No wonder social workers feel uncomfortable in court

The present article assesses the adversary systemper se and asks the question, Is there any place for courtroom antics and histrionics in cases involving children? Social workers are uncomfortable before the august body of thecourt, not because of any lack of education or knowledge on their part but because of the nature of the adversary process itself.     

UNDERSTANDING THE DECISION TO PARTICIPATE IN A SURVEY

The lack of full participation in sample surveys threatens theinferential value of the survey method. We review a set of conceptualdevelopments and experimental findings that appear to be informativeabout causes of survey participation; offer an integration ofthat work with findings from the more traditional statisticaland survey methodological literature on nonresponse; and, giventhe theoretical structure, deduce potentially promising pathsof research toward the understanding of survey participation.     

Libertarian collective decision-making: A new framework

A model of collective decision-making is presented which enables us to analyze the allocation of individual rights and liberties. The model broadens the traditional social choice framework. In social choice theory it is usually assumed that individuals have preferences over a set of feasible alternatives and that society reaches a decision on the basis of those preferences only. In the model presented in this paper, decision procedures do not only take information about individual preferences as input, but also information about individual freedom. The specific decision procedures we present and analyze can be characterized as libertarian.This paper was written while I was a visitor at the University of California, Riverside. The visit was made possible by financial support of the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO). I am extremely grateful to Prasanta Pattanaik for many stimulating discussions on the subject. For helpful comments I also thank Ad van Deemen, Grahame Lock, Huib Pellikaan and Marcel Wissenburg. Finally, I express my thanks to Wulf Gaertner and two anonymous referees.     

Fast retraction of evidence in a probabilistic expert system

We present and justify a propagation algorithm to facilitate the simultaneous calculation, for every node in a probabilistic exper system of the distribution of the associated random quantity, conditional on all the evidence obtained about the remaining nodes.     

MEASURING LEVELS OF PARTY IDENTIFICATION DOES QUESTION ORDER MATTER?

This article examines whether asking the vote question beforeparty identification alters the strength of partisanship andits relationship to vote choice. It employs the 1992 BritishElection Survey, which included a random split half-sample experiment,and the 1992–93 American Election Study Panel, where thequestion order for party identification and the vote were changed.The results show that altering the question ordering had verylittle effect in Britain and no significant effect in the UnitedStates. These results are consistent with the notion that partyidentification is one of the more enduring and stable componentsof mass political behavior in both presidential and parliamentarysystems.     

Differences in preferred level of arousal in two sub-groups of problem gamblers: A preliminary report

Twelve problem poker machine players and thirteen horse race gamblers (20 males and 5 females; age range 28–69) completed a series of questionnaires which assessed levels of anxiety, their preferred state of arousal and their motivations to gamble. As predicted, problem poker machine gamblers were found to be more anxious and reported avoiding arousal more frequently than the horse race gamblers. Alternately, problem horse race gamblers were found to prefer heightened levels of arousal and appeared to gamble to achieve these optimal levels of arousal. However, there was no difference between the groups on proneness to boredom. The present results provide evidence which is consistent with the Reversal theory and its application to the field of problem gambling.