Accounting for the Value of Performance Measurement from the Perspective of Midwestern Mayors

This article studies the decades-long question, "Does performancemeasurement matter?" by examining how and why Midwest mayorsperceive value in performance measurement. The results showthat the tool is perceived positively, but its impact on decisionmaking depends on whether performance measurement is integratedinto strategic planning, goal setting, and internal communicationbetween city council members and departmental staff and on whethermajor stakeholders are involved in developing performance measures.The article discusses the implications for future results-orientedreforms and concludes that simply reporting performance informationin budgetary or public documents is not enough. Rather, a morecomprehensive look at the implementation issues of performancemeasurement and performance budgeting is necessary.     

Race and Child Welfare Policy: State-Level Variations in Disproportionality

African American children are represented among those housed in foster care at more than twice the rate of their overall representation in the US population. This racial disproportionality is well known among child welfare researchers, who have been attempting to explain the phenomenon. Are African American families under more surveillance than white families because of involvement with TANF and other government aid programs, resulting in higher rates of foster care placements? Are investigators more likely to pursue allegations of abuse within African American families? Are African American children more likely to suffer from maltreatment? My research makes a unique contribution by investigating state-level variations in child welfare policy outcomes. Following the innovative work of Soss et al. (American Journal of Political Science 52(3):536–553, 2008) who find that states with larger African American populations have more stringent welfare regimes, it would be reasonable to expect that states with larger African American populations would have more aggressive child protection policies, resulting in higher numbers of children being housed in state protective custody. This work exposes a strikingly different pattern: States with larger African American populations are distinctly less likely to take children into protective custody. In addition, states with larger African American populations have dramatically lower levels of racial disproportionality among their children in foster care. States with larger white majorities place more children in foster care and place disproportionately higher percentages of African American children in foster care.     

Hispanic Fertility,Immigration, and Race in the Twenty-First Century

In this paper, we systematically describe the connection between immigration and fertility in light of the increasing nativist reaction to Hispanic groups. We follow a life-course perspective to directly link migration and fertility transitions. The analysis combines original qualitative and quantitative data collected in Durham/Chapel Hill, NC as well as national level information from the current population survey. The qualitative data provide a person-centered approach to the connection between migration and fertility that we then extend in quantitative analyses. Results demonstrate that standard demographic measures that treat migration and fertility as separate processes considerably distort the childbearing experience of immigrant women, inflating fertility estimates for Hispanics as a whole. Once this connection is taken into consideration, the fertility levels of Hispanic women are much lower than those reported with standard measures and the fertility-specific contribution of Hispanics to US population growth is much reduced.     

中国出现新乡村性？——基于长江三角洲地区乡村旅游发展的研究

在中国,越来越多城市居民喜欢利用周末及节假日前往乡村地区休闲度假,给旅游地理学和休闲地理学研究带来了新的研究方向,为研究中国新型的甚至是未知的城乡关系提供了新的视角。这种新的休闲度假趋势主要产生于大中型城市周边的乡村地区。以位于长江三角洲的上海周边郊区为例,研究新型乡村旅游在城郊地区的发展,在保留和修缮传统乡村景观的同时,也产生出新型景观。旅游的发展促使乡村地区结构重组,建立了乡村旅游从业者的经营活动与当地农业发展之间的新联系。从中区分出两种乡村旅游经营模式:一种是为了适应当地乡村现代化发展需要并在当地政府支持下发展起来的乡村旅游示范村;另一种则是由个人开发且相对独立的小型农家乐或乡村旅游景点。这些地区乡村旅游的快速发展既有利于当地发展支柱产业,调整产业结构,扩大经济活动范围,也为城市居民重新审视乡村世界提供新视角。     

Zero variance Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian estimators

Interest is in evaluating, by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation, the expected value of a function with respect to a, possibly unnormalized, probability distribution. A general purpose variance reduction technique for the MCMC estimator, based on the zero-variance principle introduced in the physics literature, is proposed. Conditions for asymptotic unbiasedness of the zero-variance estimator are derived. A central limit theorem is also proved under regularity conditions. The potential of the idea is illustrated with real applications to probit, logit and GARCH Bayesian models. For all these models, a central limit theorem and unbiasedness for the zero-variance estimator are proved (see the supplementary material available on-line).     

道德的重量：论行动研究与社会工作实践

本文从中国社会工作教育面对的困境作为背景,再一次梳理社会工作专业的本质,认清社会工作专业作为道德和政治实践的面向。本文进一步简单介绍社会工作研究发展的历史,指出其知识生产与其他社会科学差异之处,以及实证主义研究的问题。最后,本文讨论行动研究与社会工作实践的关系,从而认为行动研究是最具有社会工作性格的研究范式。     

Marriage and Subjective Well-Being: How and Why Context Matters

Over the last 20 years the academic community has experienced a burgeoning interest in the causes and correlates of subjective well-being. One of the most consistent findings has been that married respondents report higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction than unmarried respondents. Despite its prevalence, scant empirical research has focused on the potential mechanisms driving this relationship. The current work draws on the Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System along with 2000 US Census data to investigate the role of context and reference groups in shaping the relationship between marriage and well-being. The primary research question is whether marriage has a greater influence on life satisfaction when it is more common and thus more normative? The findings offer new insight into the marriage/well-being relationship and have broad implication for how we think about the study of the causes and correlates of subjective well-being.     

Caregiver Decision-Making: Household Response to Child Illness in Sub-Saharan Africa

We draw upon a framework outlining household recognition and response to child illness proposed by Colvin et al. (Soc Sci Med 86:66–78, 2013) to examine factors predictive of treatment sought for a recent child illness. In particular, we model whether no treatment, middle layer treatment (traditional healer, pharmacy, community health worker, etc.), or biomedical treatment was sought for recent episodes of diarrhea, fever, or cough. Based on multinomial, multi-level analyses of Demographic and Health Surveys from 19 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, we determine that if women have no say in their own healthcare, they are unlikely to seek treatment in response to child illness. We find that women in sub-Saharan Africa need healthcare knowledge, the ability to make healthcare decisions, as well as resources to negotiate cost and travel, in order to access biomedical treatment. Past experience with medical services such as prenatal care and a skilled birth attendant also increases the odds that biomedical treatment for child illness is sought. We conclude that caregiver decision-making in response to child illness within households is critical to reducing child morbidity and mortality in sub-Saharan Africa.     

Evaluation of Alternative Cohort-Component Models for Local Area Population Forecasts

It is generally accepted by demographers that cohort-component projection models which incorporate directional migration are conceptually preferable to those using net migration. Yet net migration cohort-component models, and other simplified variations, remain in common use by both academics and practitioners because of their simplicity and low data requirements. While many arguments have been presented in favour of using one or other type of model, surprisingly little analysis has been undertaken to assess which tend to give the most accurate forecasts. This paper evaluates five cohort-component models which differ in the way they handle migration, four of which are well known, with one—a composite net migration model—being proposed here for the first time. The paper evaluates the performance of these five models in their unconstrained form, and then in a constrained form in which age–sex-specific forecasts are constrained to independent total populations from an extrapolative model shown to produce accurate forecasts in earlier research. Retrospective forecasts for 67 local government areas of New South Wales were produced for the period 1991–2011 and then compared to population estimates. Assessments of both total and age-specific population forecasts were made. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the forecasts constrained to total populations from the extrapolative model, with the constrained bi-regional model giving the lowest errors. The findings should be of use to practitioners in selecting appropriate models for local area population forecasts.     

Type of Health Facility and Utilization of Antenatal Care Services Among Ghanaian Women

This study examined if differences exist in the number and timing of antenatal care (ANC) visits for users of public and private health care facilities in Ghana. Also, the study explored if such variations could be attributed to health-provider factors or the selective socioeconomic characteristics of the users. Data were drawn from the recently collected Ghana Demographic and Health Survey and from a representative sample of t 2135 women who attended antenatal care in a health facility 6 months preceding the survey. Random-effects Poisson and logit models were employed for analysis. Results showed statistically significant differences between users of private and public health facilities for number of ANC visits, but not for the timing of such visits. Although some health-provider factors were significantly associated with ANC visits, these factors did not explain why users of private health facilities had significantly higher number of ANC visits than users of public health facilities. Differences in ANC visits for both private and public health facilities were rather explained by the selective socioeconomic characteristics of the users, especially as wealthy and educated women patronized private health care than poorer and uneducated women. The study concludes that Ghanaian women attending private health facilities may not have improved access to antenatal care compared to those attending public health facilities, and adds to the emerging body of literature that questions private health care in sub-Saharan Africa as more effective than public health care.