Descriptive Analysis of Foster Care Adoptions in New South Wales,Australia

This paper describes the population of children in care in New South Wales, Australia, who were adopted by their foster families (N?=?372) from 2003 to 2014. Data pertaining to 370 of these adoptees were available and obtained from administrative records accompanying adoption applications. Most of these children had been placed with their subsequent adoptive family during infancy. However, adoption orders occurred much later in their lives. According to the available information at the time of adoption, these children did not suffer the high levels of mental health problems typically identified in populations of children in foster care. Though the data do not include follow-up to determine if the contact agreed upon at the time of adoption orders translated into practice, the most frequently postadoption arrangement recorded was face-to-face contact, four times a year with mother and siblings. The high levels of openness and face-to-face contact in Australian adoptions from care are a significant point of difference with other adoption models, and presents a need for research in the area.

IMPLICATIONS

• Following the change of legislation in New South Wales, Australia, that prioritises open adoption over foster care, social workers in the field of child protection are well placed to assist in this process.

• Social workers can assess children entering care to identify those who will benefit from adoption in a timely manner; undertake casework and administrative aspects of the adoption process; work closely with the child, and birth and adoptive families by delivering pre- and post-adoption supports; and conduct longitudinal research on the outcomes for children adopted from care.

     

Survival Convergence and the Preceding Mortality Crossover for Two Population Subgroups

In this paper, we present and develop the argument that if the survival functions for two population subgroups converge in later life, a mortality crossover must precede the occurrence of this convergence. Specifically, two survival curves, S ₁(x) and S ₂(x), associated with two distinct population subgroups, G₁ and G₂, tend to converge before all members die out, as often observed and anticipated. This convergence leads to an increased mortality acceleration for the “advantaged” group, and eventually fosters the occurrence of a mortality crossover. We present a mathematical proof for this relationship and offer several explanations for the mechanisms involved in the process of survival convergence and the preceding mortality crossover. This new presentation demonstrates that mortality crossover is a highly observable demographic event given the trend of survival convergence in later life.     

Unemployment and consumption near and far away from the Mediterranean

We study the insurance mechanisms employed by households to absorb unemployment shocks using comparable data for four countries: Italy, Spain, Great Britain, and the US. Results on family transfers when the male household head becomes unemployed suggest that family networks are the weakest in Britain, while unemployment benefits there are instead the most generous across the four countries. Despite these differences, food consumption losses induced by unemployment of the male household head are similar across countries. These findings are consistent with the view that family support and the Welfare State substitute each other in mitigating the consequences of unemployment shocks. The first author is also affiliated with CEPR and CESifo, the second author with EUI, CEPR, CESifo, and IZA.     

“It's the Beast Thing”

This article examines the representations of men and masculinities in contemporary crime narratives featuring a female protagonist. These “chick dick” stories (which adapt elements from the hardboiled detective novel, film noir, chick lit, and chick flicks) repeatedly engage with the gendered power dynamics made visible and problematic through the intersection of “chick” and crime genres, most particularly the sexualization of violence. In these narratives, popular masculinities operate as deployable concepts to dramatize contemporary gender relations. By tapping into the popular sentiment of a “crisis in masculinity,” chick dick texts also mobilize a rhetoric of unrepresentable male victimization and individual male pathologies. This strategy highlights the spaces and places in which masculinities are made vulnerable at the same time as it offers simplistic and individualized explanations for the systemic sexualized violence that dominate these narratives.     

Heterogeneity in Parent‐reported Social Skill Development in Early Elementary School Children

Despite known risks associated with aberrant social skill development, there has been a relative dearth of literature on typical developmental changes in social skills over time. In this study, we examine systematic changes in social skills from kindergarten (typical age of 5–6 years) to third grade (typical age of 8–9 years), and focus on systematic heterogeneity across these developmental trajectories. Data came from the National Head Start—Public School Early Childhood Transition Demonstration Project (N = 6964). Mixture models provide evidence for multiple classes of individuals representing heterogeneity in the development of social skills. Classes were defined as a majority class (whose trajectories remained relatively stable over time), an increasing class (whose trajectories increased at a faster rate than the majority class), and a decreasing class (whose trajectories decreased at a faster rate than the majority class). Developmental trends accounted for a substantial proportion of the variance in social skill components. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed.     

Generalized Weibull Linear Models

For the first time, a new class of generalized Weibull linear models is introduced to be competitive to the well-known generalized (gamma and inverse Gaussian) linear models which are adequate for the analysis of positive continuous data. The proposed models have a constant coefficient of variation for all observations similar to the gamma models and may be suitable for a wide range of practical applications in various fields such as biology, medicine, engineering, and economics, among others. We derive a joint iterative algorithm for estimating the mean and dispersion parameters. We obtain closed form expressions in matrix notation for the second-order biases of the maximum likelihood estimates of the model parameters and define bias corrected estimates. The corrected estimates are easily obtained as vectors of regression coefficients in suitable weighted linear regressions. The practical use of the new class of models is illustrated in one application to a lung cancer data set.