Support for National Health Insurance: Intercohort Differentials

Past research has demonstrated that the majority of the Americanpublic favor some form of national health insurance (NHI), butthe sources of this support have not been clearly identified.This paper shows that support for NHI follows party lines, withDemocrats most favoring it, followed by Independents and Republicans.The young, women, blacks, the less educated (among others) alsofavor NHI more than others, but it is apparently not a "personalneed" for the insurance that prompts this support. Lack of adequateinsurance coverage, dissatisfaction with current care, or pooraccess to health care are not associated with support for NHI.Instead, cognizance of the larger socioeconomic issues (particularlyrising society-wide health care costs), in addition to politicalidentification, generates support for NHI.     

Effects of Questionnaire Length on Response Quality

A response tendency resulting from the length of a group-administeredquestionnaire instrument is described. Respondents answeringitems that are included in large sets toward the later partsof a long questionnaire are more likely to give identical answersto most or all of the items, compared with those respondingto items in smaller sets or in shorter questionnaires. Whilemeans and intercorrelations among items within the same setare affected by this "straight-line" response pattern, intercorrelationsbetween items from different sets are much less affected byit. These investigations are based on comparisons between along questionnaire, administered to 1,050 high school seniorsin nine high schools across the nation in 1978, and five shorterquestionnaires administered to large national samples of highschool seniors.     

Regression of area mortality rates on explanatory variables: what weighting is appropriate?

"One can often gain insight into the aetiology of a disease by relating mortality rates in different areas to explanatory variables. Multiple regression techniques are usually employed, but unweighted least squares may be inappropriate if the areas vary in population size. Also, a fully weighted regression, with weights inversely proportional to binomial sampling variances, is usually too extreme. This paper proposes an intermediate solution via maximum likelihood which takes account of three sources of variation in death rates: sampling error, explanatory variables and unexplained differences between areas. The method is also adapted for logit (death rates), standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) and log (SMRs). Two [United Kingdom] examples are presented."     

Reaching children at risk: a model for training child welfare specialists

An innovative model for the training of social welfare students in the special skills essential in child welfare work is predicated upon a classification system of children at risk and a continuum of services.     

The administrative costs of non-profit health insurers

Interest in the efficiency or inefficiency of non-profit firms has spawned research on the administrative costs of Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans. Relying on plausible implications of the property rights theory of the firm, both Blair, Ginsburg, and Vogel (1975) and Vogel (1977) noted some evidence of inefficiency in these firms. Our analysis, however, utilizing their models and more recent data, reveals little convincing evidence for the view that Blue Shield plans are inefficient.     

The problem of reconciling divergent perspectives on urban crime: Personal experience,social ideology and scholarly research

The author examines influences of his personal experience with crime, his ideology, and his theoretical knowledge on his approach to the study of crime. Personal experience led to observations that (a) responses to crime are often gut-level rather than rational, (b) both street crime and the criminal justice system are characterized by incompetence, and (c) the retributive impulse must be considered in the study of crime. The radical ideology of the author led to the conclusion that crime is linked with the structure of the economic system. Finally, the author's scholarly knowledge led to recognition of the importance of the causality/meaning and determinism/voluntarism debates for the study of crime and for policy planning. He concludes that one must recognize the importance of all three sources of one's understanding of crime in order to engage in criminological research.

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