Discount Rates in Risk Versus Money and Money Versus Money Tradeoffs

We use data from a survey of residents of five Italian cities conducted in late spring 2004 to estimate the discount rates implicit in (1) money versus future risk reductions and (2) money versus money tradeoffs. We find that the mean personal discount rate is 0.3-1.7% in (1) and 8.7% in (2). The latter is lower than the discount rates estimated in comparable situations in many recent studies, greater than market interest rates in Italy at the time, and exhibits modest variation with age and gender. The discount rate implicit in money versus risk tradeoffs is within the range of estimates from studies in the United States and Europe, and does not depend on observable individual characteristics. We use split samples to investigate whether a completely abstract risk reduction - one where the risk reduction delivery has been stripped of all specifics, so that respondents should focus on the risks without being distracted by details - results in WTP and discount figures comparable to those from an identified delivery mechanism (a medical test). We find that while WTP for an immediate risk reduction is 42-73% higher with the abstract risk reduction, the discount rate in the money versus risk tradeoffs and the variance of the error term in the WTP equation are the same across the two variants of the questionnaire.     

The Construction of Gendered Citizenship at the Welfare Office: An Ethnographic Comparison of Welfare-to-Work Workshops in the United States and the Netherlands

In 1996 both the Netherlands and the United States adopted welfarelegislation that aimed to exchange single mothers’ relianceon the welfare state for dependence on the labor market. Thislegislation seems to indicate an end to gender-differentiatedsocial citizenship rights. However, ethnographic research onwelfare reform implementation shows that citizenship does notget constructed solely at the level of legislation. In-depthresearch in one site in the United States and one site in theNetherlands illustrates that citizenship continues to be genderedin specific ways despite the apparent end of gender differentiationat the level of policy formation.     

Coalitional economies with public projects

We prove that the welfare theorems hold in the framework of coalitional exchange economies with public projects, both in case of pure exchange and in the presence of production. The space of agents is assumed to be non-atomic (single traders are negligible) and infinitely many commodities are allowed to be present on the market.     

Looking After Children: a case of individualised service delivery

This is a discussion of the debate in the literature on the new Looking After Children system of managing out of home care for children. This is an important program initiative in results‐oriented government that takes an individualised approach to children in care. The literature generally falls into the two categories of either relatively uncritical advocacy of LAC or its wholesale critique. These two camps pass as ships in the night and echo polarised epistemologies within policy analysis. There is very little analytical attention to LAC as an instance of the wider human service trends of individualised planning and case management.     

The truth and lie story: developing a tool for assessing child witnesses' ability to differentiate between truth and lies

Within the court arena, the credibility and competency of child witnesses often comes under scrutiny and the decision whether a child is considered to be credible or not strongly in?uences whether their evidence will be heard by the court. A child's ability to demonstrate that they understand the difference between truth and lies and the importance of telling the truth is synonymous with competency. Research suggests that many professionals undertaking the task of establishing competency ?nd it very dif?cult, especially with younger children (Aldridge and Wood, 1997, cited in Aldridge and Wood, 1998). This paper describes the process involved in developing an innovative tool for helping professionals assess whether a child understands the difference between truth and lies. The development of the tool arose from the concerns of of?cers from Northumbria Police Force (in the UK) relating to interviews following the protocol of the government's Memorandum of Good Practice (Home Of?ce and Department of Health, 1992) on interviewing child witnesses, and the need to establish whether child witnesses can differentiate between truth and lies. As an example of good practice, The Truth and Lie Story described here has now been included in the Home Of?ce (2002) guidance Achieving Best Evidence in Criminal Proceedings, which is a revision of the 1992 Memorandum of Good Practice. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

As Good as it Gets? A Life Course Perspective on Marital Quality

Marital relationships, like individuals, follow a developmental trajectory over time with ups and downs and gains and losses. We work from a life course perspective and use growth curve analysis to look at trajectories of change in marital quality over time. Although the tendency is for marital quality to decline over time, some groups begin with much higher levels of marital quality than others. Moreover, a number of life course and contextual factors can accelerate or slow this path of change. Our findings point to the importance of considering the multi-dimensionality of time (e.g., age, marital duration, the passage of years) as well as family transitions (e.g., having children, emptying or refilling the nest) in creating the meanings and experiences of marriage over time.     

In a Nervous Voice: Acoustic Analysis and Perception of Anxiety in Social Phobics’ Speech

This study investigated the effects of anxiety on nonverbal aspects of speech using data collected in the framework of a large study of social phobia treatment. The speech of social phobics (N = 71) was recorded during an anxiogenic public speaking task both before and after treatment. The speech samples were analyzed with respect to various acoustic parameters related to pitch, loudness, voice quality, and temporal aspects of speech. The samples were further content-masked by low-pass filtering (which obscures the linguistic content of the speech but preserves nonverbal affective cues) and subjected to listening tests. Results showed that a decrease in experienced state anxiety after treatment was accompanied by corresponding decreases in (a) several acoustic parameters (i.e., mean and maximum voice pitch, high-frequency components in the energy spectrum, and proportion of silent pauses), and (b) listeners’ perceived level of nervousness. Both speakers’ self-ratings of state anxiety and listeners’ ratings of perceived nervousness were further correlated with similar acoustic parameters. The results complement earlier studies on vocal affect expression which have been conducted on posed, rather than authentic, emotional speech.     

Properties of a class of inequality measures: A proposal for a resistant version

Summary This note explores the robustness properties of a general class of ineqyality measures which includes the Bonferroni and the Gini indexes as special cases and proposes some modifications in order to make them outlier resistant.     

Evaluating qualitative management research: Towards a contingent criteriology

The term qualitative management research embraces an array of non‐statistical research practices. Here it is argued that this diversity is an outcome of competing philosophical assumptions which produce distinctive research perspectives and legitimate the appropriation of different sets of evaluation criteria. Some confusion can arise when evaluation criteria constituted by particular philosophical conventions are universally applied to this heterogeneous management field. In order to avoid such misappropriation, this paper presents a first step towards a contingent criteriology located in a metatheoretical analysis of three modes of qualitative management research which are compared with the positivist mainstream to elaborate different forms of evaluation. It is argued that once armed with criteria that vary accordingly, evaluation can reflexively focus upon the extent to which any management research consistently embraces the particular methodological principles that are sanctioned by its a priori philosophical commitments.