Children Living Away from Home

SUMMARY. Millions of children across the world live away from home; many because of wars, famines, dictatorships and poverty. Children live away from home in Britain because of family breakdown, neglect, abuse and other disadvantages, but also through parental choice and educational need. There is inadequate information about numbers, reasons and outcomes. Three main alternatives to living at home in Britain are boarding schools, residential homes and foster care. Traditional barriers between education and welfare and policies of care placements based on inadequate data have resulted in damaging gaps in services and poor placement decisions for many children living away from home. The early 1990s have brought about a national consensus based on new legislation and a group of Inquiries which provides the opportunity for major changes and improvements in services. International deliberations and action could and should be part of these changes.     

Focus Groups as a Tool for Policy Analysis

Focus groups were formerly associated with market research but have recently gained some measure of social scientific respectability. In this article, I briefly recapitulate the history of focus groups and then examine their role in 4 (2 Dutch, 2 American) policy research projects. In each case, the focus groups provided an understanding of the interests and values of different stakeholder groups and per-mitted the analysts to predict the groups' reactions to policy alternatives. This served to link the focus groups to the underlying policy problem, to set the policy issues in their appropriate context, to take due account of the technical complexities of the situation, and to orient toward integrating the results of the focus groups with the other tools used in the policy analysis. The four cases shared a "spiral" model approach to focus groups, in which the discussion moves from generic to specific toward the object of focus rather than tackling it directly. This permits both a breadth and depth of perspective and helps avoid posturing. I conclude that focus groups provide a value for policy analysis because they enable participant stakeholders to become part of the process, help uncover misunderstandings that conceal underlying agreements among stakeholders, and uncover potential problems of implementation.     

Mending fences: selling AIDS drugs to the gay community

As more drug companies enter the fray with products to treat HIV and AIDS, competition could get fierce. Pharmaceutical marketers also have to overcome the disenchantment within the gay community regarding the medical establishment. They will have a better chance of success if they understand the history of AIDS and its relationship to the gay community.     

When you don't need to join: The effects of guaranteed payoffs on bargaining in three-person cooperative games

Theory and Decision - Two coalition formation experiments were performed in which subjects played twenty 3-person games in characteristic function form. The experiments were identical except for...