Multiple forms of violence and other criminal activities as an indicator of severe child maltreatment

Child protection practice still appears to view child maltreatment as an event largely isolated from other family violence and criminal activities. Research undertaken by the authors suggests that children who have been subjected to the more severe forms of abuse are likely to have come from families who engage in several forms of criminal activity, inside and outside the family, which is often severe in nature. The child who has been maltreated may also become a participant in these activities. The authors recommend that these factors should be investigated in families who have maltreated a child, as the presence or absence of several forms of concurrent violence and other criminal activity may provide an important clue about the welfare of the child. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Consideration of Background Exposures in the Management of Hazardous Waste Sites: A New Approach to Risk Assessment

The current approach to health risk assessment of toxic waste sites in the U.S. may lead to considerable expenditure of resources without any meaningful reduction in population exposure. Risk assessment methods used generally ignore background exposures and consider only incremental risk estimates for maximally exposed individuals. Such risk estimates do not address true public health risks to which background exposures also contribute. The purpose of this paper is to recommend a new approach to risk assessment and risk management concerning toxic waste sites. Under this new approach, which we have called public health risk assessment, chemical substances would be classified into a level of concern based on the potential health risks associated with typical national and regional background exposures. Site assessment would then be based on the level of concern for the particular pollutants involved and the potential contribution of site contaminants to typical background human exposures. While various problems can be foreseen with this approach, the key advantage is that resources would be allocated to reduce the most important sources of human exposure, and site remediation decisions could be simplified by focussing on exposure assessment rather than questionable risk extrapolations.     

The location of ethnic and racial groups in the United States

The distinctive regional and urban locational patterns of thirty-three ethnic groups in the United States are analyzed from two different perspectives. First, who are the numerically important groups in each region? Second, from the perspective of the groups themselves, where are they spatially concentrated? We hypothesize that the forces generating distinctive ethnic locational patterns are strongest at the time of the initial settlement; thus the longer a group has been present in the United States, the less geographically concentrated it will be. This is found to be true for most ethnic groups except blacks and American Indians, whose specific social and political situations explain their particular concentrations. However, the early settlement patterns still affect the ethnic makeup of various areas of the nation, even though the concentrations have diminished over time. Moreover, although the 1975–1980 patterns of internal migration (analyzed through a Markov Chain model) are tending to reduce some of the distinctive geographic concentrations in the nation, this will still not fully eliminate distinctive ethnic concentrations. Groups differ in their propensities to leave or enter each area in a way that reflects the existing ethnic compositions of the areas. Thus even with the massive level of internal migration in the nation, there is no evidence that the substantial ethnic linkage to region is disappearing.     

The Entrepreneurial Tendencies of Managers: a Research Note

In this study associations are sought between certain biographical, family, personality and career variables and the likelihood that managers will develop their own business venture. Results, based on an analysis of questionnaires completed by 194 managers, reveal that ownership of a business by self or parents together with certain personal characteristics predispose managers towards business founding. Contrary to expectations, job and career frustration does not incline managers towards proprietorship.     

Demography of disaster: Population estimates after hurricane Andrew

Hurricane Andrew blasted through the southern tip of Florida in August 1992, damaging or destroying tens of thousands of homes and forcing hundreds of thousands of persons to move at least temporarily to different places of residence. The hurricane not only disrupted the lives of many Floridians, but destroyed the statistical basis for producing local population estimates in South Florida as well. These estimates are used for many types of decision-making, from the distribution of state revenue-sharing dollars to choosing sites for fast-food restaurants. This article describes the estimation problems created by the hurricane and how those problems were resolved through the use of existing data sources and the collection of new types of data. It closes with a discussion of several conceptual, methodological and procedural issues that will have to be faced in virtually any attempt to estimate the demographic consequences of natural disasters.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1994 annual meeting of the Population Association of America, Miami, Florida, USA.     

Tree-structured subgroup analysis for censored survival data: Validation of computationally inexpensive model selection criteria

The performance of computationally inexpensive model selection criteria in the context of tree-structured subgroup analysis is investigated. It is shown through simulation that no single model selection criterion exhibits a uniformly superior performance over a wide range of scenarios. Therefore, a two-stage approach for model selection is proposed and shown to perform satisfactorily. Applied example of subgroup analysis is presented. Problems associated with tree-structured subgroup analysis are discussed and practical solutions are suggested.