A Case for Developing Community Drug Indicators

The EU Action Plan on Drugs (2005?C2008) calls for member states of the European Union to provide information on five key epidemiological indicators. These are: general population surveys, prevalence and patterns of problem drug use, drug related infectious diseases, drug related deaths and mortality of drug users, and demand for drug treatment. The goal is to improve the comparability of data across the Member States, which is a central task of the EMCDDA (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction). Ireland has made progress on a national level in meeting this obligation. Currently the core information systems used to monitor the drugs problem in Ireland and to inform policy making are in the health and law enforcement areas including treatment, mortality and crime data. The dominance of such objective indicators and treatment outcome measures has contributed to obscuring the view of communities experiencing drugs problems on a day to day basis. The data are summations of the individual experience of drug problems and contribute little to understanding the broader question of how drug problem effect communities. This article draws on a community drugs study to review the contribution of traditional indicators of drug problems and consider some of the limitations of this data. It then presents an analysis of community data to identify possible community indicators of drug problems.     

Extension-Based Divorce Education: A Quasi-Experimental Design Study of the Parents Forever Program

The field of divorce education is calling for greater rigor in evaluating program effectiveness and University Extension programs are no exception. Parents Forever, a University of Minnesota Extension divorce education program developed in the 1990s, conducted a quasi-experimental design study, with a sample of in-person class participants and a comparison sample of divorcing parents. Independent samples t tests were conducted between the unstandardized residuals of each group. In support of the program’s goals, results indicated positive program effects for several variables related to parenting practices, adult quality of life, self-efficacy, and parent report of child conduct problems and peer problems (p < .01). No effect was found for coparenting conflict, adult social health, and child hyperactivity, and marginal program effects (p < .05), both positive and negative, were found for coparenting alliance (–), positive parenting (+), child emotional symptoms (+), and child prosocial behavior (–).     

The Family Experience of the Crisis of Involuntary Treatment in Mental Health

While policy and practice standards emphasise the importance of engaging and supporting families of people with mental health problems, many families have reported feeling unsupported and distanced from treatment and care planning in acute inpatient units. There has been little systematic interest in the changing role and experiences of families throughout the emergence of illness, crisis, seeking of treatment, and subsequent recovery. Nineteen in-depth interviews were conducted with the next of kin of 17 people who had been admitted under an Involuntary Treatment Order in a large metropolitan hospital in the Brisbane region. A general inductive approach was used to analyse the data. While hospital admission was described as a time where, ideally, families were able to let go of being responsible for their relative's behaviour and let the health care professionals take over, for many this did not occur. We suggest four critical elements for providing recovery-oriented support to families. These include: (a) ensuring that families feel that their relative is safe and receiving the care needed; (b) keeping the family informed about their relative's progress; (c) ensuring families have access to information about the mental health system, and (d) working in partnership with the families.

IMPLICATIONS

• Family wellbeing is improved when they feel part of a supportive team.

• Instituting an open policy where families can contact ward staff easily and access information about the person they care for may alleviate families’ anxieties and minimise stress.

• Family work is enhanced when health professionals acknowledge families’ relationships, expertise, and understanding of their family member.

     

Assessing the effects of monetized food aid on: reproductive behavior in rural Honduras

This article describes the methodology and findings of a study undertaken to assess whether the monetization of non-emergency food aid has adversely influenced national family planning program efforts in Honduras. Due to time constraints, an ex-post, non-equivalent group design was the strongest feasible study design. In the study, women receiving food aid in the form of cash coupons were compared with women receiving food rations and a third group of comparable women who were not food aid recipients on three types of outcomes: recent fertility, fertility preferences, and contraceptive use (both current and intended). A ‘sample selection’ model was used in the analysis to control for unobserved differences between comparison groups. No compelling evidence for either adverse demand- or supply-side effects was observed.     

《福乐智慧》中所反映的早期苏非

对于一个正在谋求发展的政权,苏非的避世苦修、清心寡欲、淡泊名利、不问世事并不值得提倡,正如11世纪新疆喀喇汗王朝的著名文学作品《福乐智慧》所提到的日出国王统治的国度,伊斯兰教正统派信仰盛行并以积极的态度参与国家治理。当时苏非已经出现,处于发展的初期阶段,属于个人行为,未形成大的苏非教团,但显然在社会和统治阶层中得到了一定程度的认同。究其原因,苏非神秘主义以其虔诚的独特的思想体系和修行方式为穆斯林的宗教生活增加了直觉体验和宗教情感,是对穆斯林宗教生活的合理补充。     

L'indicateur «Embauche des travailleurs» de la Banque mondiale: bilan des travaux et critiques

Cette note fait le point sur le débat suscité par le projet Doing Business de la Banque mondiale, et notamment par son indicateur «Embauche des travailleurs», censé mesurer la difficulté d'embaucher, la rigidité de la durée du travail et la difficulté de licencier. Les auteurs présentent les résultats des études qui l'ont utilisé, l'ont inspiré ou ont été influencées par cet indicateur. Ils se penchent ensuite sur les critiques de cet instrument qui pose des problèmes conceptuels et empiriques. Ils concluent par la formulation de suggestions pour les recherches à venir.     

Pairwise comparisons for proportions estimated by pooled testing

When estimating the prevalence of a rare trait, pooled testing can confer substantial benefits when compared to individual testing. In addition to screening experiments for infectious diseases in humans, pooled testing has also been exploited in other applications such as drug testing, epidemiological studies involving animal disease, plant disease assessment, and screening for rare genetic mutations. Within a pooled-testing context, we consider situations wherein different strata or treatments are to be compared with the goals of assessing significant and practical differences between strata and ranking strata in terms of prevalence. To achieve these goals, we first present two simultaneous pairwise interval estimation procedures for use with pooled data. Our procedures rely on asymptotic results, so we investigate small-sample behavior and compare the two procedures in terms of simultaneous coverage probability and mean interval length. We then present a unified approach to determine pool sizes which deliver desired coverage properties while taking testing costs and interval precision into account. We illustrate our methods using data from an observational HIV study involving heterosexual males who use intravenous drugs.     

Popular Culture and Workplace Gendering among Varieties of Capitalism: Working Women and their Representation in Japanese Manga

Female empowerment is a prerequisite for a just and sustainable developed society. Being the most developed non‐western country, Japan offers an instructive window onto concerns about gender worldwide. Although overall gender equality is advancing in Japan, difficulties remain, especially in achieving equality in the workplace. We draw on theories of ontological commitment and the psychology of fiction to critically analyse the role of popular culture — in this case manga — in the reproduction of gender inequality in the Japanese workplace. We present examples of four of the most popular mainstream manga aimed at working men and women in Japan and show how women are depicted. We argue that the hyper‐mediated fictional realism of representative tropes generates an ontological commitment to characters and narratives among consumers that reinforces the reproduction of a culturally exceptionalist national political economic space, one of whose essential defining characteristics is a gendered workplace. Our research suggests important implications for researching the relationship between culture, in all its forms, and spatial variation in persistent institutional biases among varieties of capitalism.     

Parents Forever: Evaluation of an Online Divorce Education Program

Divorce education programs are conducting increasingly rigorous impact evaluations to assess if their curriculum improves parenting practices, reduces conflict in the coparenting relationship, and improves outcomes for children. This article presents a 6-month follow-up evaluation of the online version of Parents Forever, an 8-hour divorce education course developed by the University of Minnesota Extension. At follow-up, parents (N = 232) reported significant improvements on several questions about postdivorce parenting and well-being, indicating that the online version of Parents Forever is effective in promoting positive behavioral change for parents.