Understanding Care Leavers in Russia: Young People's Experiences of Institutionalisation

Abstract

Care leavers in Russia represent one of the most disadvantaged groups in society. However, they have rarely been the focus of welfare policy debate and they receive little or no support in their independent living. This paper presents the findings of a survey of Russian care leavers. The emphasis is on care leavers' experiences of the Russian institutional care system, and the issues that impacted on their postcare transition to adulthood. A number of factors were found to influence the wellbeing of care leavers, including placement instability, institutional isolation, poor education, stigmatisation of care leavers, relationships with “houseparents”, and supportive and often challenging friendships. Findings are discussed in relation to debates about the degree and nature of institutional care of children in Russia and elsewhere.     

Competing Frameworks in Planning for the Aged in the Growth Corridors of Melbourne

The Ageing in the Growth Corridors Project was initiated as a partnership between the University of Melbourne and the Department of Health in the Northwest Metropolitan Region of Melbourne, Australia. It involved a research team working with six project officers appointed to stimulate development in relation to an aging population in the sprawling outer metropolitan growth corridors. This article identifies the key lessons learned in terms of project implementation relating to attitudinal and structural barriers to the development of an age-friendly environment in areas of rapid urban growth. The findings illustrate some of the dilemmas raised by competing program conceptions, a dynamic and changing federal/state policy context, and local resource and strategic management constraints. The partnership with the university, nevertheless, provided a point of stability and continuity for the project officers in implementing their mandate.     

Evaluating Probabilistic Forecasts with Bayesian Signal Detection Models

We propose the use of signal detection theory (SDT) to evaluate the performance of both probabilistic forecasting systems and individual forecasters. The main advantage of SDT is that it provides a principled way to distinguish the response from system diagnosticity, which is defined as the ability to distinguish events that occur from those that do not. There are two challenges in applying SDT to probabilistic forecasts. First, the SDT model must handle judged probabilities rather than the conventional binary decisions. Second, the model must be able to operate in the presence of sparse data generated within the context of human forecasting systems. Our approach is to specify a model of how individual forecasts are generated from underlying representations and use Bayesian inference to estimate the underlying latent parameters. Given our estimate of the underlying representations, features of the classic SDT model, such as the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and the area under the ROC curve (AUC), follow immediately. We show how our approach allows ROC curves and AUCs to be applied to individuals within a group of forecasters, estimated as a function of time, and extended to measure differences in forecastability across different domains. Among the advantages of this method is that it depends only on the ordinal properties of the probabilistic forecasts. We conclude with a brief discussion of how this approach might facilitate decision making.     

Assessing and Improving the Performance of Nearly Efficient Unit Root Tests in Small Samples

Abstract

The development of unit root tests continues unabated, with many recent contributions using techniques such as generalized least squares (GLS) detrending and recursive detrending to improve the power of the test. In this article, the relation between the seemingly disparate tests is demonstrated by algebraically nesting all of them as ratios of quadratic forms in normal variables. By doing so, and using the exact sampling distribution of the ratio, it is straightforward to compute, examine, and compare the test' critical values and power functions. It is shown that use of GLS detrending parameters other than those recommended in the literature can lead to substantial power improvements. The open and important question regarding the nature of the first observation is addressed. Tests with high power are proposed irrespective of the distribution of the initial observation, which should be of great use in practical applications.     

Structural holes and managerial performance: Identifying the underlying mechanisms

Structural holes theory suggests a variety of possible explanations for the empirically observed relationship between structural holes and individual managerial performance. However, little has been done to disentangle one mechanism from another. This paper empirically tests a mediated moderation model that distinguishes between the five different theoretical mechanisms: autonomy, competition, information brokering, opportunity recognition and innovativeness. The findings suggest that of these five theoretical causal motors, innovativeness plays a key role in linking network structure and network content to performance.