Resisting your good intentions: substance‐misusing parents and early intervention to support and monitor children in need

Children from substance‐misusing families face elevated risks in growing up well and safe. Early intervention is an opportunity for local authorities to offer support and keep a watching brief on children's welfare. However, the basis upon which agencies voluntarily engage with families in advance of major problems becoming evident is far from straightforward. This qualitative pilot study in Scotland followed professional decision‐making over 6 months (n = 20 professionals) with a small number of families (n = 6) defined as in need of supportive intervention. This support was allied with an intention to monitor the family situation, which, in these data, appeared to affect the willingness of families to engage with services. As services sought to increase their voluntary oversight, sometimes by threatening escalating involvement, so families by various means appeared to resist it. Successful early intervention is reliant on voluntary family participation and thus requires close attention to means of positive and motivated parental engagement to disarm resistance.     

Robustness of subset response surface designs to missing observations

Experiments designed to investigate the effect of several factors on a process have wide application in modern industrial and scientific research. Response surface designs allow the researcher to model the effects of the input variables on the response of the process. Missing observations can make the results of a response surface experiment quite misleading, especially in the case of one-off experiments or high cost experiments. Designs robust to missing observations can attract the user since they are comparatively more reliable. Subset designs are studied for their robustness to missing observations in different experimental regions. The robustness of subset designs is also improved for multiple levels by using the minimax loss criterion.     

Children's rights: have carers abandoned values?

Traditionally, social workers have been concerned about the importance of values as significantly influencing professional practice. It is argued here that the emphasis on values has latterly been superseded by a focus on rights. This shift in perspective has come to characterise the activities of social workers and ‘professional’ carers such as foster and residential carers, and is related to a growing concentration on the externally measurable elements of practice (performativity) rather than the internal, and relatively intangible, quality of relationships (caring). It is necessary to understand the relationship between rights, needs and values in order to ensure that children are accorded their rights without having to forfeit the experiential quality of relationships with their carers.     

Environment and sex ratios among Alaska Natives: An historical perspective

Human-environment interactions can affect the sex ratios of resource-dependent societies in a variety of ways. Historical and contemporary data on Alaska Native populations illustrate such effects. Some eighteenth and early nineteenth century observers noted an excess of females, which they attributed to high mortality among hunters. Population counts in the later nineteenth century and well into the twentieth found instead an excess of men in many communities. Female infanticide was credited as the explanation: since family survival depended upon hunting success, males were more valued. Although infanticide explanations for the excess of males have been widely believed, available demographic data point to something else: higher adult female mortality. Finally, in the postwar years, the importance of mortality differentials seems to have faded- and also changed direction. Female outmigration from villages accounts for much of the gender imbalance among Native populations today. Natural-resource development, particularly North Slope oil, indirectly drives this migration. In Alaska's transcultural communities, the present gender imbalances raise issues of individual and cultural survival.     

Fixing a factor in the sequential design of two-level fractional factorial experiments

When designing two-level fractional factorial experiments sequentially, there is a wide choice of designs that could be used at each stage. Designs in which one of the factors is fixed at a particular level after the first experiment are studied in this paper. This sometimes allows all important effects to be estimated in fewer runs than would the standard sequences of designs, and effects can sometimes be estimated more efficiently. The properties of some sequences are presented, and extensions to fixing more than one factor and to factors with more than two levels are discussed.     

Four theories of population change and the environment

Conclusion It is clear from the discussion of the four principal frameworks used to study population and land use that there is no consensus on the relationship. Most of the debate has centered on the two rivalpolicies of the neoclassical economists and the classical economists or natural scientists. Consensus has been difficult to reach mainly because the empirical evidence is weak and inconclusive, and the diverse experiences of different regions make it difficult to generalize for policy. Because the linkage is unclear, it seems premature to conclude that curbing population growth is the only or most important remedy for land degradation.It is relevant to note that this paper has focussed only on land degradation. It may be that population change plays a more conclusive role in affecting other aspects of the environment.The National Research Council is the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author.     

Do Marriage Preparation Programs Really Work?: A Canadian Experiment*

This paper reports on the development, implementation, and evaluation of an innovative marriage preparation program. The program used a small discussion-group format, had pre- and post-wedding sessions, and emphasized the importance of communication patterns and conflict resolution. It was hypothesized (1) that spouses who took part in such a program would be less likely to engage in destructive conflict with each other than those who had not taken part; and, (2) that spouses who took part in the program would seek assistance in solving either individual or marital problems more readily than those who did not take part. The data supported both hypotheses.