Using the lessons learned from US and English law to create a regulatory framework for charities in evolving democracies

The evolving democracies of Eastern Europe and the former USSR republics are keenly interested in establishing charities. They have little law on this issue because their former governments did not encourage the development of charities. This article compares US and English regulation of charities and proposes a regulatory framework based on what the authors believe are the best attributes of both. Although the framework is based on the common law system, it can be adapted to the civil law systems of the Eastern European nations and the former USSR republics. The article includes such issues as developing a body of law, tax relief and creating a regulatory agency.Mr Hopkins is a lawyer with Powers, Pyles & Sutter, 1275 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007, and author ofThe Law of Tax-Exempt Organizations (1992a).Ms Moore is also a lawyer, 5908 N. 35th St., Arlington, Virginia 22207.The authors would like to thank Mssrs Kersi Shroff and Stephen F. Clarke, Senior Legal Specialists, American-British Law Division, Library of Congress, and Mr. William H. Morris, an attorney at Steptoe & Johnson, Washington, D.C., for their kind assistance during the researching of this article.     

The Impact of Items and Anchors on Parent–Child Reports of Problem Behavior

Research has repeatedly demonstrated that parent and child reports of child behavior and emotional functioning often do not agree in terms of symptom severity or even symptom presence. Given the potential clinical impact that discrepant reports may have on the therapeutic process, a significant amount of research has addressed the factors influencing this observed discrepancy. Traditionally, this research has evaluated the impact of demographic factors on mean differences and obtained correlation coefficients between parent and child reports. The current research improves upon previous research in this area in two ways. First, the current research uses parent and child measures with identical rather than similar items as is commonly found in previous research. Second, the current research moves beyond identifying demographic influences on discrepant reports by explaining observed discrepancies in terms of differences in parent and child perceptions of typical child behavior.David Carlston and Benjamin Ogles are affiliated with Department of Psychology, Ohio University, Athens, USA.Funding for this project was provided by the Ohio Department of Mental Health.     

Sektion Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Low dose risk estimation via simultaneous statistical inferences

Summary.  The paper develops and studies simultaneous confidence bounds that are useful for making low dose inferences in quantitative risk analysis. Application is intended for risk assessment studies where human, animal or ecological data are used to set safe low dose levels of a toxic agent, but where study information is limited to high dose levels of the agent. Methods are derived for estimating simultaneous, one-sided, upper confidence limits on risk for end points measured on a continuous scale. From the simultaneous confidence bounds, lower confidence limits on the dose that is associated with a particular risk (often referred to as a bench-mark dose ) are calculated. An important feature of the simultaneous construction is that any inferences that are based on inverting the simultaneous confidence bounds apply automatically to inverse bounds on the bench-mark dose.     

Divergence-based estimation and testing with misclassified data

The well-known chi-squared goodness-of-fit test for a multinomial distribution is generally biased when the observations are subject to misclassification. In Pardo and Zografos (2000) the problem was considered using a double sampling scheme and ø-divergence test statistics. A new problem appears if the null hypothesis is not simple because it is necessary to give estimators for the unknown parameters. In this paper the minimum ø-divergence estimators are considered and some of their properties are established. The proposed ø-divergence test statistics are obtained by calculating ø-divergences between probability density functions and by replacing parameters by their minimum ø-divergence estimators in the derived expressions. Asymptotic distributions of the new test statistics are also obtained. The testing procedure is illustrated with an example.     

International guidelines and the inclusion of disabled people. The Ugandan story

Uganda has made much progress towards including disabled people in its mainstream development, particularly in the political agenda. The exact process by which this has been achieved and the relationship between this and international guidelines and legislation are not known. This study undertakes to examine this from two specific perspectives: (1) How do international documents relevant to disabled people relate to national legislation in Uganda? (2) What can this comparison, together with the perceptions of stakeholders, tell us about how the legislation and services could improve? International legislation and Ugandan legislation is reviewed and compared. Data from 5 semi‐structured key informant interviews and 6 focus group discussions involving a total of 38 people are collected and analysed. The themes arising from the data are related to the documents, legislation, policies and other relevant literature. The results examine the barriers to service provision; the role of change; the importance of representation; policy and legislation issues; and the effects of devolution. Five specific findings relate to how legislation and services can improve: more resources to increase access for disabled people; strong leadership and collaboration between Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) funding bodies and governments; awareness raising and training; representation from all impairment groups; and raising the profile of disabled people through further legislation.     

Statistics for weighing benefits and harms in a proposed genetic substudy of a randomized cancer prevention trial

Summary.  When evaluating potential interventions for cancer prevention, it is necessary to compare benefits and harms. With new study designs, new statistical approaches may be needed to facilitate this comparison. A case in point arose in a proposed genetic substudy of a randomized trial of tamoxifen versus placebo in asymptomatic women who were at high risk for breast cancer. Although the randomized trial showed that tamoxifen substantially reduced the risk of breast cancer, the harms from tamoxifen were serious and some were life threaten-ing. In hopes of finding a subset of women with inherited risk genes who derive greater bene-fits from tamoxifen, we proposed a nested case–control study to test some trial subjects for various genes and new statistical methods to extrapolate benefits and harms to the general population. An important design question is whether or not the study should target common low penetrance genes. Our calculations show that useful results are only likely with rare high penetrance genes.     

Factor analysis for ranked data with application to a job selection attitude survey

Summary.  Factor analysis is a powerful tool to identify the common characteristics among a set of variables that are measured on a continuous scale. In the context of factor analysis for non-continuous-type data, most applications are restricted to item response data only. We extend the factor model to accommodate ranked data. The Monte Carlo expectation–maximization algorithm is used for parameter estimation at which the E-step is implemented via the Gibbs sampler. An analysis based on both complete and incomplete ranked data (e.g. rank the top q out of k items) is considered. Estimation of the factor scores is also discussed. The method proposed is applied to analyse a set of incomplete ranked data that were obtained from a survey that was carried out in GuangZhou, a major city in mainland China, to investigate the factors affecting people's attitude towards choosing jobs.