Predicting the recipients of social work support,and its impact on emotional and behavioural problems in early childhood

This paper examines the recipients of social work support in the Millennium Cohort Study. Using panel analysis and fixed effects models, it investigates the factors that lead to the receipt of any type of social work support for individuals with young children and the effects of this support on changes in the prevalence of emotional and behavioural problems in these children. We find that divorce or separation, and episodes of homelessness are two important factors that lead to the receipt of social work support. Mothers with male children are also more likely to receive social work support. However, we find no clear evidence that social work support has any effect on changes in children's emotional and behavioural problems over time. The implications of these findings for social work research and for practice and policy are discussed.     

The relationship between reputation,employer branding and corporate social responsibility

Reputation management requires coordination between internal understanding and external expectations (Cornelissen, 2011). The focus of this study were external expectations of potential employees. The main goal of the study was to contribute to the understanding of corporate reputation and its connections with perceived corporate social responsibility and employer brands. All three concepts were investigated amongst 550 senior college business students. The units of analysis were top twenty national organizations, rated according to a syndicated study on employer attractiveness. The results show that students assign good reputation to those organizations that are perceived as socially responsible and with a good employer brand. Reputation, at least according to our results, seems to be the umbrella concept that encompasses both perceived corporate social responsibility and perceived employer brands. Organizations that develop different strategies, policies and practices with regards to socially responsible behavior and nurturing employer brands have higher levels of perceived reputation among students. Additionally, students' perceptions and position on the list of the most attractive employers is consistent.     

Virtual Interpersonal Touch and Digital Chameleons

We studied the characteristics of hand touch with a mechanical device that approximated a handshake, and we then examined the effect of handshake mimicry on assessment of a partner. Two participants interacted with a force-feedback joystick that recorded each of their hand movements individually. The two participants then greeted one another by feeling the recording of the other person’s movements via the force-feedback device. For each dyad, one of the participants actually received his or her own virtual handshake back under the guise that it was the other person’s virtual handshake. Results demonstrated three significant findings. First, for any given participant, a metric that took into account position, angle, speed, and acceleration of the hand movements correlated highly within individuals across two handshakes. Second, across participants, these metrics demonstrated specific differences by gender. Finally, there was an interaction between gender and mimicry, such that male participants liked people who mimicked their handshakes more than female participants did. We discuss the implications of these findings and relate them to theories of social interaction.

Exploring Adoption-Specific Curricula in Undergraduate and Graduate Degree Programs

The systemic impact of adoption suggests the need to explore adoption-specific curricula in baccalaureate and graduate degree programs. Using a convenience sample, the present exploratory study collected data in two phases. Phase one included email requests for adoption syllabi to professional email lists and to identified faculty with adoption research and practice expertise. In phase two, 22 faculty members who responded by emailing syllabi were invited to participate in an online survey. Results only begin to unveil what we know about adoption-specific curricula in higher education. Suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Food Insecurity Measurement: Stakeholder Comparisons of the EU-SILC and HFSSM Indicators and Considerations Towards the Usefulness of a Headline Indicator

Social Indicators Research - Prior to the February 2019 announcement that the Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM) will be used to estimate household food insecurity, there has not been a...     

Provident funds and investment in developing countries in the Pacific

This report describes the current avenues of investment used by provident fund schemes in seven island nations in the Pacific; the returns on these investments; the criteria for their selection; and the governments' guidelines and restrictions on these schemes. New investment guidelines from 1988 to 1992 are summarized and the reasons for them are explained. Limitations on permitted investment avenues are briefly described. The latter part of the report, and its main focus, analyses the problems faced when trying to balance the interests of provident fund members with national interests when selecting investments. The report concludes with some recommendations for solutions to the problems related to limited investment outlets and government restrictions. To gather information for this report, a questionnaire was sent to the provident fund schemes in the Pacific and the available annual reports were analysed. Responses, when received, have been included.     

The optimal design of fallible organizations: invariance of optimal decision criterion and uniqueness of hierarchy and polyarchy structures

We present a general framework to study the project selection problem in an organization of fallible decision-makers. We show that when the organizational size and the majority rule for project acceptance are optimized simultaneously, the optimal quality of decision-making, as determined by the decision criterion, is invariant, and depends only on the expertise of decision-makers. This result clarifies that the circumstances under which the decision-making quality varies with the organizational structure are situations where the organizational size or majority rule is restricted from reaching the optimal level. Moreover, in contrast to earlier findings in the literature that the hierarchy and the polyarchy are generally sub-optimal structures, we show that when the size, structure and decision criterion are simultaneously optimized, the hierarchy and the polyarchy are in fact the only possible optimal organizational structures when decision-making costs are present.

---

Discreteness Causes Bias in Percentage-Based Comparisons: A Case Study From Educational Testing

Discretizing continuous distributions can lead to bias in parameter estimates. We present a case study from educational testing that illustrates dramatic consequences of discreteness when discretizing partitions differ across distributions. The percentage of test takers who score above a certain cutoff score (percent above cutoff, or “PAC”) often describes overall performance on a test. Year-over-year changes in PAC, or ΔPAC, have gained prominence under recent U.S. education policies, with public schools facing sanctions if they fail to meet PAC targets. In this article, we describe how test score distributions act as continuous distributions that are discretized inconsistently over time. We show that this can propagate considerable bias to PAC trends, where positive ΔPACs appear negative, and vice versa, for a substantial number of actual tests. A simple model shows that this bias applies to any comparison of PAC statistics in which values for one distribution are discretized differently from values for the other.