Consistency: a pre-requisite for inspecting old people's homes?

Correspondence to Dr Ian Gibbs, Centre for Housing Policy, University of York, Heslington, York YO1 5DD. Summary Inspection of old people's homes, in both local authority andindependent sectors, forms a major component in the work ofthe new ‘arm's length‘ inspection units. The successof these units will depend in part on inspectors' ability tomake consistent judgements based on agreed standards. This articlereports on a study which examined the extent to which inspectorswere able to reach reliable conclusions about the quality ofcare in old people's homes and the possible contribution ofchecklists in this task.     

MEASURING LEVELS OF PARTY IDENTIFICATION DOES QUESTION ORDER MATTER?

This article examines whether asking the vote question beforeparty identification alters the strength of partisanship andits relationship to vote choice. It employs the 1992 BritishElection Survey, which included a random split half-sample experiment,and the 1992–93 American Election Study Panel, where thequestion order for party identification and the vote were changed.The results show that altering the question ordering had verylittle effect in Britain and no significant effect in the UnitedStates. These results are consistent with the notion that partyidentification is one of the more enduring and stable componentsof mass political behavior in both presidential and parliamentarysystems.     

Agency Decentralization: Planning and Assessment

Summary Criteria are examined for the location of area offices in SocialServices Departments, drawing on the monitored experience ofdealing with voluntary callers to an area office in the ProbationService. Changes were observed in numbers of voluntary callersand the kinds of problems presented, together with developmentsin inter-agency relationships. The caller's subjective feelingsregarding the accessibility of the agency were found to be importantdeterminants of agency use. Implications are drawn out for planningdecisions in local authorities     

Campaign Activities and Electoral Outcomes in Britain 1979 and 1983

Political broadcasting through the electronic media has largelydisplaced two older methods of influencing voters—canvassingand advertising in the press—as the dominant party campaignactivity during elections. This article utilizes survey datacollected during the 1979 and 1983 British general electionsto estimate the reported effects of these three types of campaignactivity on electoral outcomes. The results show that few votersreport being influenced by canvassing and advertising, and thenet effect on the vote is either small or nonexistent. By contrast,around 1 in 6 report being influenced by a party political broadcast,and those most influenced are eventual Liberal-Alliance voters.The net electoral effect of political broadcasting can rangeas high as 3.4 percent, but gains for the Conservatives andLabour are offset by the political broadcasting of competitors.The main exceptions are the Liberals in 1979 and the Alliancein 1983, who made a net gain of 1.5 percent and 3.3 percentof the vote, respectively.     

Statistical inference concerning weighted Poisson rates under some natural order restrictions

A conditional Poisson model is proposed for situations where one wants to compare the rate parameters for several populations, adjusting for a 'size' parameter and the random e ects of the subjects. Sometimes the physical nature of the problem makes it logical to consider some order restrictions on the rate parameters. The rate parameters are estimated and tested for under such order restrictions. This investigation is motivated by a real-life example on butterfly behavior, and the estimation and tests of hypotheses are illustrated over this data set.     

Comrades Compromised: The Zimbabwean and South African Liberation Struggles Compared and Contrasted

At the end of April (1992), President Mugabe was given a rough ride at the inaugural conference of the Zimbabwe Liberation War Veterans Association. Almost half of the some 36,000 veterans are unemployed, and Mugabe had to listen to accusations that his government was run by 'opportunists and bourgeois elements' who want to exclude the veterans.¹
Mr Mandela was himself booed (in April 1993) when he defended his partnership with Mr De Klerk. PAC leader Clarence Makwetu, whose APLA guerrillas have been killing white civilians, was cheered when he entered the stadium, obliging Mr Mandela to pause in his address.²     

Dependency and its Relationship to the Assessment of Care Needs of Elderly People

Correspondence to Dr Ian Gibbs, Social Policy Research Unit, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York, Heslington, York, YO1 5DD Summary A number of previous studies of old people in residential homeshave suggested that a substantial minority are not in need ofthat form of care. The rapid growth in the number of peoplein private homes, supported by social security payments andentering without any independent assessment, has led to concernthat many more people enter residential homes without needingto be there. Social workers were employed in four areas to assess the needsof residents newly admitted to homes in the independent sectorand over eighty per cent were found to be in need of residentialcare. It is suggested that the measures of dependency used toindicate need in some previous studies fail to take into accountthe complex factors involved in deciding whether a person needsresidential care.     

北京钢铁(工业)学院1952～1966年金属材料专业教育的开拓和发展

北京科技大学材料科学与工程系的前身是北京钢铁(工业)学院金相热处理系,是建国后最早从事专业金属材料科学教学和研究的机构之一,在金属材料及热处理领域的人才培养和学术研究方面作出了杰出的贡献。文章对该系的创建者及重要领导人章守华教授进行了访谈,回溯了该系早期的创建和发展情况。