384pp. £20.00/$35.00. ISBN 976–640–039–3.

In Place of Slavery: A Social History of British Indian and Javanese Laborers in Suriname. Rosemarijn Hoefte. Gainsville: University of Florida Press. 1998. xii, 275pp. $49.95. ISBN 0–8130–1625–8.

Writing West Indian Histories. B.W. Higman. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. 1999. xiv, 289 pp. £15.50 (paper). ISBN 0–333–73296–0.

Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues. Edited by Tom Brass and Marcel Van Der Linden. Bern/Berlin/Frankfurt a.M: Peter Lang. 1997 (International and Comparative Social History 5). 602 pp. £52.00. ISBN 3–906756–87–4.

Servicing the Master. Slavery and Society in Nineteenth Century Morocco. Mohammed Ennaji. Translated by Seth Graebner. London: Macmillan, 1999. xix, 166pp. £35.00. ISBN 0–333–75477–8.

Servants of Allah. Sylviane A. Diouf. New York: New York University Press. 1998. vii, 254 pp. $18.50. ISBN 0–8147–1905–8