Changing Attitudes to Disabled People in the Scout Association in Britain (1908-62): a contribution to a history of disability

This paper suggests that an historical analysis of attitudes to disabled people is an important but neglected area of study. Attitudes to disabled people will change over time and policy makers within organisations and the general public will be influenced by a variety of social factors. Governmental policies and legislation may prove of minor influence or trigger unexpected change in organisational attitudes. An examination of policy in the disability section of the Scout Association and its approach to disabled scouts illustrates the complexity of influences on organisational policy over time. Documentary evidence suggests that the Association was promoting integration of disabled scouts into the wider organisation during the inter war period when national policies promoted segregation. However in 1959, when major segregative legislation was repealed, there was a change of policy to exclude a particular group of disabled people-that is people with learning difficulties-from full membership.     

Web Survey Design: Paging versus Scrolling

A key choice in the design of Web surveys is whether to placethe survey questions in a multitude of short pages or in longscrollable pages. There are advantages and disadvantages ofeach approach, but little empirical evidence to guide the choice.In 2003 we conducted a survey of over 21,000 undergraduate students.Ten percent of the 10,000 respondents were directed to the scrollableversion of the survey, containing a single form for each ofthe major sections. The balance was assigned to the paging version,in which questions were presented to be visible without scrolling.The instrument contained a maximum of 268 possible questions,including topics that varied in sensitivity and desirability.The survey also permitted comparison of the effect of skip patternsby implementing skip instructions and hyperlinks in the scrollabledesign, and also recorded time at the end of each of the fivetopical sections. Differences between designs are evaluatedin terms of various forms of nonresponse, univariate and bivariatemeasurement properties, and proxies for respondent burden.     

Efficiency in a departmental store group

Effective measurement of efficiency levels and changes in these through time is an important yet difficult area of managerial activity. The approach advocated by MJ Farrell has much to commend it, although it also suffers from limitations. This paper demonstrates how the technique was applied to comparing the efficiency of different outlets in a departmental store group. It was found that efficiency gains over time were more marked in the use of labour than in the use of space and reasons are advanced to explain why this is not surprising. While it was not expected that efficiency and profitability would necessarily be closely correlated, there was some suggestion in the evidence that in many instances more efficient stores had higher profits and also that the more efficient stores (apart from those at the very highest efficiency levels) were larger and achieved a higher proportion of total sales through their own departments.     

Modernity,the Individual,and the Foundations of Cultural–Historical Activity Theory

It is argued that the problem of individual agency in relation to social institutions can be resolved within Cultural–Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) by the use of the “subject” as a unit of analysis. Such an approach implies a reaffirmation of the fundamental tenets of CHAT but also a critique of the concepts of society and culture, which are appropriated by psychology. A successful critique of objectivist conceptions of society and culture requires an appropriate framing of the concept of subject.     

Beyond Transitions: Applying Optimal Matching Analysis to Life Course Research

Life course researchers have increasingly explored optimal matching analysis (OMA) as a tool for the analysis of sequences, such as sections of people’s status biographies. OMA is usually employed in combination with cluster analysis (CA) to create classifications of sequences. In this article, we introduce an analytic strategy that allows assessing the classification’s internal validity. Using ideal typical sequence representations, we test different cluster algorithms and are able to optimise the fit to the data. An application analyses economic activity sequences collected for two British birth cohorts born in 1958 and 1970, investigating historical changes in passages to adulthood. The results suggest that passages into adulthood have become more diverse since the 1970s. The analytic strategy produced a classification with better fit than straightforward CA.     

Heavy Genealogy: Mapping the Currents,Contraflows and Conflicts of the Emergent Field of Metal Studies, 1978-2010

What is metal studies? How can we define and characterize it? How has it emerged as a body of academic enquiry? What are its dominant disciplinary strands, theoretical concepts and preferred methodologies? Which studies have claimed most attention, defined the goals of scholarship, typical research strategies and values? How has the claim for the legitimacy or symbolic value of metal scholarship been achieved (if it has): over time and through gradual acceptance or through conflict and contestation? How can this process of formation, or strategy of legitimation, be mapped, examined and interrogated and which methods of historical, institutional and cultural analysis are best suited to this task? Working with the most complete bibliography to date of published research on heavy metal, music and culture (the MSBD), this article employs Foucault’s archaeological “method” to examine the institutional, cultural and political contexts and conflicts that inform the genealogy of this scholarship. Such analysis reveals a formative, largely negative account of heavy metal to be found in the “sociology of rock”; a large volume of psychology work, examining heavy metal music preference as an indicator of youth risk, deviance and delinquency; sociological work on youth and deviancy critical of the values of this research and its links to social policy and politics; culminating in the work of Weinstein and Walser, who advocate a perspective sympathetic to the values of heavy metal fans themselves. Following Bourdieu, I interpret such symbolic strategies as claims for expertise within the academic field that are high or low in symbolic capital to the extent they can attain disciplinary autonomy. I then go on to examine the most recent strands of research, within cultural studies and ethnomusicology, concerned with the global metal music diaspora, and consider to what extent such work is constitutive of a coherent subfield of metal studies that can be distinguished from earlier work and what the implications of this might be.     

Turning away from the public sector in children's out-of-home care: An English experiment

This paper reports on the evaluation of an English experiment which, for the first time, moved statutory social work support for children and young people in out-of-home care from the public to the private or independent sector. Five social work practices (SWPs), independent or semi-independent of local government, were established and evaluated using a matched control design with integrated process evaluation. Social work teams in the public sector, selected to correspond to key characteristics of the SWP sites, provided control sites.