Working with Families: Messages for Policy and Practice from an Evaluation of a School‐based Project

In 2002 the authors evaluated a family support project known as Working with Families managed by the Children's Society and located in a primary school on a large, mainly white council estate in Rochdale. Our reflections on some of the issues which emerged in relation to basing family support services in a school setting seem timely in the light of the apparent growth in such services as a result of investment by the Children's Fund, and the proposals in the Green Paper, Every Child Matters, (Department for Education and Skills, 2003a) that schools should play a key role in the delivery of support services. Our experience of one such project is offered as a contribution to ongoing policy and practice developments. We highlight the strengths and difficulties of delivering support services from school settings and we offer some thoughts on whether integrated services which tackle children's needs can be delivered from schools.     

Clinical services to persons with AIDS: The parallel nature of the client and worker processes

Social workers working in the area of AIDS confront individuals struggling with a plethora of issues and problems related to an AIDS diagnosis.Especially important to this work is the interplay of themes between the worker and client; a parallel process emerges that provides both insight and potential dilemmas for the social worker. While the worker may attempt to maintain a posture of disciplined subjectivity, she is confronting in the professional relationship a situation that intimately touches the core of her own identity.Through a case presentation from practice in an AIDS clinic, this paper will examine the parallel nature of the client and worker processes. Key issues will be identified and potential responses will be considered.     

Risk and Ideology in Sexual Harassment

One explanation of sexual harassment is that it is the result of differences in organizational or individual authority between harasser and victim. A competing conceptualization suggests that much of what is termed sexual harassment is the result of a particular definition of the situation by women possessing nontraditional or feminist gender-role ideologies. Using a sample of university faculty, students and staff, this study examines the relationship among organizational position, demographic risk factors, and gender-role ideology on the self-reported incidence of sexual harassment. The findings show little relation exists between the various risk factors and the report of harassment in this sample.     

Young adults' knowledge of the strength of different alcoholic beverages

Providing information about the strength of different alcoholic beverages is a common component of alcohol abuse prevention programs. However, little is known about drinkers' knowledge of the strength of different alcoholic beverages. In the present study, 113 young adult drinkers responded to a questionnaire concerning the alcohol content of different types of malt beverages (beers, malt liquors), wines, fortified wines (port, sherry), and distilled spirits. The results indicated rates of correct responses well below 50 percent for each type of alcoholic beverage, with a substantial proportion of subjects either overestimating or underestimating alcohol content. Not a single subject reported correct alcohol content values for all four beverage types. There was a trend towards less accurate estimates of the alcohol content of strength were less accurate than those of men. The results are discussed in terms of prevention of alcohol abuse.     

Joint Persistence of Transformation Products in Chemicals Assessment: Case Studies and Uncertainty Analysis

The joint persistence (JP) quantifies the environmental persistence of a parent compound and a selection of relevant transformation products. Here, the importance as well as the uncertainty of the JP in comparison to the persistence of the parent compound alone (primary persistence, PP) are investigated. To demonstrate the effect of transformation products on the environmental persistence of organic chemicals, three case studies of parent compounds (nonylphenol ethoxylates, perchloroethylene, atrazine) and transformation products are investigated in detail with a multimedia fate model. Comparison of the PP and JP values shows that transformation products can significantly increase the persistence. In addition to the point estimates of PP and JP, the associated uncertainties are investigated. For each of the case studies, the chemical-specific input parameters of all compounds are varied and the corresponding variance of the PP and JP is determined by Monte Carlo simulations. Interestingly, the higher number of input parameters required for the JP does not necessarily increase the uncertainty of the JP as compared to that of the PP alone. An exact mathematical expression specifying the contribution of each transformation product to the JP is given. When transformation products are grouped in different generations, it becomes discernible that the first generation increases the JP most; the later generations are of decreasing importance. Finally, the effect of incomplete knowledge of the transformation products and their properties on the JP results is discussed. For reliable JP estimates, knowledge of the first generation transformation products and their degradation rate constants is required.     

Two zs are Better than One

Given only a random sample of observations, the usual estimator for the population mean is the sample mean. If additional information is provided it might be possible in some situations to obtain a better estimator. The situation considered here is when the variable whose mean is sought is composed of factors that are themselves observable. In the basic case, the variable can be expressed as the product of two, independent, more basic variables, but we also consider the case of more than two, the effect of correlation, and when there are observation costs.