Sharing personal information in the child protection context: Impediments in the Australian legal framework

Professionals, including social workers, in the child protection context are frequently required to make decisions on whether to share sensitive personal information about children, their families, and others with colleagues and across institutional and jurisdictional boundaries. Sharing information across agencies and organisations is essential to allow joined‐up service provision and to effectively protect and support children and their families. A legal framework that supports this decision making is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for effective information sharing. This article examines the complex legal framework that governs information sharing across the Australian states and territories. It identifies a number of structural and regulatory elements that unnecessarily limit information sharing or have a tendency to create a culture that is risk averse, rather than proactive, in sharing information. The article suggests structural and regulatory reforms that would improve the legal framework for sharing information, while at the same time giving due recognition to the human rights that come into tension in this policy context: the right to privacy and the rights of the child.     

A meta-analytic review and future research agenda of charismatic leadership

Charismatic leadership is a critical construct that draws much attention from both academic and practitioner literatures. Despite the positive attention received by the charisma construct, some have criticized its conceptualization and measurement. These critiques have, in turn, cast doubt on what we know regarding the antecedents and outcomes of charismatic leadership. In this review, we adopt a recently developed definition of charismatic leadership and then conduct a meta-analysis of its antecedents and objective outcomes. Following an examination of 76 independent studies and 36,031 individuals, results indicate that the Big Five traits and cognitive ability vary in their association with charismatic leadership. Other findings show that dimensions of charismatic leadership predict outcomes of interest, such as supervisor-rated task performance, supervisor-rated citizenship behaviors, and group or organization performance. Several shortcomings are identified, however, in testing theoretical and methodological moderating variables. The present research ultimately provides a roadmap for new frontiers in theoretical, measurement and empirical work on charismatic leadership.     

Illicit use of prescribed stimulant medication among college students

The authors investigated illicit use of stimulant medications at a midwestern university. They used a questionnaire to (a) examine the extent to which university students illicitly used stimulant medications prescribed for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder; (b) determine why college students abused such drugs; and (c) identify the factors that predicted illicit use of prescribed stimulant medication. Findings revealed that 17% of 179 surveyed men and 11% of 202 women reported illicit use of prescribed stimulant medication. Forty-four percent of surveyed students stated that they knew students who used stimulant medication illicitly for both academic and recreational reasons. Students reported they experienced time pressures associated with college life and that stimulants were said to increase alertness and energy. Regression analysis revealed that the factor that predicted men's use was knowing where to get easily acquired stimulant medication, whereas the main predictor for women was whether another student had offered the prescribed stimulants.     

Sleep patterns of college students at a public university

OBJECTIVE: The authors' purpose in this study was to determine the sleep patterns of college students to identify problem areas and potential solutions. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 313 students returned completed surveys. METHODS: A sleep survey was e-mailed to a random sample of students at a North Central university. Questions included individual sleep patterns, problems, and possible influencing factors. RESULTS: Most students reported later bedtimes and rise times on weekends than they did on weekdays. More than 33% of the students took longer than 30 minutes to fall asleep, and 43% woke more than once nightly. More than 33% reported being tired during the day. The authors found no differences between freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and graduate students for time to fall asleep, number of night wakings, or total time slept each night. CONCLUSIONS: Many students have sleep problems that may interfere with daily performance, such as driving and academics. Circadian rhythm management, sleep hygiene, and white noise could ameliorate sleep difficulties.     

Gender,work-family conflicts,and perceived parental success: The moderating role of gender ideology

ABSTRACT

We know little about how perceptions of conflict between work and family shape the subjective views of dual-earner parents. Given time constraints and the prevalence of gendered parenting norms, gender ideologies and work-family conflicts may help explain perceived parental success. Using data from the 2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce, I explore whether gender ideology moderates how conflicts between work and family relate to perceived parental success. Among dual-earner mothers, work-to-family conflict was negatively related to perceived parental success. For dual-earner fathers, work-to-family conflict was positively associated with perceived parental success among more traditional fathers, while the opposite was the case for more egalitarian fathers. Family-to-work conflict was only negatively related to the perceived parental success of more traditional fathers. These findings suggest that gender ideologies are more central in explaining how work-family conflicts relate to fathers’ perceived parental success compared to that of mothers.     

Getting by with a Little Help from Workplace Friends: Workplace Culture,Social Support,and Family Cohesion

Studies have shown a negative association between certain aspects of workplace culture and family functioning. Using a neo-institutional framework, we examine whether workplace social support moderates the influence of three features of workplace culture—time demands, work pressure, and work strain—on family cohesion. Analyzing survey data from 312 individuals in dual-earner relationships, we control for number of children, education, income, employment status, and occupational status. We find that workplace social support is directly associated with family cohesion but does not serve as a buffer between dimensions of workplace culture and family cohesion.     

The configurational effects of board monitoring and the institutional environment on CEO compensation: a country-level fuzzy-set analysis

This study examines the causal complexity of how the effectiveness of board monitoring influences CEO compensation around the world. Previous research drawing from the managerial power theory and ‘increased career risks’ perspective offer alternative arguments for how low and high levels of effective monitoring by boards of directors influence CEO compensation. Adopting a configurational approach using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we explore the idea that there are multiple causal paths leading to high levels of CEO compensation, such that theoretical logic from both theories may be relevant contingent upon the institutional environment in which the relationship is embedded. Our findings in a sample of 38 countries suggest that high CEO compensation is an outcome of both the presence and absence of effective board monitoring depending upon how it combines with minority investor protections and the cultural dimensions of power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and individualism, as well as the overall stock market value. Specifically, in countries with high levels of effective board monitoring, high CEO compensation will be more likely when the country’s culture is high in uncertainty avoidance, low in power distance and when there are strong protections for minority investors. Whereas in countries with low levels of effective board monitoring, high CEO compensation will be more likely when power distance is high and uncertainty avoidance is low and when there are weak protections for minority investors. Our country-level study highlights the theoretical strengths of employing a configurational approach to explore the complex interrelationships of governance mechanisms and the contexts in which they manifest.     

Fitting in: the roles of social acceptance and discrimination in shaping the daily psychological well-being of Latino youth

Objectives: We examine how acculturation experiences such as discrimination and social acceptance influence the daily psychological well-being of Latino youth living in newly emerging and historical receiving immigrant communities. Methods: We use data on 557 Latino youth enrolled in high school in Los Angeles or in rural or urban North Carolina. Results: Compared to Latino youth in Los Angeles, Latino youth in urban and rural North Carolina experienced higher levels of daily happiness, but also experienced higher levels of daily depressive and anxiety symptoms. Differences in nativity status partially explained location differences in youths’ daily psychological well-being. Discrimination and daily negative ethnic treatment worsened, whereas social acceptance combined with daily positive ethnic treatment and ethnic and family identification improved, daily psychological well-being. Conclusions: Our analysis contributes to understanding the acculturation experiences of immigrant youth and the roles of social context in shaping adolescent mental health.     

PROCUREMENT AUCTIONS WITH RENEGOTIATION AND WEALTH CONSTRAINTS

Renegotiation is a common practice in procurement auctions which allows for postauction price adjustments and is nominally intended to deal with the problem that sellers might underestimate the eventual costs of a project during the auction. Using a combination of theory and experiments, we examine the effectiveness of renegotiation at solving this problem. Our findings demonstrate that renegotiation is rarely successful at solving the problem of sellers misestimating costs. The primary effect of allowing renegotiation is that it advantages sellers who possess a credible commitment of default should they have underbid the project. Renegotiation allows these weaker types of sellers to win more often and it also allows them to leverage their commitment of default into higher prices in renegotiation from a buyer. (JEL C91, D44, D82)     

Vois‐Tu Le Kem? Do You See the Bos? Foreign Word Learning at 14 Months

How easily can infants regularly exposed to only one language begin to acquire a second one? In three experiments, we tested 14‐month‐old English and French monolingual infants’ ability to learn words presented in foreign language sentence frames. Infants were trained on two novel word‐object pairings and then tested using a preferential looking task. Word forms were phonetically and phonotactically legal in both languages, and cross‐spliced across conditions, so only the sentence frames established the word as native or foreign. In Experiment 1, infants were taught one native and one foreign word and successfully learned both. In Experiment 2 and 3, infants were taught two foreign words, but only showed successful learning of the first word they encountered. These results demonstrate that infants can successfully learn words embedded in foreign language sentences, but this is more challenging than native word learning. More broadly, they show that the sentential context of a novel word, and not just the word form itself, influences infants’ early word learning.