Liberation groups and life philosophy

Social liberation movements are significant arenas for cultural value growth. I discuss two forms of value growth that occur on the social liberation front-life philosophy value growth and life-style value growth. I show how life philosophy values are personal identity instilling values while life-style values are social identity instilling values. Unfortunately, within many social liberation movements, the two sorts of values often get confused with one another. I discuss some of these confusions within both the black liberation and feminist liberation movements. I also discuss some proper value growth models that work appropriately within these movements.     

In sickness but not in health: self-ratings, identity, and mortality

Self-rated health as a predictor of mortality has been studied primarily in large, representative populations, with relatively little progress toward understanding the information processing that individuals use to arrive at these ratings. With subsamples of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) Epidemiologic Follow-up Study (NHEFS) data for respondents with circulatory system disease (N = 3,709) and respondents with no diagnosable disorders (N = 1,127) at baseline, we test the idea that individuals with experience of chronic disease of the circulatory system will have more predictive self-ratings of health than healthy individuals. Poor or fair self-rated health increased the adjusted hazard of all-cause mortality for respondents with circulatory system disease, but not for respondents who were healthy. Additional analyses confirm that poor or fair self-rated health is particularly predictive for respondents with self-reported history of circulatory system diagnoses and perception of symptoms, but not for respondents without symptoms or diagnoses prior to the NHANES physical exam.     

Long-term care policy for the elderly in the Zaporozhye region of Ukraine: a case study of social development following the collapse of Communism

In this paper, we review the status of social policy for the elderly in Ukraine since the fall of Communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union. We specifically address the problem of "rebuilding" an income and services policy for the at-risk elderly after the unraveling of the system that existed prior to the fall of Communism. Also, we address some existing problems faced by the elderly in the health care system. Within this context, we present a case study of the current status of long-term care policy for the elderly in one province of Ukraine, the eastern province of Zaporozhye, encompassing the industrial city of Zaporozhye on the Dnieper River. This case study particularly pays attention to current attempts to promote a social development process of long-term care services for the elderly. It examines recent developments with respect to public sector organizations and voluntary sector organizations that are trying to provide necessary services to the needy elderly. With respect to the voluntary sector, the paper pays particular attention to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) model of a largely externally funded NGO that provides comprehensive and integrated social supports, while emphasizing local empowerment and the use of volunteers, for the needy Jewish population in the province of Zaporozhye. Based on our findings, we make some proposals regarding the improvement of income and services policy with respect to the elderly in Zaporozhye and Ukraine.     

LEGISLATING LOVE: The Effect of Child Support and Welfare Policies on Father–child Contact

Reducing non-marital childbearing and making nonresidential fathers take greater responsibility for their children were identified as goals of numerous policy changes since the 1980s. Child-support award rates for children born to unmarried parents have been quite low historically, leading lawmakers to focus on increasing both award and payment rates for this group. Nonmarital fathers are also much less likely to have contact with their children. Although evidence suggests that policy efforts increase child support awards and receipt, the link between child support policies, child support outcomes, and father-child contact has received less attention. This paper uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation on children born between 1985–1997 to investigate the relationship between child-support award and receipt and the amount of contact that fathers have with their non-residential children. Since it is likely that both of these behaviors are, in part, determined by unobservable characteristics of the father, we estimate an instrumental variables Tobit model. The model is identified by our assumption that child support policy variables can impact child support awards and payments, but father-child contact cannot be directly legislated. Our results suggest that there are unintended, but desirable effects of child support establishment and collection. Policies to collect child support not only increase financial resources to families, but through their impact on payments increase visitation and contact between these children and their fathers. The estimated impact of receiving child support on contact is more than 27 days per year.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Economic Association, Washington DC, January 2003 and the Annual Meetings of the Association of Public Policy and Management, November 2003. Support from NICHD Grant # HD30944 is gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank Suzann Eshleman for excellent computer programming and James Scully for providing us with data on genetic testing laws.     

Violence and gender: reports from an urban high school

This article reports on the survey component of a study examining urban high school students' experiences with violence. The survey's purpose was to collect information on students' experiences with violence, explore gender differences, and identify which factors are associated with the self-reported use of violence. Two prominent risk factors for the self-reported use of violence were found: having a close friend or family member injured by violence, and gun possession. Young men and women did not differ significantly in overall exposure, victimization, and perpetration. However, gender clearly informed the types of violence reported. The findings offer practical strategies for addressing adolescent violence, such as reducing gun availability and community-level violence, but future research must further examine the role of gender in order to structure more effective prevention and intervention approaches that target different kinds of violence.     

Substance abuse

Liddle and Dakof's (1995) comprehensive review of the status of family-based treatment for drug abuse concluded that this modality offered a "promising, but not definitive" approach to treating drug abuse among adolescents and adults. Less than a decade later, significant progress can be seen in the treatment of drug abuse problems using family-based approaches, particularly with adolescents. Family-based treatments are currently recognized as among the most effective approaches for adolescent drug abuse. Family-based treatment of adult drug abuse problems has also advanced in important ways with the recent systematic application and testing of engagement techniques and behavioral couples therapy approaches. The current review characterizes and discusses the developmental status of this subspecialty and outlines areas in which continued research attention is needed.     

Best practice in couple relationship education

Relationship education is widely available to couples and is intended to reduce the prevalence of relationship distress, divorce, and the associated personal and social costs. To realize the potential benefits of couple relationship education, it needs to be evidence-based, offered in ways that attract couples at high-risk for relationship problems, and focused on factors that put couples at high-risk for future relationship problems.     

Using "short" interrupted time-series analysis to measure the impacts of whole-school reforms. With applications to a study of accelerated schools

The present article introduces a new approach for measuring the impacts of whole-school reforms. The approach is based on "short" interrupted time-series analysis, which has been used to evaluate programs in many fields. The approach is used to measure impacts on three facets of student performance: (a) average (mean) test scores, which summarize impacts on total performance; (b) the distribution of scores across specific ranges, which helps to identify where in the distribution of student performance impacts were experienced; and (c) the variation (standard deviation) of scores, which indicates how the disparity in student performance was affected. To help researchers use the approach, the article lays out its conceptual rationale, describes its statistical procedures, explains how to interpret its findings, indicates its strengths and limitations, and illustrates how it was used to evaluate a major whole-school reform--Accelerated Schools.