Parent-perceived Attitudes of Professionals: Implications for Service Providers

While parents' reactions to a diagnosis of disability in their child have been well documented, less is known of parents' reactions to the professionals who provide the diagnostic and support services used by parents. This study identified four major parameters within which the attitudes of professionals are perceived by parents of children/teenagers diagnosed as intellectually disabled. Comments of the 131 mothers and fathers interviewed helped to shed light on what they have expected of service providers, and suggest adjustments that may need to be made by professionals to the attitudes they convey in interaction with parents.     

The contribution of non-profit organisations to the management of HIV/AIDS: A comparative study

This article elaborates a typology of organisational responses during the first decade of AIDS/HIV in a dozen Western European countries.Welfare mixes: that is, the division of task between all producers of welfare (both private and public), and the processes at work in these policies, are analysed. Three types are identified, presenting unexpected variants in respect to general typologies of Western welfare states. They underline the importance of non-profit actors and also argue that new forms of co-operation between those actors and public ones can lead to renewed management of the main social issues currently facing Western welfare states.     

Values and Evolutionary Psychology

Scholars suggest that evolutionary psychology may provide a foundation for assumptions regarding human values. I explore this suggestion by developing two arguments regarding the permissiveness of norms regulating male and female sexual activity. The first relies on the standard rational choice assumption that people value resources, and the second relies on an assumption suggested by evolutionary psychology that actors value seeing their children successfully reach adulthood. These two assumptions produce contrasting predictions regarding sex norms. I describe the implications of these predictions for explaining cross‐cultural variation and present evidence that supports the evolutionary psychology‐based predictions in this context. I also suggest implications of the two approaches for explaining norms cross‐nationally and within the United States. The article provides support for the utility of evolutionary psychology in developing assumptions about values.     

Domestic Violence Service Providers’ Needs and Perceptions of Technology: A Qualitative Study

There is growing recognition of the need to better understand the intersections between the work of domestic violence service providers and technology. Professionals who work with clients impacted by domestic violence are increasingly using technologies across different aspects of their work, including communicating with other professionals and seeking information and resources via the Internet. The current study used qualitative data from two sources—individual interviews and two focus groups—to learn about domestic violence service providers’ needs and perceptions related to technology use. The results provide insights about technologies used currently, expected benefits of future technological advances, barriers to using technology, and participants’ self-rated levels of comfort with technology.     

Culture and Demography: From Reluctant Bedfellows to Committed Partners

Demography and culture have had a long but ambivalent relationship. Cultural influences are widely recognized as important for demographic outcomes but are often “backgrounded” in demographic research. I argue that progress toward a more successful integration is feasible and suggest a network model of culture as a potential tool. The network model bridges both traditional (holistic and institutional) and contemporary (tool kit) models of culture used in the social sciences and offers a simple vocabulary for a diverse set of cultural concepts, such as attitudes, beliefs, and norms, as well as quantitative measures of how culture is organized. The proposed model conceptualizes culture as a nested network of meanings represented by schemas that range in complexity from simple concepts to multifaceted cultural models. I illustrate the potential value of a model using accounts of the cultural changes underpinning the transformation of marriage in the United States and point to developments in the social, cognitive, and computational sciences that could facilitate the application of the model in empirical demographic research.     

Health Policy and the Politics of Evidence

National decisions on the drugs, treatments and medical devices that should be funded through public expenditure are a fundamental element of health policy. But despite a political emphasis upon evidence‐based policy, the results of rigorous clinical trials and statistical modelling techniques rarely speak for themselves. So, does the pre‐eminence traditionally accorded to quantitative data in the medical field underpin policy decisions on a consistent basis? Or are more subtle, less transparent characteristics of context and interaction evident in the shaping of attendant decisions? This article considers these questions by drawing on a study of decision‐making in the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)—an organization established by the British government in 1999 to decide whether selected health technologies should be made available throughout the National Health Service in England and Wales. In broad terms, the findings point to the primacy of arguments based on quantitatively oriented, experimentally derived data but also to a discursive hegemony of clinicians and health economists in mediating, including or debarring more qualitative, experientially based evidence. A more complex, dynamic understanding of policy governance in the field of health technology appraisal—founded on a discursive appropriation of the idea of the “common good”—goes some way to explaining the persistence of this hegemony despite an avowedly inclusive, plural approach to decision‐making.     

Consensual partnering in Australia: A review and 1991 census profile

This paper is the first part of a two-part examination of consensual partnering in Australia. It reviews the Australian literature on consensual partnering, summarizing evidence of its proliferation since the mid-1960s and also the findings of investigations into its nature and the personal attributes that predispose some people more than others to adopt it. It then discusses the shortcomings of Australian census data as a source for studying consensual unions, before using data from the 1991 Census to present the first elements in a comprehensive profile of the cohabiting population. These cover the basic demography of consensual partnering: the ages, marital statuses and family type distributions of those involved. The second author contributed to this paper while a student of Graduate Studies in Demography, The Australian National University. Views expressed are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those of the Australian Bureau of Statistics.