Culture and community: drink and soft drugs in Hebridean youth culture

This paper discusses the way in which ideas about deviance and thus moral judgements are ultimately grounded within native culture. Through focusing on underage drinking and soft drug use in the Western Isles of Scotland an analysis is presented which seeks to unfold the relationship between tradition, morality and belonging.     

Exploring social work students’ attitudes towards feminism: opening up conversations

This paper reports on findings from a 2013 study of UK social work students’ attitudes towards feminism and the perceived relevance of feminist theory to social work practice. Building on an earlier, single-university exploration of students’ views, the study made use of social media (Twitter) to access opinions of students from seven universities across the UK using an online survey tool. Whilst it is not possible to make generalising claims based on ‘opt in’ research of this nature, the findings are nevertheless suggestive of some important issues for those working with social work students today. Principally, they showed that understandings of feminism in the student cohort were diverse and may be very different to the feminism that an older generation of academic and fieldwork educators may have grown up with. The article argues that it is important, in the light of this, to interrogate what we mean by feminism in our work with students. This will then allow us to open up wider conversations about power, agency and structure, thus bringing greater criticality and reflexivity to our teaching and learning.     

Information Criteria for the Paired-Comparisons Problem

We contrast comparisons of several treatments to control in a single experiment versus separate experiments in terms of Type I error rate and power. It is shown that if no Dunnett correction is applied in the single experiment case with relatively few treatments, the distribution of the number of Type I errors is not that different from what it would be in separate experiments with the same number of subjects in each treatment. The difference becomes more pronounced with a larger number of treatments. Extreme outcomes (either very few or very many rejections) are more likely when comparisons are made in a single experiment. When the total number of subjects is the same in a single versus separate experiments, power is generally higher in a single experiment even if a Dunnett adjustment is made.     

Parameter Estimation for Hidden Markov Models with Intractable Likelihoods

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a popular technique for analysing data for complex models where the likelihood function is intractable. It involves using simulation from the model to approximate the likelihood, with this approximate likelihood then being used to construct an approximate posterior. In this paper, we consider methods that estimate the parameters by maximizing the approximate likelihood used in ABC. We give a theoretical analysis of the asymptotic properties of the resulting estimator. In particular, we derive results analogous to those of consistency and asymptotic normality for standard maximum likelihood estimation. We also discuss how sequential Monte Carlo methods provide a natural method for implementing our likelihood‐based ABC procedures.     

From altruism to sociality: A switch in perception

The article critically reviews concepts and uses of the term altruism in relation to the emergence of the capitalist welfare state. It argues that altruism may be regarded as a fetishized representation of ‘sociality’ and that notions of altruism tend to obscure or distort understandings of the essential social interdependence that characterises humanity as a species. The article reaches back to anthropological evidence, to religious and philosophical influences, and to insights from scientific inquiry and it makes a case for a humanistic switch in perspective within the study of social policy.     

Estimating the Effects of a Time‐Limited Earnings Subsidy for Welfare‐Leavers

In the Self Sufficiency Project (SSP) welfare demonstration, members of a randomly assigned treatment group could receive a subsidy for full‐time work. The subsidy was available for 3 years, but only to people who began working full time within 12 months of random assignment. A simple optimizing model suggests that the eligibility rules created an “establishment” incentive to find a job and leave welfare within a year of random assignment, and an “entitlement” incentive to choose work over welfare once eligibility was established. Building on this insight, we develop an econometric model of welfare participation that allows us to separate the two effects and estimate the impact of the earnings subsidy on welfare entry and exit rates among those who achieved eligibility. The combination of the two incentives explains the time profile of the experimental impacts, which peaked 15 months after random assignment and faded relatively quickly. Our findings suggest that about half of the peak impact of SSP was attributable to the establishment incentive. Despite the extra work effort generated by SSP, the program had no lasting impact on wages and little or no long‐run effect on welfare participation.     

The Relationship between Procedural Rationality and Political Behavior in Strategic Decision Making

Despite the central place of rationality and political behavior in the decision-making literature, we know little about the relationship between these two dimensions. Can decisions be made using both rational and political methods, or must managers use one approach or the other? These questions were addressed in a study of 61 strategic decisions in 24 companies using a multiple-informant, structured interview protocol. Results indicate that procedural rationality and political behavior are independent dimensions of the strategic decision-making process. The implications of our findings for future strategic decision-making research are discussed.     

Directed Matching and Monetary Exchange

We develop a model of monetary exchange where, as in the random matching literature, agents trade bilaterally and not through centralized markets. Rather than assuming they match exogenously and at random, however, we determine who meets whom as part of the equilibrium. We show how to formalize this process of directed matching in dynamic models with double coincidence problems, and present several examples and applications that illustrate how the approach can be used in monetary theory. Some of our results are similar to those in the random matching literature; others differ significantly.     

ON THE SELECTION OF CRITICAL VALUES IN SEQUENTIAL DECISION PROBLEMS

This paper explores the effect which the choice of critical values in sequential decisions has on the overall distribution of payoffs. It demonstrates in the context of a simple two-stage sequential decision model that the mean and variance of the overall distribution can be highly sensitive to the choice of critical values. Finally, it considers the problem of selecting optimal critical values when a standard meanvariance approach is used.