Shards of the old looking glass: restoring the significance of identity in promoting positive outcomes for looked‐after children

There is a driving force within current UK child welfare policies which promotes a strengths led approach to both assessment and care planning for children in need. Social policy emphasizes the importance of tangible outcomes such as education achievement, which have been enshrined in statute. However, other developmental outcomes, such as identity, are subordinated. Notwithstanding the relevance of these more concrete indicators, this paper suggests that this focus has left a gap at theoretical, strategic and operational levels relating to more psychosocial aspects of human growth and development, such as identity. This paper seeks to redress that gap by considering identity as both a process and an outcome. Following a review of the literature on identity development, it presents an analysis of semi‐structured interviews with 13 young people and their social workers. The findings show how young people's identity is shaped by their relationships, can be a protective mechanism, and deferred or put on standby. In the concluding discussion the implications for social work practice are highlighted.     

The Civilizing Process of Trust: Developing Quality Mechanisms which are Local,Professional‐led and thus Legitimate

‘Quality’ and ‘performance’ have become defining concepts for policymakers and health‐care systems alike. Yet whilst these principles are of fundamental importance, their practical implementation and assurance are far from straightforward. This commentary analyses the difficulties faced in enhancing quality and performance in the English NHS. Many recent initiatives have been driven through incentives and external auditing of the professionals providing health care on the frontline. Drawing on recent literature and research findings, we argue that this checking‐based ‘audit culture’ is fundamentally flawed in driving quality and performance. Many targets and measures are too crude to reflect important aspects affecting patient outcomes and therefore these frameworks lack legitimacy amongst professionals. An alternative, trust‐based model is proposed – one more capable of acknowledging the meaning, complexity and specificities inherent to professional work. Quality mechanisms developed locally by professionals are able to produce the legitimacy crucial for their effectiveness. It is argued that the normative obligation of approaches based on conditional trust is a more compelling incentive towards good practice than targets and sanctions. This governance by ‘the social’ is able to motivate a more holistically enlightened and consistent reflexivity towards practice, though it is only able to flourish in the absence of purposive‐rational systems.     

Three's a crowd? The Nader vote in the 2000 presidential, election in U.S. metropolitan areas

The 2000 U.S. presidential election resulted in one of the closest and most controversial outcomes in U.S. history. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader had little chance of winning, but nevertheless impacted the race in several close states and arguably swung the race from Al Gore to George W. Bush. This research examines Ralph Nader's “urban strategy” to win 5% of the vote for president and the bases of his electoral support. This study uses the METRO_2000 data set which contains a variety of publicly available variables for 276 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the year 2000. The analysis uses OLS regression to examine the determinants of the percentage of the vote for Nader in each MSA. The results indicate that the Nader vote was positively influenced by key electoral variables such as the level of electoral participation, whether Nader was on the ballot or could be written in, and the closeness of the race in state polls leading up to the election. The Nader vote was also higher in MSAs with high percentages of voters who supported Nader programs including environmentalists, those favoring universal health care and gay rights, union members, and MSAs that were college towns or with high percentages of college-educated voters. Ralph Nader's urban strategy effectively mobilized enough of his electoral base to impact the 2000 election, but electoral constraints and the closeness of the race prevented him from achieving his goal of attaining 5% of the vote. This case holds lessons about the limits and possibilities of third party campaigns in U.S. presidential elections.     

The negative binomial–beta Weibull regression model to predict the cure of prostate cancer

In this article, for the first time, we propose the negative binomial–beta Weibull (BW) regression model for studying the recurrence of prostate cancer and to predict the cure fraction for patients with clinically localized prostate cancer treated by open radical prostatectomy. The cure model considers that a fraction of the survivors are cured of the disease. The survival function for the population of patients can be modeled by a cure parametric model using the BW distribution. We derive an explicit expansion for the moments of the recurrence time distribution for the uncured individuals. The proposed distribution can be used to model survival data when the hazard rate function is increasing, decreasing, unimodal and bathtub shaped. Another advantage is that the proposed model includes as special sub-models some of the well-known cure rate models discussed in the literature. We derive the appropriate matrices for assessing local influence on the parameter estimates under different perturbation schemes. We analyze a real data set for localized prostate cancer patients after open radical prostatectomy.     

Model-based clustering,classification, and discriminant analysis of data with mixed type

We propose a mixture of latent variables model for the model-based clustering, classification, and discriminant analysis of data comprising variables with mixed type. This approach is a generalization of latent variable analysis, and model fitting is carried out within the expectation-maximization framework. Our approach is outlined and a simulation study conducted to illustrate the effect of sample size and noise on the standard errors and the recovery probabilities for the number of groups. Our modelling methodology is then applied to two real data sets and their clustering and classification performance is discussed. We conclude with discussion and suggestions for future work.     

Developing a best practice model of refugee maternity care

BackgroundAbout one third of refugee and humanitarian entrants to Australia are women age 12–44 years. Pregnant women from refugee backgrounds may have been exposed to a range of medical and psychosocial issues that can impact maternal, fetal and neonatal health.Research questionWhat are the key elements that characterise a best practice model of maternity care for women from refugee backgrounds? This paper outlines the findings of a project which aimed at developing such a model at a major maternity hospital in Brisbane, Australia.Participants and methodsThis multifaceted project included a literature review, consultations with key stakeholders, a chart audit of hospital use by African-born women in 2006 that included their obstetric outcomes, a survey of 23 African-born women who gave birth at the hospital in 2007–08, and a survey of 168 hospital staff members.ResultsThe maternity chart audit identified complex medical and social histories among the women, including anaemia, female circumcision, hepatitis B, thrombocytopenia, and barriers to access antenatal care. The rates of caesarean sections and obstetric complications increased over time. Women and hospital staff surveys indicated the need for adequate interpreting services, education programs for women regarding antenatal and postnatal care, and professional development for health care staff to enhance cultural responsiveness.Discussion and conclusionsThe findings point towards the need for a model of refugee maternity care that comprises continuity of carer, quality interpreter services, educational strategies for both women and healthcare professionals, and the provision of psychosocial support to women from refugee backgrounds.     

Glass Cliffs Are Not So Easily Scaled: On the Precariousness of Female CEOs' Positions

Adams, Gupta and Leeth ( British Journal of Management , 2008) question the universality of the glass cliff after finding no differences in US companies' financial performance either before or after the appointment of male and female CEOs. We agree that glass cliffs are neither universal nor ineluctable, but urge caution in interpreting this null result. This is because the nature and significance of women's precarious leadership positions becomes more apparent when one goes beyond archival financial data and compares the broad circumstances of male and female leaders. Here multiple strands of research suggest that above the glass ceiling the playing field for men and women is far from level.     

Impact of situational framing and complexity on charismatic,ideological and pragmatic leaders: Investigation using a computer simulation

Revisiting the work of Weber [Weber, M. (1921). The theory of social and economic organizations. New York: Free Press], Mumford and colleagues (e.g., [Strange, J. M., & Mumford, M. D. (2002). The origins of vision: Charismatic versus ideological leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 13, 343?377; Mumford, M.D. (2006). Pathways to outstanding leadership: A comparative analysis of charismatic, ideological and pragmatic leaders. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.]) explored the thesis that in addition to charismatic leadership, there exist at least two additional pathways to outstanding leadership: ideological and pragmatic. Despite the compelling results of initial studies, however, questions remain as to when and under what situational conditions these three leaders operate most effectively. As such, an experiment was conducted to investigate two noteworthy contextual influences: 1) situational congruence with a leader's mental model and 2) environmental complexity. The experiment made use of a computerized leadership simulation where participants took on the role of a university chancellor. Results indicate that leader type, complexity, and situational framing were critical factors in determining leader performance on multiple game performance criteria as well as creative process criteria. Implications and avenues for future research are discussed.