INTERVENTION STRATEGIES: PREDICTING FAMILY THERAPY OUTCOME*

A pre-defined list of family therapy intervention strategies was used to predict post-therapy perceived life happiness and marital happiness among husbands and wives. Clients presented with both child and marriage-focused problems. The data were analyzed separately for husbands and wives. In general, favorable outcome for husbands was associated with active restructuring operations on the part of the therapist. Prediction of outcome for wives was less clear. However, wives did appear to respond favorably to less active interventions such as actualizing transactional patterns and reframing.     

Planning for permanency planning in foster care

The perceived severity of the problem of “drift” in the foster care system has encouraged agencies nationwide to accept permanency planning, but perhaps with limited attention to the planning process. This article examines the phenomenon of permanency planning from a planning perspective by focusing on: (a) definition of the permanency planning problem, (b) understanding of issues relevant to permanency planning (caseworker, program and systemic), (c) appreciation of the operational context (political, economic and social factors), and (d) evaluation of available options and possible consequences in developing or improving a permanency planning program. Permanency planning is not a simple, ready-made program applicable to any situation; it involves coordinated efforts by workers, service systems, and society in general, and requires time, commitment and resources. Successful planning for permanency planning can permit more children to grow up in homes providing continuity and stability.     

Asexuality: prevalence and associated factors in a national probability sample

I used data from a national probability sample (N > 18,000) of British residents to investigate asexuality, defined as having no sexual attraction to a partner of either sex. Approximately 1% (n = 195) of the sample indicated they were asexual. A number of factors were related to asexuality, including gender (i.e., more women than men), short stature, low education, low socioeconomic status, and poor health. Asexual women also had a later onset of menarche relative to sexual women. The results suggest that a number of pathways, both biological and psychosocial, contribute to the development of asexuality.     

Inequality and welfare evaluation of heterogeneous income distributions

This paper establishes the principles that should govern the welfare and inequality analysis of heterogeneous income distributions. Two basic criteria – the equity preference condition and the compensation principle – are shown to be fundamentally incompatible. The paper favours the latter, thereby vindicating the traditional method of dealing with heterogeneous samples. However, inequality and welfare comparisons will usually be well defined only if equivalent incomes are obtained using constant scale factors; and researchers will need to distinguish clearly between inequality of nominal incomes and inequality of living standards. Furthermore, household observations must always be weighted according to family size.     

Unions and private wage supplements

Private wage supplements are an important part of total compensation. A model of workers’ supplement expenditures is developed which shows that, although the expenditure determinants sometimes differ between broad industry/occupation subsamples, earnings, price effects of preferential tax treatment and economies of group purchase, unionization, the product market power of the firm, and worker age are usually significant determinants of supplement expenditures. The firm’s goal of reducing turnover costs as well as demographic, locational, and industry variables also systematically affect supplement expenditures. Supplements usually increase progressively with wages, indicating that often made proportionality assumptions are invalid. This work is based on a portion of my doctoral dissertation “An Economic Analysis of the Determinants of Private Wage Supplements.” An anonymous referee made many useful suggestions and criticisms. The Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University provided some of the computer funding. The remaining errors are my responsibility.     

The "experimenting agency". The California Youth Authority Research Division

During the 1960s and 1970s, the California Youth Authority embarked on a series of randomized field trials to test interventions for juvenile and young adult offenders. This article examines the institutional and political reasons why rigorous tests were adopted for such interventions as the Community Treatment Program. It also describes the effect these trials had on the agency and on California justice, as well as how the experimental method eventually became less often used in the Youth Authority. The authors explore some general reasons why this happened.     

School dropout and injecting drug use in a national sample of white non-Hispanic American adults

In this study we sought to extend our previous finding of an association between school dropout and injecting drug use (IDU) among African Americans by testing the association in a sample of White non-Hispanic Americans. A nationally representative sample of White non-Hispanic Americans age eighteen years and older was drawn from public use data files of the 1995-1996 National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse (NHSDA). Adults with a self-report history of IDU were identified, and were matched to non-IDU adults in the same neighborhoods of residence. Conditional logistic regression was used to estimate the association between dropping out of high school and the occurrence of IDU. White non-Hispanic American high school dropouts were more likely than high school graduates to have injected a drug at least once. The findings of this research on non-Hispanic Whites are generally consistent with our earlier evidence on the association between educational status and a history of IDU among African-American adults. School dropout prevention programs may merit attention in an overall strategy of preventing injecting drug use and HIV/AIDS.