The Practice of Career Counseling by Specialists and Counselors in General Practice

This study sought to identify which career counseling work behaviors are unique to the specialty of career counseling and which career counseling work behaviors are an element of general counseling practice. Career counseling work behaviors related to assessment and counseling were judged to be fundamental to the general practice of counseling. Career counseling work behaviors related to program management, information, and consultation were judged to be fundamental to the specialty practice of career counseling. Implications for counselor certification and counseling program accreditation are discussed.     

Children as Witnesses: Understanding Their Capacities, Needs, and Experiences

Historically the law regarded children as inherently unreliable and made it difficult for them to testify. Since 1975 awareness of child abuse has increased and research has established that children can be reliable witnesses. Governments began to recognize the needs and capacities of children and enacted legal reforms to facilitate prosecutions for child abuse. This paper reports on a survey of victim witness workers and other justice system professionals which reveals some of the continued failings of that system in dealing with children. Although relatively rare, there are cases of false allegations of abuse, usually a result of investigations by poorly trained professionals. Further legal reforms and better human supports are required to ensure that the needs of children are met and their capacities as witnesses are fully appreciated.     

City-wide relationships between green spaces,urban land use and topography

The growing proportion of human populations living in urban areas, and consequent trends of increasing urban expansion and densification fuel a need to understand how urban form and land use affect environmental quality, including the availability of urban green spaces. Here we use Sheffield as a case study of city-wide relationships between urban green space extent, quality (vegetation cover and tree-cover), and gradients in urban form and topography. The total area of buildings and length of the road network are equally strong negative predictors of extent of green space, while the former predictor is a more important negative influence upon green space quality. Elevation positively influences extent of green space but negatively influences tree-cover. In contrast, slope of terrain positively influences green space quality and is the best predictor of tree-cover. Overall housing density is a more important negative predictor of extent of green space and tree-cover than the densities of individual housing types. Nevertheless, the latter are more important influences upon levels of vegetation cover. Threshold effects of densities of different housing types suggest opportunities for optimising green space quality, with implications for housing policy. Variation in ecological quality of green space may partly reflect different historical intensities of industrial activity.     

Trends in the intergenerational transmission of divorce

I use data from the 1973-1996 NORC General Social Survey to examine trends in the intergenerational transmission of divorce, the propensity for the children of divorce to end their own marriages. The rate of divorce transmission declined by almost 50% in the study period. This result was essentially unchanged by statistical controls for various personal and family background differences between respondents.     

Making a connection: school engagement of young people in care

Intervention to improve educational attainment for children in out‐of‐home care is increasingly being recognized as important for their well‐being and future opportunities. This paper reports on a mixed method study of the school engagement or connectedness of young people in care. The study comprised a survey of 202 young people in care in Queensland, Australia, and a matched comparison group of young people not in care, plus interviews with a subset of 65 young people in care who were surveyed. Both the school environment and the perceived levels of support influenced school engagement, with those who were assisted by carers and caseworkers more likely to be positively connected with school. These young people perceived education as a pathway to achieving work and life goals. The findings suggest that active and focused attention on young people's school engagement should be part of case planning and monitoring as it offers an additional strategy for improving their educational experience.     

Bayesian Instrumental Variables: Priors and Likelihoods

Instrumental variable (IV) regression provides a number of statistical challenges due to the shape of the likelihood. We review the main Bayesian literature on instrumental variables and highlight these pathologies. We discuss Jeffreys priors, the connection to the errors-in-the-variables problems and more general error distributions. We propose, as an alternative to the inverted Wishart prior, a new Cholesky-based prior for the covariance matrix of the errors in IV regressions. We argue that this prior is more flexible and more robust thanthe inverted Wishart prior since it is not based on only one tightness parameter and therefore can be more informative about certain components of the covariance matrix and less informative about others. We show how prior-posterior inference can be formulated in a Gibbs sampler and compare its performance in the weak instruments case for synthetic as well as two illustrations based on well-known real data.     

The Impact of Uncertainty Shocks

Uncertainty appears to jump up after major shocks like the Cuban Missile crisis, the assassination of JFK, the OPEC I oil‐price shock, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This paper offers a structural framework to analyze the impact of these uncertainty shocks. I build a model with a time‐varying second moment, which is numerically solved and estimated using firm‐level data. The parameterized model is then used to simulate a macro uncertainty shock, which produces a rapid drop and rebound in aggregate output and employment. This occurs because higher uncertainty causes firms to temporarily pause their investment and hiring. Productivity growth also falls because this pause in activity freezes reallocation across units. In the medium term the increased volatility from the shock induces an overshoot in output, employment, and productivity. Thus, uncertainty shocks generate short sharp recessions and recoveries. This simulated impact of an uncertainty shock is compared to vector autoregression estimations on actual data, showing a good match in both magnitude and timing. The paper also jointly estimates labor and capital adjustment costs (both convex and nonconvex). Ignoring capital adjustment costs is shown to lead to substantial bias, while ignoring labor adjustment costs does not.     

Rail infrastructure charging in Hellenic railways

In this paper we consider marginal cost estimation in Greek railways over the period 2000-2004. Marginal cost estimation has been recently an active area of research when disaggregated data by line of operation are available but factor price data are not available. We propose panel data techniques to deal with the problem of statistical efficiency of parameters estimators. Our estimates show that marginal cost in Greek railways is comparable to the estimates in other European countries.     

Taking a "Hands On" Approach to Diversity in Higher Education: A Critical-Dialogic Model for Effective Intergroup Interaction

This article reviews divergent empirical evidence on interracial contact. While research on diversity in higher education provides ample evidence for the educational benefits of engaging with diversity in informal interactions or courses, experimental and naturalistic studies in social psychology on interracial interactions reveal a complicated picture, showing what appear to be both positive and negative effects. Rather than addressing the question of whether or not to promote interracial interactions on campus, we present a critical-dialogic model of intergroup dialogue that centers on communication processes as an avenue toward intergroup relationships, understanding, and collaboration. Prior research and preliminary results from a nine-university research collaboration provide strong empirical support for the proposed model. We conclude with program and policy considerations for higher education institutions interested in promoting meaningful intergroup interaction.