Alcohol and other drug abuse counselors' attitudes and resources for integrating research and practice

The state of Wisconsin recently launched a Research-to-Practice Initiative. One aspect of the Wisconsin initiative was to survey Wisconsin-Certified Alcohol and other Drug Abuse Counselors (CADCs) to assess their attitudes, reported practices, and resources in regard to the integration of research and practice. The sample for the present study included 366 CADCs. Of the 366 respondents, 62 percent (n = 226) were female and 38 percent (n = 140) were male. The respondents were primarily Caucasian (90 percent) with the remaining respondents identifying as African American (4 percent), Native American (2 percent), Hispanic (1 percent), and Asian American (0.5 percent). The results from the survey indicated that the majority of respondents have access to computers, e-mail, and the Internet at their workplace; report being "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their education and training; and tend to approve of the efforts to integrate research and practice. Incentives, barriers and strategies to integrate research and practice are discussed.     

ALLOCATION OF REMOTELY SENSED DATA USING MARKOV MODELS FOR IMAGE DATA AND PIXEL LABELS

For remotely sensed data, this paper reviews the Bayesian approach to the allocation of picture elements (pixels) to groups. Group labels are assumed a priori to be spatially correlated and, conditional on the labels, the image data are also assumed to be spatially correlated. The models considered have the property that the posterior distribution of the pixel labels given the image data inherits conditional independence constraints. Two allocation algorithms which exploit this fad are discussed. These algorithms are based on maximising the posterior distribution, and involve the use of neighbouring image and label data to update the label of any given pixel. The effect of spatial correlation in the image data on allocation performance is examined.     

Public goods and Arrovian social choice

A social welfare function satisfying Arrow's independence axiom is constant or authoritarian if it generates continuous and transitive social preferences over the space of allocations of public and private goods, and individual preferences have the classical economic properties. The social welfare function will be oligarchial if it generates continuous and quasitransitive social preferences and satisfies a weak version of the Pareto criterion in addition to the independence axiom.This work was supported by the National Sciences Foundation grant no. SES 9007953. I am grateful to anonymous referees whose suggestions led to several substantial improvements.     

Small business still speaks with the same voice: a replication of ‘the voice of small business and the politics of survival’*

We replicated Bechhofer and Elliott's (1978) study of Edinburgh shopkeepers to answer two important questions. First, have political attitudes and behaviour changed since 1969-1970 when Bechhofer and Elliott collected their data? Second, are the Bechhofer and Elliott findings applicable only to the one city where their study was conducted? We collected our data in 1978 from the cities of Bradford and Leicester and the borough of Ealing, in grater London. Our replication supports Bechhofer and Elliott's findings in three of the four areas investigated. First, small shopkeepers are consistent Conservatives, although they are not terribly enthusiastic in their support. Second, shopkeepers are recruited from a wide range of social origins, especially from the lower non-manual strata and skilled manual workers. Third, small shopkeepers are highly individualistic politically, being strongly against big government and anti-union. Fourth, although Bechhofer and Elliott found that shopkeepers' optimistic beliefs in the possibilities of social promotion were apparently fulfilled in Edinburgh, such was not the case in Bradford. Ealing, or Leicester. The difference between our results and theirs may stem from differences in city economic structures.     

Couple network patterns of newcomers in an Australian city

Data from a study of newcomer families in Canberra, Australia, are used to illustrate patterns of couples' network formation in a new social setting. The discussion focuses on particular couple network patterns which newcomers developed during their first year and on the influence of these patterns on the newcomers' experience of the new social environment. Different network structures were found to affect the newcomers' potential for both individual change and the development of intimate relationships in this situation.