The Role of Social Support in the Transition From Foster Care to Emerging Adulthood

Many youth leave foster care with disrupted relationships with their family and others in their social networks. Previous research has documented the severe adversity that former foster youth face in the transition to young adulthood. Perhaps some difficulties are at least partially related to a lack of social support that results from frayed relationships. This article reviews the literature on social support, particularly as it relates to foster youth, for the purpose of examining the role that formal and informal supports play in the transition to adulthood. The implications of this literature for successful transitions for former foster youth are discussed, as well as ways child welfare workers can engage youth and their families, and help them develop supportive social networks.     

Compulsory intergenerational family solidarity shaping choices between work and care: Perceptions of informal female carers and local policymakers in Estonia

Estonians are obliged by law to provide maintenance for family members who are unable to cope by themselves. As a result, 80% of fragile older people receive informal care. Whether this is because the carers themselves feel solidarity and choose informal caring or because they lack alternatives is the question. We applied the cultural approach for explaining the construction of compulsory family solidarity in care provision to older people through the perceptions of informal carers and policy actors. Our interest is in how filial norms framed by individual responsibilities of care provision required by law can influence (i) informal carers’ perceptions concerning their choices between work and care and (ii) impact policy actors’ perceptions concerning eldercare service provision. Analysing the empirical data produced during focus groups with female carers and interviews with policy actors, we demonstrate the triple‐fold pressure to informal caregiving as an expression of compulsory family solidarity. Key Practitioner Message: ? The article demonstrates how the national Family Law Act constitutes a compulsory requirement of family solidarity in society; ? The compulsory family solidarity norm influences local‐level policymaking and inhibits the development of formal care services for older people; ? Informal carers’ choices between work and care are shaped by their personal filial norms, familialistic policymaking, and pressure exerted by older people.     

一类CRM模型的构建及其销售策略分析

从分析现有CRM(客户关系管理)系统的缺失入手,强调了销售以客户“人”为分析基点的重要性,在此基础上给出了一类销售过程的简化状态指标.应用该思路、指标、借助于Pfeifer和Carraway的思路、利用Markov链建立商家与客户关系模型,就有限次销售的一次交易、多次交易及无限次销售的情况分别给出相应分析结果.并考虑企业实际运作,进一步讨论了该模型下不同销售策略模型的响应.结果表明,减少成功率小的销售活动,企业期望获利会更大些.     

A solution for two-person bargaining problems

Everyday bargaining problems are often solved by tossing a coin. A solution for two-person bargaining problems is axiomatized, which is a Pareto-optimal generalization of this coin tossing method. The super-additive solution of Perles and Maschler is also shown to be a generalization of this method. Various properties of our solution are studied, including continuity and risk sensitivity, and compared with properties of other solutions discussed in the literature.This study was financed by the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation, which is gratefully acknowledged. I like to thank an anonymous referee for useful comments.     

SIMULTANEOUS DETERMINATION OF CHURCH CONTRIBUTIONS AND CHURCH ATTENDANCE

In a standard model of household allocation of time and income, church attendance and church contributions are determined simultaneously. There are life-cycle aspects to both attendance and contributions, as Azzi and Ehrenberg (1975) and Ehrenberg (1977) have argued, and contributions behavior is affected by tax treatment and by a potential free-rider problem as well. This paper motivates an econometric specification which recognizes these features and estimates the parameters with a data set of over 2000 Protestant church members.     

Distribution of the cross-correlations of squared residuals in ARIMA models

ABSTRACT The distribution of the cross-correlations of squared residuals from Box-Jenkins models is considered in very general conditions, and the asymptotic distribution is derived. A test for a lagged relationship in volatility for economic time series under instantaneous causality is proposed, and its empirical behaviour is studied. An example involving the international stock market's volatility is studied, and an interesting result is observed.     

Ultrastructural elliptical models

Dolby's (1976) ultrastructural model with no replications is investigated within the class of the elliptical distributions. General asymptotic results are given for the sample covariance matrix S in the presence of incidental parameters. These results are used to study the asymptotic behaviour of some estimators of the slope parameter, unifying and extending existing results in the literature. In particular, under some regularity conditions they are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal. For the special case of the structural model, some asymptotic relative efficiencies are also reported which show that generalized least squares and the method of moment estimators can be highly inefficient under nonnormality.     

Modelling the management of underground water assets

Central to the activities of any industry is the modernization of its assets. This paper describes the application of statistical methods to the asset management plan of a large water company. A model for the underground assets is given in detail, and the extensive computations required are illustrated. A Bayesian model shows the consequences of various policy options and provides realistic measures of the uncertainty connected with them.     

History of sexual abuse and parental alcohol misuse: Risk,outcomes and protective factors in adolescents

This study examined the school performance, suicidal involvement, disordered eating behaviors, pregnancy risk and chemical use of teenagers with a history of sexual abuse or parental alcohol misuse and found that they had higher rates of these adverse outcomes than among a comparison group of teenagers without such background risk factors. Adolescents with dual-risk background reported higher levels of suicide risk, disordered eating, sexual behaviors and chemical abuse than teenagers with only one background risk factor. Among index group members, protective factors against these adverse outcomes included a high degree of religiosity and the ability to discuss problems with family or friends. Risk factors that increased the likelihood of adverse outcomes included depression, perceived substance use in school and worries about family financial security.The first author was supported in the preparation of this article by a grant from the Lois and Samuel Silberman Fund of New York.