The Queer Utility of Narrative Case Studies for Clinical Social Work Research and Practice

The author uses a queer critical lens to analyze the marginalization of case study research in the evidence-based practice model of clinical social work. He argues that narrative case studies are necessary for the production of context-dependent knowledge about social work practice and asserts that the method offers particular utility in conducting queer inquiry. The method is explored in relation to its capacity to describe non-normative phenomena and the impact of normative cultural pressures on queer subjects. An abbreviated case study by the author is included to demonstrate these capacities.     

A Case for the Case Study: How and Why They Matter

In this special issue we have asked the contributors to make a case for the case study. The guest editors, Jeffrey Longhofer, Jerry Floersch and Eric Hartmann, intergrate ideas from across the disciplines to explore the complexties of case study methods and theory. In education, Gary Thomas explores the importance of ethnographic case studies in understanding the relationships among schools, teachers, and students. Lance Dodes and Josh Dodes use the case study to articulate a psychoanalytic approach to addiction. In policy and generalist practice, Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie elaborate a model for a case-by-case approach to prediction and the swampy ground prediction serves up to practitioners. Christian Salas and Oliver Turnbull persuasively write about the role of the case study in neuro-psychoanalysis and illustrate it with a case vignette. In political science, Sanford Schram argues for a bottom up and ethnographic approach to studying policy implementation by describing a case of a home ownership program in Philadelphia. Eric Hartman queers the case study by articulating its role in deconstructing normative explanations of sexuality. In applied psychology, Daniel Fishman describes a comprehensive applied psychology perspective on the paradigmatic case study. Richard Miller and Miriam Jaffe offer us important ways of thinking about writing the case study and the use of multi-media. Each contributor brings a unique perspective to the use of the case study in their field, yet they share practical and philosophical assumptions.     

Allais for the poor: Relations to ability,information processing,and risk attitudes

This paper complements evidence on the Allais paradox from advanced countries and educated people by a novel investigation in a poor rural area. The share of Allais-type behavior is indeed high and related to indicators of “lacking ability,” such as poor education, unemployment, and little financial sophistication. Based on prospective reference theory, we extend these characteristics by biased processing of probabilistic information. Finally, we reveal that Allais-type behavior is linked to risk-related characteristics, such as risk tolerance and optimism. This indicates a potential problem as exactly the more dynamic among the poor tend to make inconsistent decisions under uncertainty.     

Are the poor worse at dealing with ambiguity?

This paper studies the relationship between people’s ambiguity attitudes and income in the field using language as a natural source of ambiguity. It shows that the method of Baillon et al. (2017b) can be adapted for field studies, providing ambiguity measurement tasks that are more comprehensible for nonacademic subjects. Ambiguity attitudes were elicited in two groups of Chinese adolescents (poor rural and rich urban), among whom the income variation is big. In the rural group the poorer are both more ambiguity averse and more a-insensitive, whereas in the urban group the richer are more a-insensitivite. On average, the poor rural adolescents are worse at dealing with ambiguity than their urban counterparts. A-insensitivity, which measures people’s understanding of an ambiguous situation, is an important but sometimes neglected component of ambiguity attitude. Policies aiming to help people improve decisions may focus more on reducing a-insensitivity as this cognitive bias is more likely to be influenced by intervention than people’s intrinsic aversion towards ambiguity.     

Loss aversion leading to advantageous selection

Some insurance markets are characterized by “advantageous selection”, that is, ex-post risk and coverage are negatively correlated. We show that expectation-based loss aversion as in K?szegi and Rabin (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(4), 1133–1165, 2006; The American Economic Review, 97(4), 1047–1073, 2007) provides a natural explanation for this phenomenon in environments in which risk aversion models do not, e.g., when agents face modest-scale risks and/or in absence of moral hazard. More exposure to risk has two competing effects on an agent’s willingness to pay for insurance: a positive effect, as in standard expected utility models; and a negative one, due to a reference effect. We determine conditions under which an insurance provider optimally sets a high price at which only low risk agents buy.     

Giving in the face of risk

Decisions about how to share resources with others often need to be taken under uncertainty regarding its allocational consequences. Although risk preferences are likely important, existing research is silent about how social and risk preferences interact in such situations. In this paper we provide experimental evidence on this question. In a first experiment givers are not exposed to risk while beneficiaries’ final earnings may be larger or smaller than the allocation itself, depending on the realized state of the world. In a second experiment, risk affects the earnings of givers but not of beneficiaries. We find that individuals’ risk preferences are predictive for giving in both experiments. Increased risk exposure of beneficiaries tends to decrease giving whereas increased risk exposure of givers has no effect. We propose a simple non-linear generalization of a model allowing for other-regarding preferences, ex-post and ex-ante fairness, and risk aversion. We find some support for it in our data when risk is on the beneficiaries’ side but less so when risk is on the givers’ side. Our results point to the importance of the further development of models of social preferences that also incorporate risk preferences.