Variation in Dual Citizenship Policies in the Countries of the EU

While the concept of citizenship has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years, few studies focus on the increasingly prevalent reality of dual citizenship, or full membership – with its respective rights, privileges, and obligations – in two different countries. The main objective of this article is to conceptualize, measure, and classify variation in dual citizenship in the countries of the European Union. I start by recounting the historical opposition to dual citizenship and by describing its emergence in recent decades. I then develop a “Citizenshi Policy Index” that accounts for some of the intricacies associated with citizenship policies in general and dual citizenship policies in particular. I go on to apply these measures to the fifteen “older” EU countries in both the 1980s and the contemporary period – thus allowing for an analsis of the changes that have taken place over the past two decades members. Overall, the findings point to surprisingly resilient national differences that stand out in contrast to the EU's institutional “harmonization” in so many other areas.     

When the levee breaks: treating adolescents and families in the aftermath of hurricane katrina

Hurricane Katrina brought to the surface serious questions about the capacity of the public health system to respond to community-wide disaster. The storm and its aftermath severed developmentally protective family and community ties; thus its consequences are expected to be particularly acute for vulnerable adolescents. Research confirms that teens are at risk for a range of negative outcomes under conditions of life stress and family disorganization. Specifically, the multiple interacting risk factors for substance abuse in adolescence may be compounded when families and communities have experienced a major trauma. Further, existing service structures and treatments for working with young disaster victims may not address their risk for co-occurring substance abuse and traumatic stress reactions because they tend to be individually or peer group focused, and fail to consider the multi-systemic aspects of disaster recovery. This article proposes an innovative family-based intervention for young disaster victims, based on an empirically supported model for adolescent substance abuse, Multidimensional Family Therapy (MDFT; Liddle, 2002). Outcomes and mechanisms of the model's effects are being investigated in a randomized clinical trial with clinically referred substance-abusing teens in a New Orleans area community impacted by Hurricane Katrina.     

Development and validation of a Biodata Inventory as an alternative method to measurement of the five factor model of personality

The present study was designed to test the effectiveness of using a biographical inventory as an alternative to a traditional personality inventory in measuring the five factor model of personality. A combination of empirical and rational strategies were incorporated in the development and scoring of the biodata items. All (N = 383) participants completed the newly developed Biodata Inventory and the NEO-Five Factor Inventory. Confirmatory factor analysis was performed to examine the goodness of fit of the five factor structure from the respondents’ data. All participants completed a letter cancellation task, reported grade point averages, and SAT scores. Predictive validity was assessed for both instruments’ scores. Results indicate that the five factor model fit the data from the biodata and personality inventories. Predictive validities of both inventories’ scores were consistent with many other research results. The relationship of the Conscientiousness biodata scores to grade point average and task completion performance were statistically significant.     

On Robust and Efficient Estimation of the Center of Symmetry

In this article, a class of estimators of the center of symmetry based on the empirical characteristic function is examined. In the spirit of the Hodges–Lehmann estimator, the resulting procedures are shown to be a function of the pairwise averages. The proposed procedures are also shown to have an equivalent representation as the minimizers of certain distances between two corresponding kernel density estimators. An alternative characterization of the Hodges–Lehmann estimator is established upon the use of a particularly simple choice of kernel.     

Confidence intervals for n in the exponential order statistics problem

A simplified proof of the basic properties of the estimators in the Exponential Order Statistics (Jelinski-Moranda) Model is given. The method of constructing confidence intervals from hypothesis tests is applied to find conservative confidence intervals for the unknown parameters in the model.     

The Post-Hospital Mental Patient and Family Therapy: Prospects and Populations*

Changes in the pattern of delivery of mental health services have led to dramatic increases in the number of patients discharged from mental hospitals. These post-hospital mental patients represent a new challenge to the field of family therapy. Of the approximately 1 million patient admissions to state and county mental hospitals, general hospitals, and private psychiatric hospitals, over 380,000 are married, and more than half of the remaining patients are estimated to be living with family. Almost 135,000 admissions receive family therapy during their hospitalization, and an estimated 650,000 mental patients will return to their families upon discharge.