Estimating the costs of preventive interventions

The goal of this article is to improve the practice and reporting of cost estimates of prevention programs. It reviews the steps in estimating the costs of an intervention and the principles that should guide estimation. The authors then review prior efforts to estimate intervention costs using a sample of well-known but diverse studies. Finally, the authors illustrate the principles with an example, the Family Bereavement Program. They conclude that example by discussing whether and how the costs of the intervention might differ when implemented in a real-world setting.     

Preliminary Validation of an Online DSM-Based Mental Health Referral Inventory

A brief online inventory was developed as a much needed corrective for the hundreds of unscientific tests that are used now by millions of people to self-diagnose mental health problems. The primary purpose of the new inventory is to refer people to mental health professionals for further evaluation when they are experiencing problems that might be diagnosable under DSM guidelines; it is not designed to diagnose, however. The inventory was found to be a valid and reliable measuring instrument based on analysis of data obtained from 3,403 subjects. The 54-item checklist looks for 18 common problems identified in the DSM-IV and takes from 5 to 10 min to complete. Test scores proved to be good predictors of a variety of self-reported criterion measures, including happiness, personal and professional success, history of hospitalization, history of therapy, current participation in therapy, employment, and level of education. Females were found to have slightly more mental health problems than males, but no differences in scores were found by race or ethnicity.     

Introduction to The Giard Portfolio: A Man for All Seasons

This essay contextualizes Baraitser's (2009 Baraitser , L. ( 2009 ). Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption . London , UK : Routledge . [Google Scholar]) Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption with regard to a persistent neglect of the value of motherhood in Western philosophy. The author argues that Baraitser's approach foregrounds the “maternal encounter” in a way that is distinctive both with regard to mainstream philosophy and with regard to hegemonic versions of feminism. The text is also singular in its style and enactment of a more personalized experience of motherhood, which is nonetheless simultaneously articulated through a subtle and powerful reading of contemporary philosophy, most especially through the work of Alain Badiou and Julia Kristeva. The author argues that Baraitser avoids the more moralistic or naive versions of the contemporary “return to the ethical” and instead plots a powerfully original and iconoclastic philosophy of the maternal, which maintains an idiosyncratic subversive potential, both philosophically and politically.     

Parents' hopes and expectations for their children's future occupations

Qualitative research has generated important insights into the intersection of social class, parental values and children's experiences of education and their role in the reproduction of inequalities. There has been less analytic engagement with parents' expectations and aspirations regarding their children's future occupations. Such expectations and aspirations have attracted much research and policy interest. Typically, analyses have been quantitative and focused on outcomes for children. Whilst parental expectations are deemed very influential for children's future occupational outcomes, there is relatively little evidence on the shaping of such expectations, or the ways in which future work and occupations are discussed between parents and children. This article reports on an analysis of parents' ideas about their children's future occupations and the contexts in which these ideas accrue meaning. Drawing on primary data from interviews with parents we explore diversity within, as well as across, social classes. First we explore parents' expectations and aspirations for their children's future occupations. Secondly we consider how parents see their own role in shaping such futures. The evidence highlights the salience of parents' own biographies and class backgrounds in shaping their orientations to, and manner of engagement with, their children's futures. Thirdly we briefly explore how parents' expectations and engagement with their children play out in class differentiated ways as their children approach early adulthood.     

Trust,Culture, and Cooperation: A Social Dilemma Analysis of Pro‐Environmental Behaviors

Social dilemmas require a choice between cooperation, or sacrificing for the greater good, and self‐interest. One commonly studied social dilemma is environmental conservation. Previous work suggests that trust predicts cooperation in the form of environmental protection. We contend that this view ignores cultural factors. Building on prior cross‐cultural research, we predict an interaction between strength of social ties and trust on cooperation. Findings from General Social Survey data indicate that low trust levels found in the U.S. South (a collectivist culture) renders trust ineffective at promoting environmental protection. However, trust predicts cooperation in nonsouthern regions (which are more individualist), where trust levels are higher.     

Who gains from information asymmetry?

This article considers an asymmetric contest with incomplete information. There are two types of players: informed and uninformed. Each player has a different ability to translate effort into performance in terms of the contest success function. While one player’s type is known to both players, the other is private information and known only to the player himself. We compare the Bayesian Nash equilibrium outcome of a one-sided private information contest to the Nash equilibrium with no private information, in which both players know the type of the other player. We show conditions under which uncertainty increases the investment of the uninformed player and the rent dissipation of the contest, while decreasing the expected net payoff of the informed player. In addition, we consider conditions under which the informed player—before knowing his own type—prefers that the uninformed player knows his type. Moreover, we show conditions for the existence/non-existence of equilibrium in a two-stage contest in which the informed player declares his type (or does not declare) in the first stage and in the second stage the two players play according to the information available to them.