Treatment of Children with Absent Fathers

The last few decades have seen a dramatic increase in the number of children raised in homes where the biological father is not present. Many of these children, mired in secrecy, guilt, and family conflict, are left with unanswered questions and self-doubts about this absence. Depression and behavioral problems often result. This article reviews the clinical literature around relevant issues such as father hunger, developmental deficits, and the varying effects on the child depending on age, sex, and the degree of the father's absence. Several case examples are offerred to illustrate these issues, and treatment recommendations are given in an attempt to help the child come to terms with the absent father and him/herself.     

Nonparametric Survival Estimation when Death is Reported with Delay

In disease registries there can be a delay between death of asubject and the reporting of this death to the data analyst.If researchers use the Kaplan-Meier estimator and implicitlyassumed that subjects who have yet to have death reported arestill alive, i.e. are censored at the time of analysis, the Kaplan-Meierestimator is typically inconsistent. Assuming censoring is independentof failure, we provide a simple estimator that is consistentand asymptotically efficient. We also provide estimates of theasymptotic variance of our estimator and simulations that demonstratethe favorable performance of these estimators. Finally, we demonstrateour methods by analyzing AIDS survival data. This analysis underscoresthe pitfalls of not accounting for delay when estimating thesurvival distribution and suggests a significant reduction inbias by using our estimator.     

Hiring Behavior Analysts: Free Gifts at a Booth Increase Verbal Contacts with a Recruiter,but Not Serious Job Inquiries

ABSTRACT

The job market for certified behavior analysts currently is excellent, which poses a serious challenge for organizations looking to hire such individuals. We evaluated whether the provision of small giveaways at a recruitment booth set up at two behavior-analysis conferences and at a university career fair influenced the relative number of attendees who verbally contacted a recruiter for an organization looking to hire certified and prospective behavior analysts. We also examined whether the provision of gifts influenced the relative number of attendees who left an e-mail address requesting further contact about possible employment. An alternating-treatments design was used to compare the giveaways and no-giveaways conditions. The giveaways items significantly increased the number of attendees who spoke with the recruiter, but not the number who requested further contact. These findings provide support for the use of giveaways items to generally attract attention to a recruiter, but further research is needed to determine whether their use increases applications for employment.     

Deconstructing disproportionality: views from multiple community stakeholders

While the existence of racial disproportionality has been well documented, the causes of disproportionality are less clear. Studies identifying contributing factors have relied largely on analyses of state and national data sets, which may lack the robust data necessary to fully explain the factors related to this issue. Further, a limitation of existing research is the lack of data from the voice of those in communities affected by disproportionality. This study was designed to develop a deeper understanding of disproportionality from the views of multiple community stakeholders. Using a qualitative approach, data were collected to provide a greater depth of information that can be used alongside existing studies toward developing an enhanced understanding of disproportionality in child welfare.     

The gap in social care provision for older people in China

Because of its unprecedented sociodemographic changes, particularly rapid population aging, China faces huge challenges in social care. Using data from the 2012 Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (n = 9,765), this article examines the need for social care, as well as the major sources of provision. The findings indicate that the majority of older people face some restriction in their daily living activities. From their perspective, however, the most urgent social protection services are related to health care and legal aid rather than services supporting daily living. Although Chinese Government policy since the 1990s has been a strategy of social welfare socialization, the role of government, both as provider and funder, is limited and focuses only on the most deprived and on urban areas. The result is a massive “care gap” between the need for social care and its supply. The primary responsibility for care provision is borne by the family. The direction of social policy in the future should focus on shared care between the family and the state, giving priority to expanding the coverage of social care services, especially in rural areas.     

A Cautionary Note on Beta Families of Distributions and the Aliases Within

In this note, we examine the four parameter beta family of distributions in the context of the beta-normal and beta-logistic distributions. In the process, we highlight the concept of numerical and limiting alias distributions, which in turn relate to numerical instabilities in the numerical maximum likelihood fitting routines for these families of distributions. We conjecture that the numerical issues pertaining to fitting these multiparameter distributions may be more widespread than has originally been reported across several families of distributions.     

A modified two-stage approach for joint modelling of longitudinal and time-to-event data

Joint models for longitudinal and time-to-event data have been applied in many different fields of statistics and clinical studies. However, the main difficulty these models have to face with is the computational problem. The requirement for numerical integration becomes severe when the dimension of random effects increases. In this paper, a modified two-stage approach has been proposed to estimate the parameters in joint models. In particular, in the first stage, the linear mixed-effects models and best linear unbiased predictorsare applied to estimate parameters in the longitudinal submodel. In the second stage, an approximation of the fully joint log-likelihood is proposed using the estimated the values of these parameters from the longitudinal submodel. Survival parameters are estimated bymaximizing the approximation of the fully joint log-likelihood. Simulation studies show that the approach performs well, especially when the dimension of random effects increases. Finally, we implement this approach on AIDS data.     

WHERE THE MINIMUM WAGE BITES HARD: INTRODUCTION OF MINIMUM WAGES TO A LOW WAGE SECTOR

Between 1993 and April 1999 there was no minimum wage in the United Kingdom (except in agriculture). In this paper we study the effects of the introduction of a National Minimum Wage (NMW) in April 1999 on one heavily affected sector, the residential care homes industry. This sector contains a large number of low paid workers and as such can be viewed as being very vulnerable to minimum wage legislation. We look at the impact on both wages and employment. Our results suggest that the minimum wage raised the wages of a large number of care home workers, causing a very big wage compression of the lower end of the wage distribution, thereby strongly reducing wage inequality. There is some evidence of employment and hours reductions after the minimum wage introduction, though the estimated effects are not that sizable given how heavily the wage structure was affected. (JEL: J4, J8)     

Change and continuity among minority communities in Britain

We compare the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Britain with other ethnic minorities to ask the questions ‘are Muslims different?’ and ‘is their behaviour changing over time?’. We look at the gender gap in education, age at marriage, marriage from the source country and female employment. In all these dimensions we find that Muslim communities are different but also that there is a convergence in behaviour. This is because those born in Britain generally differ markedly in behaviours from those born in the country of origin, but also because there is change within both the UK- and foreign-born communities.     

CONDITIONAL RISK ANALYSIS

This paper introduces conditional risk analysis as a new approach to extend the standard risk analysis method of Hertz. An exercise in profit planning is used to illustrate the special features of conditional risk analysis: total risk measurement, risk decomposition, factor outcome analysis and variable significance analysis. Mathematical expressions are presented for performing the various analyses.