The Effects of Congressional Appropriation Committee Membership on the Distribution of Federal Research Funding to Universities

Does congressional representation of a university affect the distribution of research funding to universities? This article studies two types of congressional representation: district representation, reflecting interests related to the politician's constituents, and alma mater affiliation, reflecting the politician's personal interests. I find that both types of representation matter and lobbying efforts by public and private universities may differ. Thus this article suggests politics plays a role in diverting funding that might be given to other institutions based under a more objective process, reducing the potential effectiveness of the funding on research activities.     

The Rights and Responsibilities of Gay and Lesbian Parents: Legal Developments, Psychological Research, and Policy Implications

With the growing number of same-sex unions, the legal system must determine the rights and responsibilities of gay parents who decide to end a relationship. In 2005, the California Supreme Court found that a child's lesbian caregiver was a legal "parent" despite having no biological or adoptive relationship, while the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 2004 concluded the opposite. Psychologists can inform this debate by presenting research demonstrating that (a) children benefit from contact with two parents, and (b) children's well-being is unaffected by their parents' sexual orientation. Psychologists can further assist the legal system by conducting future research. In order for psychologists to impact laws and policies, legal actors must utilize this expertise .     

'Mingling together': promoting the social inclusion of disabled children and young people during the school holidays

The promotion of social inclusion of disabled children and their families is currently high on the UK political agenda. Research shows that disabled children and their families are highly disadvantaged, both economically and socially. This paper reports some of the findings of a qualitative study, entitled On Holiday! , which involved analysing the views of 297 people across six local authority research sites in England including 86 disabled children and young people. The study showed that many disabled children and their families experienced high levels of social isolation and exclusion during out-of-school periods and during the school holidays in particular. The paper recounts some of the experiences of disabled young people and their families and ways in which local authorities can promote their social inclusion. We argue that disabled young people and their families can only be truly socially included and empowered when all levels of the local authority (managers, officers and elected members) recognize the rights and entitlements of disabled children and have the political will and commitment to implement them.     

Walking a well-being tightrope: young people in Australia

The economic and social contribution young people make to society is increasingly important as the population ages. Yet a substantial number of young people face economic and social challenges that have an impact on their current and future well-being. Independent indicators are often used to describe what we know about how young people are faring, but these fail to show how young people are doing holistically, across their whole life. If we are to better understand and improve young people??s well-being and their lives more generally, it is critical that research establishes the connections and interactions between life domains. This paper uses a well-being framework and secondary analysis of national statistics to begin to understand how young people are faring when we cross economic outcomes with other social indicators. It argues that some Australian young people fare poorly across a large number of other social indicators and thus may be walking a tightrope in regard to their well-being and well-becoming. This paper also aims to generate a dialogue about using a well-being framework for future research with and about young people.     

Responding to remediation and gatekeeping challenges in supervision

Thirty faculty in randomly selected Commission on Accreditation for Marriage and Family Therapy Education (COAMFTE) programs representing four geographical regions of the United States were asked to respond to a survey that included seven brief vignettes depicting gatekeeping and remediation challenges supervisors may face when working with therapists-in-training. Research participants were asked to select from among a range of 17 response options and were also asked to provide a rationale for the selection of their responses. The response rate for the mailed survey was 34%. Telephone interviews were conducted with three respondents who had provided especially detailed responses to the open-ended portions of the mailed survey and who also volunteered to be questioned regarding how supervision decisions are made. Results support the conclusion that COAMFTE faculty take their gatekeeping function seriously as they balance commitments to multiple stakeholders. When presented with hypothetical "bare-bones" vignettes, the supervisors in our study consistently recommended talking with the student in order to more fully understand the context of the student's performance problem before deciding how to proceed. Supervisors recommended a variety of remediation efforts, but reserved the most severe consequences, such as probation, dismissal, and filing an ethics complaint, for the vignette involving dishonesty and lack of personal integrity.     

"Just like I'm saving money in the bank": client perspectives on care coordination services

Older adults face many challenges to community living. The literature has not sufficiently explored the roles of care coordination in the maintenance of housing and access to health care among older adults, particularly from their own perspectives. This qualitative study analyzes the findings from 25 interviews and 6 focus group discussions (48 participants) with a multiethnic sample of older adults in the New York City area. Care coordination services appear to assist older adults access health care, and to a lesser extent, maintain affordable housing. Disparities in access to care coordination appear to remain for immigrant, minority and suburban populations.     

Questioning Consilience and Autonomy in Self-Determination Theory: A Critique and Hermeneutic-Phenomenological Alternative

This paper offers a theoretical analysis of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and its claims regarding human autonomy. Self-determination theorists have advanced a form of self-regulated, engaged behavior (i.e., autonomy), founded upon on a consilient account of human motivation that assumes multiple, hierarchical levels of organization and causation (e.g., biological, psychological, and social). Autonomy, from this perspective, is taken to emerge from underlying biological mechanisms, but also able to exert its own causal effects in the world as a unique psychological phenomenon. We contend that in theorizing this way, self-determination theorists have invoked a mixed discourse of mechanism and autonomy that leaves important questions unanswered, perhaps most importantly those concerning how autonomy as a kind of volition can fit coherently in the mechanistic account of world that they advocate. We then offer an alternative perspective based upon the work of various hermeneutic-phenomenological thinkers in philosophy and psychology. This alternative perspective conceptualizes human phenomena such as autonomy and motivation in agentic terms, emphasizing meaningful participation in possibility-laden contexts of everyday practices.     

A Bayesian method for safety signal detection in ongoing blinded randomised controlled trials

Sponsors have a responsibility to minimise risk to participants in clinical studies through safety monitoring. The FDA Final Rule for IND Safety Reporting requires routine aggregate safety evaluation, including in ongoing blinded studies. We are interested in estimating the probability that the true adverse event rate in the experimental arm exceeds that in the control arm. We developed a Bayesian approach that specifies an informative meta-analytic predictive prior on the event probability in the control arm and an uninformative prior on that in the experimental arm. We combined these priors with a mixture likelihood that considers each patient in the ongoing blinded study may belong to the experimental or control arm. This allowed us to estimate the quantity of interest without unblinding. We evaluated our method by simulation, pairing scenarios that differed only in whether a safety signal was present or missing, and quantifying the ability of our model to discriminate using signal detection theory. Our approach shows benefit. It detects safety signals more reliably with greater sample sizes and for common rather than rare events. Performance does not deteriorate markedly when historical studies exhibit heterogeneous hazards or non-constant hazards. Our method will allow us to monitor safety signals in ongoing blinded studies with the goal of earlier identification and risk mitigation. Our method could be adapted to use informative priors on both arms or predictive covariates where pertinent data exist. We stress that ongoing safety monitoring should involve a multi-disciplinary team where statistical methods are paired with medical judgement.     

Feminized cultural capital at work in the moral economy: Home credit and working-class women

One of the defining features of the home credit sector is the role played by its agents—workers who act as intermediaries between lending companies and borrowers to facilitate lending and collect repayments. There is a prevailing and pervasive narrative in the sector that women make superior agents, largely based on the belief that female agents can manage relationships with borrowers more successfully than their male counterparts. This article analyzes data from 349,078 home credit accounts (loans), as well as 71 interviews with home credit agents and lending company managers, to evaluate both the myths and realities of women's roles in home credit. The data is also used to explore the opportunities for—and potential constraints on—women's career progression in home credit work, based on an understanding of the moral economy in which they operate. By exploring the moral economy of low-income communities, the article highlights the role of working-class women's cultural capital within the labor market. Despite women forming the majority of the agent workforce in home credit, women's capital is undervalued in comparison with their male counterparts' capital. The analysis within this article allows a greater understanding of the highly classed and gendered nature of the moral economy of low-income communities and the exchange value of women's capital within the labor market.