Therapeutic residential care in Spain. Population treated and therapeutic coverage

Therapeutic residential care (TRC) is the name given to specialized children's homes for treating cases with severe emotional and behavioural problems that have been placed in residential care. A recent international review has revealed great diversity in the referral criteria of cases and in the models of intervention carried out. The goal of this study is to describe the population treated in these types of facilities in Spain and the therapeutic coverage given. The sample is made up of 215 young people in children's homes, of whom 93 are in TRC. The cases referred to TRC have been in residential care for less time but have gone through a greater number of placements. These young people also exhibit more problems of drug use, and there is a larger percentage of clinical‐range cases in the Child Behaviour Checklist scales of attention problems and aggressive behaviour. Nevertheless, the results of logistic regression indicate that the only variables that significantly increase the probability of being referred to TRC are drug use and changes of care placements. With regard to therapeutic care, there is a higher percentage in the TRC group receiving psychiatric care, and the sessions are also more frequent.     

A distance-based model for spatial prediction using radial basis functions

In the context of local interpolators, radial basis functions (RBFs) are known to reduce the computational time by using a subset of the data for prediction purposes. In this paper, we propose a new distance-based spatial RBFs method which allows modeling spatial continuous random variables. The trend is incorporated into a RBF according to a detrending procedure with mixed variables, among which we may have categorical variables. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method, a simulation study is carried out for a variety of practical scenarios for five distinct RBFs, incorporating principal coordinates. Finally, the proposed method is illustrated with an application of prediction of calcium concentration measured at a depth of 0–20 cm in Brazil, selecting the smoothing parameter by cross-validation.     

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,Dissociation, and Neuropsychological Performance in Latina Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse

This study compared the memory, attention/concentration, and executive functioning of 12 women with histories of child sexual abuse with a control group of 12 women without childhood abuse. Participants completed a neuropsychological test battery and various instruments assessing post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociation. The child sexual abuse group had lower performance than the control group on long- and short-term visual and verbal memory and presented more limited performance on executive functioning tasks. Functioning in these areas showed a negative correlation with post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative symptoms. These findings suggest that child sexual abuse is associated with memory and executive functioning deficits and supports the idea that people with trauma histories and increased post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociation symptoms may have alterations in neuropsychological functioning.     

Cuando los delitos son episodios sociales

Resumen

En este trabajo se estudia la percepción del delito desde la perspectiva de los episodios sociales. Los objetivos más importantes de nuestra investigación fueron: a) aislar y comparar las dimensiones que subyacen a la percepción del delito en tres grupos de sujetos: delincuentes institucionalizados, profesionales del sistema penal y grupo de personas no vinculadas al sistema penal; y b) ver si existen diferencias en la percepción de tres de los tipos de delitos establecidos en el Código Penal español. La muestra estuvo compuesta por un total de 272 sujetos, todos ellos varones, procedentes de los tres grupos en estudio. Las puntuaciones dadas por estos sujetos a 22 episodios delictivos fueron sometidas a escalamiento multidimensional. Se obtuvo un espacio multidimensional de cuatro dimensiones para cada uno de los grupos y se constataron diferencias entre ellos. Las puntuaciones de los episodios en cada dimensión permitieron discriminar de forma significativa entre los tres tipos de delitos. Los resultados se discuten integrando la perspectiva de los episodios sociales y la teoría de la atribución.     

A multicriteria decision analysis model for faculty evaluation

In the context of increasing demands for social and financial accountability of universities, the required implementation of transparent faculty evaluation systems constitutes a challenge and an opportunity for universities strategically aligning the activity of academic staff with the university goals. However, despite growing interest in the performance appraisal of faculty, only a few reported studies propose models that cover the full range of academic activities and the models in use are typically based on ad hoc scoring systems that lack theoretical soundness. This article approaches faculty evaluation from an innovative comprehensive perspective. Based on the concepts and methods of multiple criteria value measurement, it proposes a new faculty evaluation model that addresses the whole range of academic activities and can be applied within and across distinct scientific areas, while respecting their specificities. Constructed through a socio-technical process, the model was designed for and adopted by the Instituto Superior Técnico, the engineering school of the Technical University of Lisbon. The model has a two-level hierarchical additive structure, with top-level evaluation areas specified by second-level evaluation criteria. A bottom non-additive third level accounts for the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of academic activity related to each evaluation criterion. The model allows (a) the comparison of the performance of academic staff with performance targets reflecting the strategic policy concerns of university management; (b) the definition of the multicriteria value profile of each faculty member at the top level of the evaluation areas; (c) the computation of an overall value score for each faculty member, through an optimisation procedure that makes use of a flexible system of weights and (d) the assignment of faculty members to rating categories.     

Regional fertility trends in Mozambique

This article increases our knowledge of Mozambique's demography by assessing the nature and magnitude of fertility decline, using the 1980 and 1997 censuses and the 1997 Demographic and Health Survey. Several robust methods, including P/F ratios from census and birth history data, the own-children procedure (census data), and estimates of censored parity progression ratios (adjusted for truncation bias) are used to identify fertility trends. Regional differences in fertility trends are discussed in the light of the proximate determinants of fertility. Fertility decline has started in Mozambique but the magnitude of the decline differs among the three administrative regions in the country. In Southern Region the fertility decline is well established, while in Northern and Central regions the decline is still incipient.     

Improving an upper bound on the size of k-regular induced subgraphs

This paper considers the NP-hard graph problem of determining a maximum cardinality subset of vertices inducing a k-regular subgraph. For any graph G, this maximum will be denoted by α _k (G). From a well known Motzkin-Straus result, a relationship is deduced between α _k (G) and the independence number α(G). Next, it is proved that the upper bounds υ _k (G) introduced in Cardoso et al. (J. Comb. Optim., 14, 455–463, 2007) can easily be computed from υ ₀(G), for any positive integer k. This relationship also allows one to present an alternative proof of the Hoffman bound extension introduced in the above paper. The paper continues with the introduction of a new upper bound on α _k (G) improving υ _k (G). Due to the difficulty of computing this improved bound, two methods are provided for approximating it. Finally, some computational experiments which were performed to compare all bounds studied are reported.     

An Exploratory Study of Clinical Measures Associated with Subsyndromal Pathological Gambling in Patients with Binge Eating Disorder

Both binge eating disorder (BED) and pathological gambling (PG) are characterized by impairments in impulse control. Subsyndromal levels of PG have been associated with measures of adverse health. The nature and significance of PG features in individuals with BED is unknown. Ninety-four patients with BED (28 men and 66 women) were classified by gambling group based on inclusionary criteria for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-IV (DSM-IV) PG and compared on a range of behavioral, psychological and eating disorder (ED) psychopathology variables. One individual (1.1% of the sample) met criteria for PG, although 18.7% of patients with BED displayed one or more DSM-IV criteria for PG, hereafter referred to as problem gambling features. Men were more likely than women to have problem gambling features. BED patients with problem gambling features were distinguished by lower self-esteem and greater substance problem use. After controlling for gender, findings of reduced self-esteem and increased substance problem use among patients with problem gambling features remained significant. In patients with BED, problem gambling features are associated with a number of heightened clinical problems.     

Impact of funding and value added on Spanish venture capital-backed firms

This paper contributes to the literature on the effect of venture capital (VC) on the economic development of areas in which those specialized investors are active. The work focuses on the separate consideration of two effects that are supposed to explain the superior performance of a large sample of Spanish VC-backed firms, namely funding and value-added services provided by VC managers to their investee firms. The results show that funding is significant regardless of the stage of development of the investee firm. The value added, however, is only significant for the subsample of firms at the expansion stage.