Ethical dilemmas in evaluating programs with family court related clients

Two ethical dilemmas are discussed; breaching client confidentiality in order to intervene in the client's illegal behavior, and defining the role of evaluator as expert witness. The evaluation context concerns a combined program development and evaluation project with clients involved in family court proceedings for child abuse or neglect. Different perspectives, approaches, and experiences in resolving each dilemma are reviewed. The conclusion argues that approaches to ethical dilemmas in evaluation projects must go beyond techniques to disguise data, to include an assessment of the values and value commitments connected to the different roles an evaluator must perform.     

The Social Shaping of Emotion: The Case of Grief*

This article addresses the issue of how deeply social arrangements may penetrate into private emotion, in this instance, grief. It argues that the data necessary to address the issue satisfactorily are not available and thus current assumptions in the literature about the universality of the grief experience are at least suspect. However, there are theoretical reasons, derived from interactionist thought, to suspect that if certain components of the grief experience vary, so will the experience. Four of these components are examined (level of significance of the other who dies; definition of the situation surrounding the death; character of the self experiencing a loss through death; and the interactional situation/setting in which the prior three components occur). Evidence is also presented which is suggestive of space-time variation in these components. It is concluded that an assumption of the deep social shaping and thus the variability of grief is fruitful for further empirical inquiries.     

Principal component and correspondence analysis of compositional data: some similarities

Principal component and correspondence analysis can both be used as exploratory methods for representing multivariate data in two dimensions. Circumstances under which the, possibly inappropriate, application of principal components to untransformed compositional data approximates to a correspondence analysis of the raw data are noted. Aitchison (1986) has proposed a method for the principal component analysis of compositional data involving transformation of the raw data. It is shown how this can be approximated by a correspondence analysis of appropriately transformed data. The latter approach may be preferable when there are zeroes in the data.     

School performance, academic aspirations, and drug use among children and adolescents

The relationship between drug use, school performance, and academic aspirations among 446 Anglo and Hispanic youths, age nine to seventeen, is explored. Two groups of subjects--current substance users and non-users--were interviewed. Subjects in each comparison group were similar in age, ethnicity, and gender. Overall results, consistent with prior research, indicate a significant relationship between current school performance, future educational aspirations, and drug use. No difference was noted between substance use groups on indicators of general interest in school work or probability of dropping out of school. Important differences in response patterns occurring with age, ethnicity, and gender were found.     

CONDITIONAL INFERENCE ABOUT AN EQUICORRELATION COEFFICIENT

SenGupta (1987) proposed a locally most powerful test which is globally (one sided) unbiased, and an estimator of p, the equicorrelation coefficient of a standard symmetric multivariate normal (SSMN) distribution. Here we use the idea in Williams (1984) to illustrate the construction and use of ancillary statistics to make inference about p. The test and confidence intervals based on this construction are conditionally optimal.     

The therapist at play and the patient who begins to play

This paper addresses the therapeutic challenge presented in the initial phase of therapy by patients who have trouble playing and dreaming, that is, patients who use action-discharge and concrete communication and who show a relative lack of derivative, symbolic communication. An approach is described which conceptualizes therapy as taking place in an intermediate area between inner and outer reality, and in which playing, dreaming and interpretable transference, the vehicles of therapeutic work, can be facilitated. There can be advantages, in some cases, of using such an approach in family sessions. Clinical material is presented from the treatment of an adolescent in her family.     

Intrinsic Growth Rates and Net Reproduction Rates in the Presence of Migration

Conventional measures of long‐term population growth such as the intrinsic growth rate and the net reproduction rate assume migration rates to be zero. We develop expressions for analogous measures that register the impact of net migration rates, and we develop a simple method of estimating their values. Applying these new measures to data for developed countries shows that allowance for migration raises net reproduction rates by 0.2‐0.3 in areas of overseas European settlement and by approximately half as much in Northern and Western Europe. The newly defined intrinsic growth rates in Eastern Europe are exceptionally low at ‐1.7 percent to ‐2.4 percent per annum. In contrast, the migration‐adjusted intrinsic growth rate of the United States exceeds those of Asia and Latin America. The formulas and estimation procedures described should allow a more precise understanding of the implications of current migration patterns for long‐term growth prospects.