Do social workers avoid the dilemmas of work with clients?

This article is devoted to Lipsky's suggestion that the purpose of street-level policies is to establish and justify patterns of behaviour that enable street-level bureaucrats to avoid the dilemmas provoked by uncertain working conditions. Based on a review of relevant literature as well as on case studies in the culture of social work service organisations by the authors, the article suggests that two kinds of street-level policies are described by the research. The first one is consistent with the aforementioned idea by Lipsky and follows the wish of social service workers to avoid the dilemmas of their work with clients without trying to change those uncertain conditions that provoke these dilemmas. The actors of the second kind of street-level policy try to negotiate with relevant partners and to change uncertain working conditions that are at the roots of their dilemmas. Both kinds of street-level policy are described by means of empirical examples and their substantive features are summarised.     

Efficient computation of location depth contours by methods of computational geometry

The concept of location depth was introduced as a way to extend the univariate notion of ranking to a bivariate configuration of data points. It has been used successfully for robust estimation, hypothesis testing, and graphical display. The depth contours form a collection of nested polygons, and the center of the deepest contour is called the Tukey median. The only available implemented algorithms for the depth contours and the Tukey median are slow, which limits their usefulness. In this paper we describe an optimal algorithm which computes all bivariate depth contours in O(n ²) time and space, using topological sweep of the dual arrangement of lines. Once these contours are known, the location depth of any point can be computed in O(log² n) time with no additional preprocessing or in O(log n) time after O(n ²) preprocessing. We provide fast implementations of these algorithms to allow their use in everyday statistical practice.     

The Emergence of a Specific Kind of Individualization Habitus Among Divorced Women

Previous research has consistently found that divorce is associated with psychological distress. This study expands existing research by considering age, education, employment, income, length of divorce, number of children, and economic hardship as predictors of postdivorce psychological distress among divorced women in Iran. This study examines 800 divorced women in Iran 30 to 48 years old who had been divorced for no more than 2 years. Results demonstrated that education, number of children, and economic hardship together predict 63.6% of the variance in psychological distress among divorced women. Economic hardship was found to be the strongest contributor. Recommendations for researchers and implications for clinicians are discussed.     

What Coy Smiles Say About Positive Shyness in Early Infancy

Positive shyness is a universal emotion with the specific social function of regulating our interactions by improving trust and liking, and showing politeness. The present study examined early infant production of coy smiles during social interactions as a measure of positive shy behavior. Eighty 4‐month‐olds were experimentally observed during three types of interactions in front of a mirror in which (1) the infant only sees him or herself, (2) the infant only sees the other person (mother, father, or stranger), and (3) the infant sees both him or herself and the other person. Infants produced more coy smiles during the interaction with a stranger than during the interactions with their mother or their father, or when they could see only themselves in front of a mirror. Infants also produced more coy smiles when they could see their self‐reflection during the interaction than when they could not. Our results support the assumption that coy smiles indicate an early emerging emotional reaction with an important adaptive function during social situations involving novel persons and when special attention is given to the child.     

Bayesian Probabilistic Projections of Life Expectancy for All Countries

We propose a Bayesian hierarchical model for producing probabilistic forecasts of male period life expectancy at birth for all the countries of the world to 2100. Such forecasts would be an input to the production of probabilistic population projections for all countries, which is currently being considered by the United Nations. To evaluate the method, we conducted an out-of-sample cross-validation experiment, fitting the model to the data from 1950–1995 and using the estimated model to forecast for the subsequent 10 years. The 10-year predictions had a mean absolute error of about 1 year, about 40 % less than the current UN methodology. The probabilistic forecasts were calibrated in the sense that, for example, the 80 % prediction intervals contained the truth about 80 % of the time. We illustrate our method with results from Madagascar (a typical country with steadily improving life expectancy), Latvia (a country that has had a mortality crisis), and Japan (a leading country). We also show aggregated results for South Asia, a region with eight countries. Free, publicly available R software packages called bayesLife and bayesDem are available to implement the method.     

Modelling Deceleration in Senescent Mortality

Mortality deceleration is the observed but yet to be understood phenomenon that the increase in the late-life death rate slows down after a certain species-related advanced age. Various definitions of onsets of mortality deceleration are examined. A new distribution based on the Strehler-Mildvan theory of aging takes on the required shapes. The application is done on mortality data from the 1892 cohort of Swedish women and on Mediterranean fruit flies.     

Compositional biplots including external non-compositional variables

Biplots represent a widely used statistical tool for visualizing the resulting loadings and scores of a dimension reduction technique applied to multivariate data. If the underlying data carry only relative information (i.e. compositional data expressed in proportions, mg/kg, etc.) they have to be pre-processed with a logratio transformation before the dimension reduction is carried out. In the context of principal component analysis, the resulting biplot is called compositional biplot. We introduce an alternative, the ilr biplot, which is based on a special choice of orthonormal coordinates resulting from an isometric logratio (ilr) transformation. This allows to incorporate also external non-compositional variables, and to study the relations to the compositional variables. The methodology is demonstrated on real data sets.     

Structure of Fibonacci cubes: a survey

The Fibonacci cube Γ _n is the subgraph of the n-cube induced by the binary strings that contain no two consecutive 1s. These graphs are applicable as interconnection networks and in theoretical chemistry, and lead to the Fibonacci dimension of a graph. In this paper a survey on Fibonacci cubes is given with an emphasis on their structure, including representations, recursive construction, hamiltonicity, degree sequence and other enumeration results. Their median nature that leads to a fast recognition algorithm is discussed. The Fibonacci dimension of a graph, studies of graph invariants on Fibonacci cubes, and related classes of graphs are also presented. Along the way some new short proofs are given.     

Testing the Vitamin Model of job stress in Dutch health care workers

Three central hypotheses of Warr's Vitamin Model concerning the relationship between job characteristics and well-being and health outcomes were tested: (1) differential effects of job characteristics on the various well-being and health outcomes; (2) predominance of curvilinear associations; and (3) moderate influence of negative and positive affectivity on these relationships. The study participants were 162 employees from a health care organization (aged 19–54 years, 95% women) who completed questionnaires on job demands and job autonomy, as well as on the outcome variables depression, anxiety, job satisfaction, and health complaints. In addition, data on short-term sickness absence were collected. A higher level of job demands was significantly associated with a lower level of well-being and self-reported health. Job autonomy showed weaker relationships with the outcome variables. The effects of job demands were still large after controlling for negative and positive affectivity, while the effects of job autonomy in most cases became non-significant. The predicted curvilinear relationship between job characteristics and outcome variables did not have an additional value over a linear model in predicting the data. It is concluded that the present data from a homogeneous sample of mostly female nurses support Warr's Vitamin Model to a limited extent.