Promoting Prevention: Targeting Family-Based Risk and Protective Factors for Drug Use and Youth Offending in Swansea

The multi-agency, multiple-intervention Promoting Preventioninitiative to prevent youth offending in Swansea was evaluatedwith a computer-based interactive questionnaire with five hundredand eighty young people (aged eleven to eighteen years). Resultsindicate that multiple exposure to risk factors within the familydomain significantly increases the likelihood that a young personwill become involved in school exclusion, drug-taking and offending,whilst exposure to multiple protective factors decrease thelikelihood of these problem behaviours. The evaluation processindicates that Promoting Prevention’s cross-cutting andconsultative methodology is an empowering and engaging way oftargeting family-based interventions.     

A NOTE ON BAYES FACTORS

This note establishes a connection between Bayes factors and the use of the logarithmic score utility function for model selection in a Bayesian context. The connection presented provides insights into Bayes factors.     

The Premise and Promise of Citizenship and Civil Society for Renewing Democracies and Empowering Sustainable Communities

State regimes have launched policies to "reinvent" government and "regenerate" communities in peripheral impoverished rural and urban areas to build sustainable communities and reduce poverty. We investigate the impact of policy concepts–the empowerment paradigm, citizenship as citizen participation and inclusion, and associations between the state and civil society–on local areas' success in leveraging dollars to foster sustainable economic and community development in persistently poor rural areas of the U.S. The thirty-three rural sites of the Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Communities Initiative of the Clinton-Gore Administration comprise our database. We find that empowering area-based, low-income residents through the election mechanism to choose their representatives on the local sites' governing board is strongly and significantly related to both inclusion and citizen participation. Also, the presence of elected citizens with connections to civil society on the governing body contributes strongly to later success in leveraging dollars.     

Perception of Emotion: Measuring Decoding Accuracy of Adult Prosodic Cues Varying in Intensity

The purpose of the present study was to present a measure of the ability to decode emotion in the voices of adults. After describing the process of how the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy—Adult Prosody (DANVA2-AP) test was constructed, five propositions were developed to guide the gathering of appropriate construct validity evidence for the measure. Evidence from a series of studies provided support for all of the propositions. It was concluded that the DANVA2-AP had satisfactorily met the minimal requirements for construct validity.     

Revealed Preference and Expected Utility

This essay gives necessary and sufficient conditions for recovering expected utility from choice behavior in several popular models of uncertainty. In particular, these techniques handle a finite state model; a model for which the choice space consists of probability densities and the expected utility representation requires bounded, measurable utility; and a model for which the choice space consists of Borel probability measures and the expected utility representation requires bounded, continuous utility. The key result is the identification of the continuity condition necessary for the revelation of linear utility.     

Hellenic (Greek) gender attitudes

Using data from 1,120 residents of Athens, Greece, we used structural equation modeling to confirm the existence of three types of gender attitudes: (1) egalitarian housework attitudes, (2) acceptance of females in traditionally male occupations, and (3) acceptance of males in traditionally female occupations. There was more acceptance of females in traditionally male occupations than of males in traditionally female occupations. Consistent with previous research, there was a relatively strong relationship between gender and egalitarian attitudes. Compared to men, women were more accepting of females being employed in traditionally male occupations, of males being employed in traditionally female occupations, and of equality between husband and wife in performing household chores. Education and marital status had significant impacts on egalitarian housework attitudes but not on occupational gender attitudes. His primary areas of teaching and research include criminology, deviance, juvenile delinquency, gender roles, and adolescent drug use. His research and teaching areas are criminology and marriage and family. In recent years his research has focused on adolescent drug use and marital dissolution.     

Access, Choice and Travel: Implications for Health Policy

The UK National Health Service is introducing policies offering patients a choice of the hospital where they would like to be treated. ‘Patient choice’ policies form part of a wider debate about the access to health care and the interaction between providers (including information, provision, performance and reputation) and patients (including knowledge, resources and willingness to travel). As the hospital of ‘choice’ might not necessarily be the ‘local’ provider, such policy developments are predicated on an assumption that some patients will be willing to travel further. This will, in turn, affect patients’ access to services. In general, use of services decreases with distance but this is dependent on accessibility to services, the organization of those services, the socio‐economic characteristics of the patient, perceptions of the provider and the condition for which they are to be treated. This article reviews the evidence on patients’ willingness to travel in terms of access to health care and assesses the emerging implications of and for current UK policy on patient choice.     

Nicotine Addiction: Implications for Public Health Policy

Although the morbidity and mortality caused by cigarette smoking occur in adulthood, the initiation of tobacco use and the development of nicotine addiction typically occur during adolescence. The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of nicotine addiction, focusing on the development of addiction in youth, and to explore implications for public health policy. An understanding of the pharmacological and nonpharmacological factors that determine the course of nicotine addiction is critical in developing rational policies regarding tobacco products. The Food and Drug Administration's rule to regulate cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products is discussed. The fact that smokers typically make the transition from casual use to nicotine addiction during adolescence argues for developing and implementing effective prevention efforts and smoking cessation treatment programs that are youth-oriented.     

Estimation of the Distribution Function of a Standardized Statistic

For estimating the distribution of a standardized statistic, the bootstrap estimate is known to be local asymptotic minimax. Various computational techniques have been developed to improve on the simulation efficiency of uniform resampling, the standard Monte Carlo approach to approximating the bootstrap estimate. Two new approaches are proposed which give accurate yet simple approximations to the bootstrap estimate. The second of the approaches even improves the convergence rate of the simulation error. A simulation study examines the performance of these two approaches in comparison with other modified bootstrap estimates.