The Proportion of Gaming Revenue Derived from Problem Gamblers: Examining the Issues in a Canadian Context

The legitimacy of government-sponsored gambling and its continued expansion depends in part on the impact that gambling has on society and the extent to which gambling revenue is derived from vulnerable individuals. The purpose of the present article is to try to establish a valid estimate of the proportion of gaming revenue derived from problem gamblers in Canada. Using recent secondary data collected in eight Canadian provinces, we estimate this proportion to be 23.1%, compared to a problem gambling prevalence rate of 4.2%. This estimate must be seen as tentative, however, as self-reported expenditures are 2.1 times higher than actual provincial gaming revenues.     

Developing Differences: Gender,Childhood and Economic Development

SUMMARY: Western images of the child in modern thought set up an opposition between innocence and experience which is supplemented by discourses of child care and child protection, and reflected in international policies and legislation for children. This article traces idealised conceptions of children of the North and South and unravels dichotomies between work and play as they map onto gendered and cultural spaces. These issues are linked to an analysis of assumptions underlying both international policies for child development and models of economic development, focusing in particular on the Human Development Index put forward in the 1992 United Nations Development Programme. In order to counter the naturalisation and abstraction of development in both, which reflects and contributes to the cultural and economic domination of the Northern hemisphere over the South, the article ends with a call to attend to both the specificity and diversity of children's developments.     

Discrepancies in Perceived Organizational Control: their Incidence and Importance in Local Churches*

The effects of discrepancies between preferred and perceived control among church members are investigated in terms of amount and distribution of control. For each dimension of control, three categories of respondents are identified: those who preferred a greater amount or wider distribution of control than they perceived to exist within their churches (deficit); those whose preferred and perceived control scores were identical (balance); and those who preferred a lesser amount or more concentrated distribution of control in their churches than they perceived to exist (surplus). For both amount and distribution of control, a perceived deficit is more common than a surplus. Respondents experiencing discrepancies in either direction are more dissatisfied and alienated than those with a balance in desired and perceived organizational control. A deficit is associated with more dissatisfaction (but not necessarily more alienation) than a surplus. Subsample comparisons show these findings hold for both officers and non-officers. Regression analyses show that discrepancies regarding organizational control are important even after other aspects of control have been introduced.     

Depression and dependence upon unsustaining environments

Applying the author's person-environment incongruence model of depression, the relationship between the predisposition to independence or dependence, in both family and work environments, and the presence or absence of depression was investigated. Fifty depressed and fifty nondepressed white women between 21 and 67 were studied. A beginning case was made for the hypothesis that incongruence between a person's predisposition and the environment results in vulnerability to depression. While most depressed women were dependent and in environments that did not meet their needs, independent women in unsustaining environments were also found to be depressed. This is a major finding, since dependence alone is generally thought to typify depressed persons.     

Approximation of power in multivariate analysis

We consider the calculation of power functions in classical multivariate analysis. In this context, power can be expressed in terms of tail probabilities of certain noncentral distributions. The necessary noncentral distribution theory was developed between the 1940s and 1970s by a number of authors. However, tractable methods for calculating the relevant probabilities have been lacking. In this paper we present simple yet extremely accurate saddlepoint approximations to power functions associated with the following classical test statistics: the likelihood ratio statistic for testing the general linear hypothesis in MANOVA; the likelihood ratio statistic for testing block independence; and Bartlett's modified likelihood ratio statistic for testing equality of covariance matrices.