Personality and Personal Disturbance in Social Workers: A Research Note

Summary Personality Deviance Scales (PDS) and Personal Disturbance Scale(DSSI/sAD) scores were obtained from field social workers. In comparison with general population data and Rutherford's16 PF findings with trainee social workers the subjects werefound to be extreme in not blaming others, slightly submissiveand to have a low prevalence of personal disturbance. It was conjectured that certain personality characteristicsand ways of reacting to frustration may be important in bothbecoming and remaining a social worker.     

The Cognitive-Behavioural Approach with Depressed Clients

Correspondence to Dr Michael Seott, Liverpool Personal Service Society, 34, Stanley Street, Liverpool L1 6AN Summary The recent cognitive revolution in psychology has meant thatan individual's behaviour is now rarely viewed in simple behaviouristterms as solely a product of rewards and punishments, but isseen as influenced by the individual's own, often idiosyncratic,view of their situation. This new paradigm has enabled the developmentof highly structured and usually brief interventions in manyareas of individual emotional problems. This paper describes Individual and Group Cognitive Therapywith depressed clients and cites two recent outcome studies.The contribution of Cognitive-Behaviour Therapy (CBT) to thisarea of emotional distress is noted with the caveat that itseffectiveness has been more thoroughly studied in this areathan in others.     

Local Authority Intake Teams

Summary Amongst the many developments in social services organisationin the decade since Seebohm, specialist Intake Teams responsiblefor all initial referrals and short term work received by anArea Team, remain a popular form of local organization. Thispaper describes a small national survey of English local authoritiesto collect information on both intake teams and their long termcounterparts, and briefly outlines some of the major findings.The survey produced a broad picture of both the present structureof local authority fieldwork departments, and the personal characteristicsof social workers and their team leaders. The paper goes onto examine the relationship between intake and long term teams,particularly in terms of referral rates, relative caseloadsand the case transfer process; and concludes with an outlineof teams satisfaction with the intake system, and some indicationsof desired future developments.     

THE EFFECT OF CONCEALED WEAPONS LAWS: AN EXTREME BOUND ANALYSIS

Lott and Mustard [1997] provide evidence that enactment of concealed handgun ("right-to-carry") laws deters violent crime and induces substitution into property crime. A critique by Black and Nagin [1998] questions the particular model specification used in the empirical analysis. In this paper, we estimate the "model uncertainty" surrounding the model specified by Lott and Mustard using an extreme bound analysis (Leamer [1983]). We find that the deterrence results are robust enough to make them difficult to dismiss as unfounded, particularly those findings about the change in violent crime trends. The substitution effects are not robust with respect to different model specifications. (JEL K42)     

ESTIMATING TELEPHONE NONCOVERAGE BIAS WITH A TELEPHONE SURVEY

Nontelephone households are implicitly treated as a static populationin discussions of sampling frame noncoverage. Yet telephoneservice is known to be episodic for many households, who maygain or lose service as their financial situation changes orwhen they move. Thus the population of telephone householdsat any given time includes households that were recently a partof the nontelephone population. These households may be usedto characterize the nature of some noncoverage errors and evento estimate their magnitude. Using a panel constructed withthe 1992-93 Current Population Survey, "transient" telephonehouseholds-those who gained or lost service over the year coveredby the panel-are shown to comprise over half of the panel householdsreporting no telephone service in either the 1992 or 1993 surveys.These households are compared with the total nonphone populationand found to be similar on a variety of key demographic characteristics.Several statewide Virginia telephone surveys are used to comparehouseholds reporting "intermittent" phone service with nontelephonehouseholds surveyed through in-person interviews. Householdsreporting intermittent telephone service were very similar tonontelephone households in terms of health insurance coverageand other variables known to be related to telephone status.     

Quasi‐Symmetric Graphical Log‐Linear Models

Abstract. We propose an extension of graphical log‐linear models to allow for symmetry constraints on some interaction parameters that represent homologous factors. The conditional independence structure of such quasi‐symmetric (QS) graphical models is described by an undirected graph with coloured edges, in which a particular colour corresponds to a set of equality constraints on a set of parameters. Unlike standard QS models, the proposed models apply with contingency tables for which only some variables or sets of the variables have the same categories. We study the graphical properties of such models, including conditions for decomposition of model parameters and of maximum likelihood estimates.     

Ex Ante and Ex Post: What Does Rod Stewart Really Know Now?1

Do we really know whether or not we have “maximized” utility, or do we just know that we are “happy” or “sad”? We argue that we can never know objectively whether or not utility has been maximized; however, people acting on a free market are sufficiently close to the decision as to be able to hazard a better guess about their opportunity costs than policy makers.