The sexual abuse of children by strangers: its extent,nature and victims' characteristics

This paper reports a school‐based questionnaire survey conducted among 2420 children aged nine to 16 years. It examines the extent of stranger abuse, its nature and the characteristics of victims. The research contains complex messages in terms of the ‘seriousness’ of stranger abuse and identifies a number of challenges to understanding this phenomenon. It highlights the need for much more sophistication in debates over, and policy and practice responses to, stranger abuse. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Employee–Employer Grievances: A Review

The focus of industrial conflict has shifted from collective confrontation to grievances between employee and employer. This narrative review encompasses a range of international research on individual employee–employer grievances. The literature is reviewed in four key stages: (1) the incidence of grievable events; (2) the employee's response to a potential grievance issue; (3) the effectiveness of grievance processing; and (4) outcomes. The incidence of grievable events cannot be estimated precisely, because most are either not pursued by the employee or are settled informally (and so not recorded). Most research has been done on the second stage, investigating when a grievance will be pursued. The theoretical frame of exit, voice and loyalty, adapted from A.O. Hirschman (Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organisations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970) has been prominent, but a series of findings have challenged the validity of this model and suggest a range of competing theories which may explain the apparent conundrum of negative outcomes associated with formal grievance procedures. The role of power has regained prominence, and this is part of a fuller understanding of grievance outcomes. The focus has been on the employee perspective, and it is now timely to broaden the focus, modelling a progression through a sequence of stages and emphasizing the role of employers in designing and managing grievance processes which are effective and fair.     

Parental grief after a child's drug death compared to other death causes: investigating a greatly neglected bereavement population

This comparative survey contrasted 571 parents who lost children to various death causes: 48 to drug-related deaths and overdoses, 462 to suicide, 24 to natural death cases, and 37 to mostly accidental death cases. Groups were compared in terms of grief difficulties, mental health problems, posttraumatic stress, and stigmatization. Results did not show any appreciable differences in these respects between the suicide bereaved parents and those losing children to drug-related deaths. However, when the suicide and drug-related death survivors were specifically contrasted against accidental and natural death loss cases, a consistent pattern emerged showing the former group was consistently more troubled by grief and mental health problems than the latter two sub-groups. These differences remained when controls of time since the loss and gender differences were employed as covariates. These findings suggest that the powerful and intense stigma against drug use and mental illness, shared among the public-at-large, imposes challenges in healing of immense proportion for these parents as they find less compassionate responses from their significant others, following their losses.     

The notion of population economics

Economic literature has not adequately addressed population problems and growth models have assumed the population growth rate as an exogenous constant. Life expectancy and the quality of documentation over a long period have corrected the problem of nonstationary population, however. In addition, mathematical and computational possibilities have been increased thereby allowing population issues to be considered endogenous and variable in models. Recognizing that population changes affect supply and demand and should be studied, a group of economists have found a society to address such population problems--the European Society for Population Economics. Within the realm of population economics are subfields that should be included in any studies. For example, economists must examine household behavior and its influence on having or not having children. Another subfield includes studying the effects of changes in birth rates. For example, birth rates affect age distribution and each age distribution has a typical distribution of demand. A young society would demand schooling and child care, while an old society would need elderly care and health facilities. To enhance optimum population growth, policy makers have several options. For example, family allowances and child care influence procreation, but they require an increase in state expenditures and taxes. Providing health care for all members of society improves the quality of the population and its size. Implementing a migration policy also increases the population. Education and retraining strengthens the quality of the labor force, but some argue that it does not lead to procreation.     

Population, nutrition and agriculture

The human carrying capacity of the world or a country is considered as a function of food consumption per capita. A method of assessing carrying capacity is described, and it is shown that the world’s population currently exceeds the global carrying capacity, that the population of the less-developed countries (LDCs) exceeds their carrying capacity, and that this situation cannot be expected to change more than marginally in the period up to 2050. It is also shown that a major increase in the global consumption of nitrogen fertilizer will be necessary if world crop production per capita is to be maintained at the current inadequate level.     

Pension reform in the Baltic States: Convergence with “Europe” or with “the world”?

Abstract The Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – join the European Union in 2004. This paper examines pension reform in the three countries over the past decade in the light of the “European social model” and the “World Bank model”. Part one seeks to define these two models. It shows how the former emphasizes income adequacy and solidarity while the latter stresses fiscal sustainability, savings and economic growth. Part two looks at reforms made and proposed. Initial reforms involved raising the retirement age and relating benefits more closely to earnings and service. This resulted in the establishment of pension systems similar to those in many European countries. Subsequent reforms involved attempts to shift from a publicly financed, purely “pay‐as‐you‐go” system to one based upon “funding” and private, individual accounts. Such systems have been promoted by the World Bank. The appropriateness of this approach – its high transition costs, potentially high administration costs, and longer‐term implications for the relative income status of retired people – is questioned. Part three draws conclusions. In the short and medium term, policymaker should safeguard income adequacy rather than seek the doubtful advantages of funding – in other words, look more to “Europe” than to “the world”.     

Behrens-fisher problem under the assumption of homogeneous coefficients of variation

The powers of the likelihood ratio (LR) test and an “asymptotically (in some sense) optimum” invariant test are examined and compared by simulation techniques with those of several other relevant tests for the problem of testing the equality of two univariate normal population means under the assumption of heterogeneous variances but homogeneous coefficients of variation. It is seen that the LR test is highly satisfactory for all values of the coefficient of variation and the “asymptotically optimum” invariant test, which is computationally much simpler than the LR test, is a reasonably good competitor for cases where the value of the coefficient of variation is greater than or equal to 3. Also, a     

Assessing discrimination of risk prediction rules in a clustered data setting

The AUC (area under ROC curve) is a commonly used metric to assess discrimination of risk prediction rules; however, standard errors of AUC are usually based on the Mann–Whitney U test that assumes independence of sampling units. For ophthalmologic applications, it is desirable to assess risk prediction rules based on eye-specific outcome variables which are generally highly, but not perfectly correlated in fellow eyes [e.g. progression of individual eyes to age-related macular degeneration (AMD)]. In this article, we use the extended Mann–Whitney U test (Rosner and Glynn, Biometrics 65:188–197, 2009) for the case where subunits within a cluster may have different progression status and assess discrimination of different prediction rules in this setting. Both data analyses based on progression of AMD and simulation studies show reasonable accuracy of this extended Mann–Whitney U test to assess discrimination of eye-specific risk prediction rules.     

Acknowledgement

We gratefully acknowledge the partial support of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences through Training Grant #T32 ESO 7018 and Research Grant #ROI ESO 2286, also the partial support of Special Projects funded by COllncil for Tobacco Research - U.S.A., Inc.