The Supply of Foster Families for Children in Care

Correspondence to John Miles, Institute of Social and Applied Psychology, The University, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7LZ. Summary The family circumstances of 2694 foster homes in England arecompared with representative families from the 1985 GeneralHousehold Survey. Foster families typically include a womanin the 31–55 age group, live in homes with three or morebedrooms, are two parent families with one parent working full-timeand the other not, and they have older children only. The incidenceof families with these characteristics is used to develop anestimator of the relative supply position of local authorityareas for foster care, from which a number of conclusions aredrawn. Over the last thirty years some social changes have improvedthe supply, others decreased it, and on balance the nationalsupply position is little changed. Ironically, supply is bestin those areas which have the lowest need for fostering services.Ways in which local authorities can improve their supply positionare considered. The supply estimator reveals that the averageboarding out payments made by authorities show clear signs ofresponsiveness to the local supply position for foster families.     

Improving Coding Reliability for Open-Ended Questions

One of the basic measurement problems in survey research isthe reliable coding of open-ended questions. A posteriori methodsfor improving coding reliability are distinguished from a priorimethods. An a posteriori method has been shown to be of limitedvalue for improving reliability for certain coding tasks. Thisarticle proposes and illustrates a multi-step, a priori procedurefor generating coding categories for open-ended items. Preliminaryevidence is presented indicating that this method may yieldreliability levels far superior to those typically obtainedin coding open-ended questions     

INVESTIGATIONS CONCERNING THE DYNAMICS OF CONSUMER BEHAVIOR IN UNCERTAIN ENVIRONMENTS

This paper reports the results of several experiments investigating dynamic consumer behavior. When consumers know their incomes and prices but are uncertain about their preferences, we find that they typically adopt a two-step approach to locating optimal consumption bundles. Initially, a grid search method is employed; this is followed by a gradient search method. An interesting phenomenon observed in many of our experiments is a tendency to consume a bundle well away from the optimum, immediately after the optimum is located. The effects of income and price changes are also studied.     

From'Normal Appearances'to 'Simulation'in Interaction

Since they are modern characters, living in an age of transition more urgently hysterical at any rate than the age which preceded it, I have drawn my people as split and vacillating, a mixture of the old and the new. and I think it not improbable that modern ideas may, through the media of newspapers and conversation, have seeped down into the social stratum which exists below stairs. My souls (or characters) are agglomerations of past and present cultures, scraps from books and newspapers, fragments of humanity, torn shreds of once-fine clothing that has become rags, in just the way that a human soul is patched together. (Strindberg [1888] 1964: 102-3)     

DOES THE TAX SYSTEM FAVOR INVESTMENT IN HIGH-TECH OR SMOKE-STACK INDUSTRIES?

In this paper, we examine whether differential use of depreciable assets gives rise to differential tax treatment of high-technology industries relative to other industries. We calculate the total effective tax rate on a marginal investment in each of 34 assets, and weighting by the use of these assets, we calculate total effective tax rates for 73 industries. We find considerable variation within the high-tech sector and within the more traditional sector, but for the case of a taxable firm with a given debt/equity ratio, we do not find any systematic differences between overall rates in the two sectors.