Religion and Giving in Australia

This article draws on a household survey of giving and volunteering undertaken as part of the Giving Australia project to explore the relationship between religion and the giving behaviour of adult Australians. We find that people who identify themselves as having a religion are more likely to give and to give more on average than people who do not but that this relationship is produced by a subset of this group; namely, people who regularly attend religious services. Indeed, the likelihood of giving and average amounts given by givers over a year increase with levels of attendance at religious services. The relationship holds even after allowing for other factors that affect the likelihood of a person giving and the amount given. It also holds for giving to nonreligious causes (ie when giving to religion is omitted). However, when we also omit giving to charities and look at giving to civic causes alone we find that the frequency of attendance at religious services has an ambiguous relationship with giving. A suggestion in overseas literature that it is participation in religious groups, rather than attendance at religious services that is associated with giving is not supported.     

The ubiquitous angle

Summary.  Previously we used the geometry of n -dimensional space to derive the paired samples t -test and its p -value. In the present paper we describe the 'ubiquitous' application of these results to single degree of freedom linear model hypothesis tests. As examples, we derive the p - and t -values for the independent samples t -test, for testing a contrast in an analysis of variance and for testing the slope in a simple linear regression analysis. An angle θ in n -dimensional space is again pivotal in the development of the ideas. The relationships between p , t , θ , F and the correlation coefficient are also described by using a 'statistical triangle'.     

Social Policy in South Korea: Cultural and Structural Factors in the Emergence of Welfare

There are a number of features that make South Korea an interesting place to study social policy. First, it has experienced rapid economic development with the associated changes in urbanization and demography. This change has created social problems, which the state has had to address. Second, the country retains a strong cultural tradition and repeated affirmation of the values and practices of Confucianism. In this paper, these two features are considered in relation to the way social policy has been addressed. The thrust of the paper will be on the policy responses to perceived social problems and the way in which other social problems are individualized within families. These policies are informed and shaped by Korean politics and culture.     

Value of a Life: What Difference Does It Make?1

A comparison of the costs and benefits of 57 lifesaving programs reveals striking disparities across agencies and programs in cost/life saved and even greater disparities in cost/life-year saved. Within a broad range the monetary value assigned to the benefits of averting a death usually does not alter the policy implications of the analyses. The findings suggest that despite the substantial disagreements and uncertainties in the theory and practice of valuing lives, careful quantitative analysis can be helpful in setting health, safety, and environmental priorities.     

Considerations on Research in Family Therapy: An Interview with Rudolf Moos

Rudolf Moos, Professor of Psychiatry, Stanford University School of Medicine and Research Career Scientist at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Medical Centre, is not well known to Australian and New Zealand therapy circles, yet his research into instruments applicable to research into the family and its dynamics is prolific, his personal energy, integrity and dedication are admirable and his persistence at researching the very difficult areas of social environments is unequalled. This interview was recorded at the Social Ecology Laboratory at Veteran's Administration Medical Centre at Palo Alto, where he is Director of the Laboratory.     

ANALYSIS OF DOUBLY CENSORED DATA AND THE HIV INCUBATION PERIOD DISTRIBUTION IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

The paper analyses the distribution of times from HIV seroconversion to the first AIDS defining illness for a subcohort of the Western Australian HIV Cohort Study for whom the seroconversion date is known to fall within a calendar time window. The analysis is based on a generalised gamma model for the incubation times and a piecewise constant distribution for the conditional times of seroconversion given the seroconversion windows. This allows flexible hazard shapes and also allows comparison of goodness of fit of the gamma and Weibull distributions which are often used for modelling incubation times. Computational issues are discussed. In these data, neither age at seroconversion, nor calendar time of seroconversion, nor the identification of a seroconversion illness appears to afFect incubation distributions. The Weibull distribution appears to provide a reasonable fit. The distribution of times from seroconversion to an HIV-related death is also briefly considered.     

DEPENDENT AUTONOMY: A NEW PHASE OF INTERNAL COLONIALISM

The history of colonialism in Australia is summarised into four phases, called external colonialism, internal colonialism, welfare colonialism and dependent autonomy. Four policy frameworks for Aboriginal affairs: subjection and exploitation; protection and segregation; assimilation and integration; and self-determination and reconciliation; coincide with these phases. Contradictions arising from irreconcilable tendencies in liberal-humanist philosophy marked official discourses, practices and strategies during each phase of colonialism. Current policies are analysed in terms of political paradox. The self-determination policy, which promotes autonomy through increased dependency on the state, is analysed as a new phase of colonialism which is called ‘dependent autonomy’.     

AN ALGORITHM FOR CHOOSING THE SAMPLING TIMES FOR AN EXPERIMENT ON A CONTINUOUS PROCESS

Saunders & Eccleston (1992) and Saunders, Eccleston & Spessa (1992) developed an approach to the design of factorial experiments on continuous processes that allows for the correlation present in such processes. Their methods concentrated on identifying the order of application of treatments in such experiments, assuming that the spacing between experiments is constant. On a continuous process, there is no necessity to maintain equally spaced sampling times. This paper gives an algorithm for choosing the optimal sampling times for a factorial experiment aimed at estimating a particular parameter or set of parameters. It is shown that in practical situations the optimal sampling times give considerable improvements in the accuracy of the parameter estimates.