Describing a landscape we are yet discovering

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis -     

The Local and the National in Community Care: Exploring Policy and Politics in Finland and Britain

International literature on community care tends to focus on the national level of welfare institutions and policies. However, community care is largely a locally tailored service and this paper makes a case for local comparisons of community care policies. Using local case studies from Finland and Britain, the paper argues that focusing on the local level contributes to the comparative study of community care in two ways. First, local comparisons highlight the often distinctively local nature of community care policies and thereby add to our understanding of community care. Second, local comparisons extend existing cross‐country explanations of community care by showing that community care is largely shaped by local politics, together with indirect structuring by national contexts. As such, the local case studies highlight the importance of the relationship between policy and politics, which has often been neglected in comparative research.     

Comprehensive Family Services and customer satisfaction outcomes

Comprehensive Family Services (CFS) is a strengths-based and partnership-oriented approach to casework implemented through multiple initiatives. This study examines the relationship between the practice of CFS and satisfaction of clients, foster parents, and community partners. CFS indicators are paired with statewide customer satisfaction survey results. CFS practices are associated with significantly higher customer satisfaction that improved over time for all groups. Although causality cannot be determined, the relationship is consistent, robust, and meaningful.     

DEA-Like Model and Common Weights Approach for the Construction of a Subjective Community Well-Being Indicator

A growing literature assesses the quality of life and well-being in geographically and/or politically divided areas. The paper proposes a new subjective well being (SWB) indicator based on residents’ satisfaction with environment and community, personal life and leisure activities. Our approach is a novel construction and new application of the well-being index, specifically, a DEA-like model with common weights under the benefit of the doubt (BoD) approach. This approach is very interesting in the SWB framework, allowing us to differentiate efficient individuals or estimate the relative importance of each domain in the SWB indicator. The results state that Personal life is the domain that most profoundly affects SWB index; it also differs in groups of individuals and geographic spaces.     

Immigrants’ educational disadvantage: an examination across ten countries and three surveys

Studies on immigrants’ disadvantage focus predominantly on labour market perspectives. Immigrants’ poor education is a subject much less examined especially in a cross-national context. This paper examines differences in educational achievement between immigrants and natives across ten OECD countries. In English-speaking countries, immigrants fare best, while in Continental European countries they fare worse compared to natives. Whilst language skills seem to explain immigrants’ disadvantage in English-speaking countries, socioeconomic background and school segregation are further important determinants of immigrants’ gap in Continental Europe. Results presented are predominantly robust across three sources of achievement data: PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS.      

Understanding Professional Projects in Welfare Service Work: Revival of Old Professionalism?

The professional terms for occupations that provide welfare services are changing, and here the introduction of new public management in the Nordic countries since the 1990s is indicative of wider developments. The article explores professional projects in welfare service work from both conceptual and empirical perspectives. The aim is to produce a gender‐sensitive analysis of the professional projects at the lower levels of the occupational hierarchies in health care. The first part reviews the literature conceptualizing the societal and institutional embeddedness of professional projects. The institutional matrix of welfare states emerges as a key context in shaping the welfare service work performed by women‐dominated professional groups. The second part examines the case of Finland and suggests that recent reforms have created new inequalities in the system of professions, in which occupational groups in welfare service work are becoming marginalized. This signals a move away from ‘democratic professionalism’ towards a revival of ‘old professionalism’.     

Infants' Visual Recognition of Pincer Grip Emerges Between 9 and 12 Months of Age

The development of the ability to recognize the whole human body shape has long been investigated in infants, while less is known about their ability to recognize the shape of single body parts, and in particular their biomechanical constraints. This study aimed to explore whether 9‐ and 12‐month‐old infants have knowledge of a hand‐grasping movement (i.e., pincer grip), being able to recognize violations of the hand's anatomical constraints during the observation of that movement. Using a preferential looking paradigm, we showed that 12‐month‐olds discriminate between biomechanically possible and impossible pincer grips, preferring the former over the latter (Experiment 1). This capacity begins to emerge by 9 months of age, modulated by infants' own sensorimotor experience with pincer grip (Experiment 2). Our findings indicate that the ability to visually discriminate between pincer grasps differing in their biomechanical properties develops between 9 and 12 months of age, and that experience with self‐produced hand movements might help infants in building a representation of the hand that encompasses knowledge of the physical constraints of this body part.     

Rule learning transfer across linguistic and visual modalities in 7-month-old infants

Rule learning (RL) refers to infants’ ability to extract high-order, repetition-based rules from a sequence of elements and to generalize them to new items. RL has been demonstrated in both the auditory and the visual modality, but no studies have investigated infants’ transfer of learning across these two modalities, a process that is fundamental for the development of many complex cognitive skills. Using a visual habituation procedure within a cross-modal RL task, we tested 7-month-old infants’ transfer of learning both from speech to vision (auditory-visual—AV—condition) and from vision to speech (visual-auditory—VA—condition). Results showed a transfer of learning in the AV condition, but only for those infants who were able to efficiently extract the rule during the learning (habituation) phase. In contrast, in the VA condition infants provided no evidence of RL. Overall, this study indicates that 7-month-old infants can transfers high-order rules across modalities with an advantage for transferring from speech to vision, and that this ability is constrained by infants’ individual differences in the way they process the to-be-learned rules.     

Clustering time-course microarray data using functional Bayesian infinite mixture model

This paper presents a new Bayesian, infinite mixture model based, clustering approach, specifically designed for time-course microarray data. The problem is to group together genes which have “similar” expression profiles, given the set of noisy measurements of their expression levels over a specific time interval. In order to capture temporal variations of each curve, a non-parametric regression approach is used. Each expression profile is expanded over a set of basis functions and the sets of coefficients of each curve are subsequently modeled through a Bayesian infinite mixture of Gaussian distributions. Therefore, the task of finding clusters of genes with similar expression profiles is then reduced to the problem of grouping together genes whose coefficients are sampled from the same distribution in the mixture. Dirichlet processes prior is naturally employed in such kinds of models, since it allows one to deal automatically with the uncertainty about the number of clusters. The posterior inference is carried out by a split and merge MCMC sampling scheme which integrates out parameters of the component distributions and updates only the latent vector of the cluster membership. The final configuration is obtained via the maximum a posteriori estimator. The performance of the method is studied using synthetic and real microarray data and is compared with the performances of competitive techniques.     

New sources on Soviet perpetrators of mass repression: a research note

At the end of the Great Terror, Stalin reversed course and reined in the NKVD. Hundreds of NKVD interrogators and other officials were arrested and charged with “violations of socialist legality.” Punishments ranged from imprisonment in the Gulag to execution. This repression of the NKVD was the result of a combination of scapegoating and “clan” politics. The arrests and accompanying trials of these NKVD officers created an enormous paper trail of sources, strictly classified in the FSB archives in Moscow. Recently, however, the security police archives in Ukraine opened its doors to researchers. The result is access to a range of sources which allow researchers, for the first time, to explore in detail the topic of Soviet perpetrators, in this case, the Soviet security police during and in the aftermath of the Great Terror.