Practitioner views on the core functions of coaching in the implementation of an evidence-based intervention in child welfare

Despite coaching being identified as an important implementation strategy, scant information is available on the core functions of coaching, and few empirical studies are specific to coaching in the child welfare setting. This study explored practitioners' perceptions of the core functions of coaching by using semi-structured focus groups with coaches (n = 13) and interviews with coachees (n = 11) who were delivering Parent Management Training, Oregon (PMTO) model to families of children in foster care. Four themes were identified as the core functions of coaching: (1) supporting practitioners via strengths-oriented feedback; (2) promoting skill-building via collaboration and active learning strategies; (3) problem-solving for appropriate use and adaptation of the EBI with real-world cases, and (4) providing an accountability mechanism for high fidelity implementation. Collectively, this study's findings build knowledge on the core functions of coaching, which may be a critical strategy for integrating evidence-based interventions (EBI) into usual practice in child welfare settings. The findings suggest that this implementation strategy is more than a simple extension of training. Coaching was viewed as vital for supporting practitioners full adoption of the intervention in their day-to-day practice, fitting an EBI to the complex needs of child welfare families, and ensuring high-quality implementation. Also identified were some unique aspects of PMTO coaching, such as a strict strengths-orientation and observation-based feedback via mandatory video recordings of client sessions. Further research is needed to explore different coaching techniques, protocols, and formats to examine whether certain features promote a more effective path to implementation and, ultimately, client outcomes.     

Managing the implementation of innovations

Data from a field survey of acceptance and implementation of a new training system are used to assess the validity and utility of a conceptual model of implementation processes. Results demonstrate the model's applicability, provide evidence of its explanatory power, and suggest that the model can be usefully applied to guide implementation planning and monitoring. Such applications are expected to improve the return realized on investment in new technologies, policies, and programs.     

On the core of voting games

The purpose of this paper is to analyse a special class of cooperative games called voting games in the cases where the set of alternatives is finite or a convex and compact subset of an Euclidean space. In a first part we provide a complete classification of these games according to the non-emptiness of the core. Then in a second part we prove that the set of continuous preference profiles having a core is small from a topological point of view. The contribution of the paper is mainly a simplification of the existing proofs and the introduction of a suitable topology to formulate the second question.     

On the equal division core

The Equal Division Core (EDC) of a transferable utility cooperative game (TU game) is the set of efficient pay-off vectors for the grand coalition which are not blocked by the equal division allocation for any sub-coalition. Our objective is to provide an axiomatic characterization of the EDC as a solution of TU games.This is revised version of a part of Chapt. 3 of my Ph.D. dissertation. Beginning with suggesting the problem, my supervisor Bhaskar Dutta extended his unstinting help in every step of this pursuit without which this work could not have been possible. I have also much benefitted from the comments and suggestions from the responsible editor, two anonymous referees, Hervé Moulin and seminar participants at Bilkent and Bonn Universities (especially from the detailed comments of Reinhard Selten). Of course, the shortcomings remaining are mine. Somdeb Lahiri, Anjan Mukherji and T. Yamato have been kind enough to make certain literature accessible to me.Research fellowships from the Indian Statistical Institute and CNRS, France and hospitality at GEMMA, Universite de Caen are gratefully acknowledged.31 March 2000     

Decision-making capacity: the core of self-neglect

Self-neglect in the elderly is a pervasive public health issue that affects 1.2 million elderly each year. In working with self-neglect cases, ethical issues are often raised that challenge all professionals. Professional and family's wishes to remove obstacles to the wellbeing of an elderly may be directly in opposition to the individual's wishes. The core of many ethical dilemmas resides in the question of the individual decision-making capacity. Issues surrounding decision-making capacity are complex with many confounding factors. Through case-discussion, fundamental ethical issues of decision-making capacity relating to self-neglect will be explored and strategies will be offered to resolve these dilemmas.     

Auditing the implementation of Looking After Children

An audit showed that all authorities in the first implementation cohort had introduced the LAC materials. Standards of completion varied and were greater for children admitted post-implementation than for those already looked after.     

Nash implementation and the bargaining problem

We study Nash implementation of the bargaining solutions in a cake sharing set up. We argue that the minimal Pareto optimal, symmetric and Nash implementable SBS is the one inducing all Pareto optimal and midpoint-dominating utility vectors in each state.     

Finessing a point: augmenting the core

The “finesse point” introduced here extends the notion of a core; it is a position that minimizes what a candidate needs to do to counter moves that are made by an opponent. The definition, which is motivated by the “chaos theorem” as well as by the dynamics of positive and negative political campaigning, is also used to define a “malicious point,” which is an optimal location from which a candidate can engage in “negative campaigning.”     

Existence of a multicameral core

When a single group uses majority rule to select a set of policies from an n-dimensional compact and convex set, a core generally exists if and only if n = 1. Finding analogous conditions for core existence when an n-dimensional action requires agreement from m groups has been an open problem. This paper provides a solution to this problem by establishing sufficient conditions for core existence and characterizing the location and dimensionality of the core for settings in which voters have Euclidean preferences. The conditions establish that a core may exist in any number of dimensions whenever n ≤ m as long as there is sufficient preference homogeneity within groups and heterogeneity between groups. With m > 1 the core is however generically empty for . These results provide a generalization of the median voter theorem and of non-existence results for contexts of concern to students of multiparty negotiation, comparative politics and international relations.     

On the generic emptiness of the local core of voting games

The local core of voting games is investigated from a genericity point of view. There exist preference profiles for which it is empty and there exist preference profiles for which the local core and its complement are both dense in the set of alternatives. Furthermore the subset of profiles having an empty local core is dense in the whole set of profiles. Some remarks on the choice of the topology are provided.We are grateful to the French Commissariat Général du Plan for financial support and to Norman Schofield for having the opportunity to read McKelvey and Schofield (1986) before the publication. We are indebted to two anonymous referees for helpful suggestions and to Jerry Kelly for important comments and for correcting our English.     

上海绿色电力机制实施效果评价

上海是我国最早实施绿色电力机制的城市之一。但现行的自愿认购机制实施效果不佳,大部分绿电没有得到认购,大量绿色电力不能通过现有机制得到消费,造成可再生能源产业的良性发展缺乏动力。     

Spoilers,blocking coalitions,and the core

This paper surveys non-cooperative implementations of the core which tell an intuitive story of coalition formation. Under the core solution concept, if a blocking coalition exists those agents abandon the current allocation without regard for the consequences to players outside the blocking coalition. Yet in certain circumstances, these players have an incentive to prevent formation of any blocking coalition; a game analyzed in Lagunoff (Games Econ Behav 7:54–61, 1994) is vulnerable to such circumstances. To obtain all core allocations and only core allocations, a mechanism must either restrict the actions of non-members of a proposed coalition, or ensure that non-members are unharmed by the departure of the coalition. These requirements illustrate the core’s nonchalance toward agents not in blocking coalitions. The author gives special thanks to Beth Allen and Andy McLennan for their direction, and gratefully acknowledges valuable discussions with Roger Lagunoff, Hugo Sonnenschein, John Ledyard, Myrna Wooders, Nuray Akin, as well as comments from participants at the 2004 Spring Midwest Economic Theory and the Society for Economic Design conferences and from anonymous referees. All errors remain my own. Partial funding came from National Science Foundation grants DMI-0070257 and DMI-0217974.     

Market arbitrage, social choice and the core

 This paper establishes a clear connection between equilibrium theory, game theory and social choice theory by showing that, for a well defined social choice problem, a condition which is necessary and sufficient to solve this problem – limited arbitrage – is the same as the condition which is necessary and sufficient to establish the existence of an equilibrium and the core. The connection is strengthened by establishing that a market allocation, which is in the core, can always be realized as a social allocation, i.e. an allocation which is optimal according to an ordering chosen by a social choice rule. Limited arbitrage characterizes those economies without Condorcet triples, and those for which Arrow’s paradox can be resolved on choices of large utility values. Received: 30 December 1994/Accepted: 12 August 1996     

How stable is the core discussion network?

Researchers have paid increasing attention to the core discussion network, the set of people we turn to when discussing important matters. Because the core discussion network is theorized to be composed of people's closest ties, not fleeting acquaintances, it is expected to be largely stable, evolving slowly over the span of people's lives. However, recent studies have shown that networks are strongly affected by the contexts in which people interact with others, and as people experience life course transitions, they also often enter new contexts – school, college, work, marriage, and retirement. We ask whether, as actors enter new social contexts, the core discussion network remains stable or changes rapidly. Based on original, longitudinal, qualitative and quantitative data on the experience of first-year graduate students in three academic departments in a large university, we examine the stability of the core discussion network over the first 6 and 12 months in this new context. We test four competing hypotheses that focus on strength of ties, new opportunities, obligations, and routine activity and predict, respectively, stasis, expansion, shedding, and substitution. We find that the core discussion network changes remarkably quickly, with little or no lag, and that it appears to do so because both the obligations that people face and the routine activities they engage in are transformed by new institutional environments. Findings suggest that core discussion network may be less a “core” network than a highly contextual support network in which people are added and dropped as actors shift from environment to environment.     

A universal meta bargaining implementation of the Nash solution

This paper follows van Damme (1986) in presenting a meta bargaining approach that justifies the Nash bargaining solution. But in contrast to van Damme's procedure our meta bargaining game is universal in the sense that all bargaining solutions are allowed as strategic choices in the meta bargaining game. Also our result holds true for any number n of players. Received: 31 July 2000/Accepted: 19 March 2001     

Nash implementation of Lindahl allocations

We define a class of Nash based mechanisms that implement Lindahl allocations in standard public good economies. As those that first proved Nash implementation of Lindahl allocations, defined by Hurwicz (1979) and Walker (1981), the mechanisms provided here are continuous, feasible, and independent of agents' characteristics. In economies with two agents (e.g., bilateral monopolies, duopolies, principal-agent models), our mechanisms are also applicable, in contrast to the well-behaved mechanisms in the literature, and they satisfy favourable stability properties.