Pulling together: building a community debriefing team.

1. Research shows that many emergency workers are affected physically and emotionally by critical incident stress. 2. Debriefings conducted by trained team members are an effective method to mitigate the impact of critical incident stress. A debriefing is a structured, time-limited group intervention. 3. Cooperation among community agencies is essential for the development and effective functioning of a critical incident stress debriefing team. 4. Several teams in Illinois have organized to form a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing Network. The Illinois network is part of an international organization composed of critical incident stress debriefing providers.     

Expected sample moments of concomitants of selected order statistics

In this paper, the task of determining expected values of sample moments, where the sample members have been selected based on noisy information, is considered. This task is a recurring problem in the theory of evolution strategies. Exact expressions for expected values of sums of products of concomitants of selected order statistics are derived. Then, using Edgeworth and Cornish-Fisher approximations, explicit results that depend on coefficients that can be determined numerically are obtained. While the results are exact only for normal populations, it is shown experimentally that including skewness and kurtosis in the calculations can yield greatly improved results for other distributions.     

Going to Pieces: Paul Monette and the Fragments of the Tribe

Author of the highly acclaimed Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) and winner of the 1992 National Book Award for his autobiography Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, Paul Monette died of complications from AIDS in Los Angeles on February 12, 1995. His most recent work, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise (1994), is his third volume in a trilogy of autobiographical writing on growing up gay, coming-out, and living with AIDS. A graduate of Phillips Academy and Yale University, Monette received a number of awards for his writing and his work as an outspoken voice in the battle against AIDS, including the National Book Award, three Lambda Literary awards, the PEN Center West Freedom to Write Award, and three honorary doctorate degrees, from Wesleyan University, the City University of New York, and the State University of New York at Oswego. A memorial service was held for Monette on Sunday, February 19, 1995, at the Directors Guild of America on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Paul Monette was 49.     

Deterrence in the workplace: perceived certainty, perceived severity, and employee theft

The phenomenon of employee theft is examined empirically, utilizing a deterrence paradigm. Employees selected randomly from three different industry sectors and metropolitan areas were asked to self-report their involvement in a number of property theft activities within the employment setting. Using a weighted least-squares logit regression analysis, the study found that the perception of both the certainty and severity of organizational sanctions were related to employee theft. Males reported more theft than did females, but contrary to previous research, no gender/certainty or gender/severity interactions were observed. The best-fit model did, however, contain two significant first-order interactions: age/certainty and age/severity. These interactions strongly suggest that younger employees are not as deterrable as their older peers, especially under conditions of both high certainty and high severity of punishment. While a number of possible explanations might account for differential deterrability according to age, a commitment to or stakes in conformity explanation is proposed.     

Evaluating alternative approaches to strategic planning

The question which, unfortunately, often goes unanswered, is whether a company's process of corporate planning is optimal. Furthermore, even if they wished to answer such a question there is little in the literature which can provide them with a direct, and explicit evaluative model. This paper examines the development of planning and the many different contributors towards its theoretical underpinning. Whilst recognizing that planning is a field which is a ‘semantic's jungle’ the authors carefully pick their way through the mine-field of misunderstanding and misquotation and clearly establish a base-line for evaluation and indeed propose a detailed methodology. It is hoped that this paper will be a fore-runner of many which will assist the executive in his important evaluative role concerning alternative planning approaches.     

Moving in or Breaking Up? The Role of Distance in the Development of Romantic Relationships

Most romantic relationships start with a living apart together (LAT) phase during which the partners live in two separate households. Over time, a couple might decide to move in together, to separate, or to remain together while maintaining their nonresidential status. This study investigates the competing risks that partners in a LAT relationship will experience the transition to coresidence or to separation. We consider the amount of time LAT partners have to travel to see each other to be a key determinant of relationship development. For our statistical analyses, we use seven waves of the German Family Panel Pairfam (2008/2009–2014/2015) and analyze couples in the age group 20–40 years. We distinguish between short-distance relationships (the partners have to travel less than one hour) and long-distance relationships (the partners have to travel one hour or more). Estimating a competing risks model, we find that couples in long-distance relationships are more likely to separate than those living in close proximity. By contrast, the probability of experiencing a transition to coresidence is lower for LAT couples in long-distance than for those in short-distance relationships. Interaction analyses reveal that distance seems to be irrelevant for the relationship development of couples with two nonemployed (unemployed, in education or other inactive) partners.