Professional Perspectives on Decision Making about the Long-term Care of Older People

With the increasing pressure on social and health care resources,professionals have to be more explicit in their decision makingregarding the long-term care of older people. This groundedtheory study used 19 focus groups and nine semi-structured interviews(99 staff in total) to explore professional perspectives onthis decision making. Focus group participants and intervieweescomprised care managers, social workers, consultant geriatricians,general medical practitioners, community nurses, home care managers,occupational therapists and hospital discharge support staff.The emerging themes spanned context, clients, families and services.Decisions were often prompted by a crisis, hindering professionalsseeking to make a measured assessment. Fear of burglary andassault, and the willingness and availability of family to helpwere major factors in decisions about living at home. Serviceavailability in terms of public funding for community care,the availability of home care workers and workload pressureson primary care services influenced decision ‘thresholds’regarding admission to institutional care. Assessment toolsdesigned to assist decision making about the long-term careof older people need to take into account the critical aspectsof individual fears and motivation, family support and the availabilityof publicly funded services as well as functional and medicalneeds.     

Child maltreatment and foster care

In “Child Maltreatment and Foster Care,” Richard J. Gelles, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, reports what is known about the incidence of child maltreatment and foster care placement rates since welfare reform. He relies on four major sources of data: Current Trends in Child Abuse Reporting and Fatalities: Results of the 1998 Annual Fifty State Survey, the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), the National Incidence Survey of Reported and Recognized Child Maltreatment (NIS), and the Voluntary Cooperative Information System (VCIS).     

现代国际贸易理论中的国内和国际规模收益

在二战后的国际贸易中,工业化国家之间的制造业产品的交易量巨大,这种产业内贸易现象的出现,在一定程度上对传统的赫克歇尔-俄林-萨缪尔逊贸易模型产生了冲击和质疑。经济学家从多个角度寻求对这种现象的理论解释,并开始注意产品差别化及其对规模经济的影响,但是,这些研究对贸易理论的影响很小,并且解释现实的能力也很弱。因此,把差别化的生产资料作为研究的重点,在国际收益的框架下,建立模型以推出国际规模收益,并且运用这一模型得出了国际规模收益、传统的国内规模收益和要素禀赋论之间的关系。     

Expected sample moments of concomitants of selected order statistics

In this paper, the task of determining expected values of sample moments, where the sample members have been selected based on noisy information, is considered. This task is a recurring problem in the theory of evolution strategies. Exact expressions for expected values of sums of products of concomitants of selected order statistics are derived. Then, using Edgeworth and Cornish-Fisher approximations, explicit results that depend on coefficients that can be determined numerically are obtained. While the results are exact only for normal populations, it is shown experimentally that including skewness and kurtosis in the calculations can yield greatly improved results for other distributions.     

Pathways between education and health: a causal modelling approach

Summary.  The association of poor education and poor health has been consistently observed in many studies and in various countries. Thus far, studies examining the mechanisms underlying this association have looked at only a limited set of potential pathways. This study simultaneously examines six distinctive pathways, which have been hypothesized to link education and health and found support from previous studies. A causal analysis of education and health was performed using structural equation models. Data were used from six phases of the National Child Development Study, which is based on following up an initial sample of 17416 children who were born in 1958. The association between education and health appears to be explained by a combination of mechanisms: adolescent health and adult health behaviours for men and women, adult social class among men and parental social class among women. We conclude that improvements in population educational attainment may not automatically lead to improvements in population health, and that health policies for improving health and reducing health inequalities need to target specific causal pathways.     

Sektion Jugendsoziologie Tätigkeitsbericht 2004

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Happiness has traitlike and statelike properties: A reply to Veenhoven

Veenhoven (1994) contrasted hypotheses of whether happiness is a trait or state, concluding that it is a state variable. This article critiques the conceptual foundation of Veenhoven's paper, and examines technical deficiencies in his review of evidence. Based on previous findings and new analyses, we conclude that happiness has both traitlike and statelike properties, but that individual differences in happiness endure despite its situational reactivity, and explain greater variance than situational effects.     

Predicting Participation in Environmental Treaties: A World-System Analysis*

Which countries tend to sign international environmental treaties and why? This study tests the ability of quantitative cross-national political and economic analysis to predict participation in international environmental agreements over the period 1963–1987. Cross-sectional ordinary least squares regressions suggest that poor, highly indebted countries that are dependent on very few trading partners and that have repres-sive regimes are far more likely to be nonsignatories. The results suggest strategies for increasing the likelihood that nations will ratify hture environmental treaties.     

Exploring structure-effectiveness relationships in nonprofit arts organizations

The authors examined nineteen nonprofit performing arts organizations, investigating the distribution of influence among organizational members, the grouping of volunteers and staff in organizational structures, and the effectiveness of the organizations. The organizations' effectiveness was assessed using multiple performance indicators. The analysis revealed five groupings or configurations of influence, which correlated to the organizations exhibiting the highest and lowest levels of organizational effectiveness. The authors conclude that a variety of structures are associated with good performance but structural dysfunctions are associated with organizational failure, and that members' commitment to an organization's structure is an important element of success.     

On the derivation of a full life table from mortality data recorded in five-year age groups

Mortality data are often gathered using 5-year age groups rather than individual years of life. Furthermore, it is common practice to use a large open-ended interval (such as 85 and over) for mortality data at the older ages. These limitations of the data pose problems for the actuary or demographer who wishes to compile a full and accurate life table using individual years of life. The author devises formulae which handle these problems. He also devises methods for handling mortality during the 1st year of life and for dealing with other technical problems which arise in the compilation of the full life table from grouped data.