Risk Perceptions of Offshore Workers on UK Oil and Gas Platforms

Knowledge of the workforce's risk perceptions and attitudes to safety is necessary for the development of a safety culture, where each person accepts responsibility for working safely. The ACSNI Human Factors report stresses the importance of assessing workforce perceptions of risk to achieve a proper safety culture. Risk perception research has been criticized for insufficient analysis of the causal relationships between risk factors and perceived risk. The present study reports some of the factors which predicted risk perception in a sample of 622 employees from six UKCS offshore oil installations who completed a 15-section questionnaire. This paper focuses on the accuracy of workers' risk perceptions and what underlying factors predict the perception of personal risk from both major and minor hazards.     

A New Theoretical Discrete Growth Distribution with Verification for Microbial Counts in Water

Living microbes are discrete, not homogeneously distributed in environmental media, and the form of the distribution of their counts in drinking water has not been well established. However, this count may "scale" or range over orders of magnitude over time, in which case data representing the tail of the distribution, and governing the mean, would be represented only in impractically long data records. In the absence of such data, knowledge of the general form of the full distribution could be used to estimate the true mean accounting for low-probability, high-consequence count events and provide a basis for a general environmental dose-response function. In this article, a new theoretical discrete growth distribution (DGD) is proposed for discrete counts in environmental media and other discrete growth systems. The term growth refers not to microbial growth but to a general abiotic first-order growth/decay of outcome sizes in many complex systems. The emergence and stability of the DGD in such systems, defined in simultaneous work, are also described. The DGD is then initially verified versus 12 of 12 simulated long-term drinking water and short-term treated and untreated water microbial count data sets. The alternative Poisson lognormal (PLN) distribution was rejected for 2 (17%) of the 12 data sets with 95% confidence and, like other competitive distributions, was not found stable (in simultaneous work). Sample averages are compared with means assessed from the fitted DGD, with varying results. Broader validation of the DGD for discrete counts arising as outcomes of mathematical growth systems is suggested.     

Assessing the impact of community programmes working with children and families in disadvantaged areas

Community programmes designed to improve the functioning of disadvantaged neighbourhoods and the families living there, as well as to reduce specific problems such as child abuse and youth offending, are currently very popular with the UK government. However, whilst there is considerable knowledge about the structural causes of individual and neighbourhood disadvantage in UK society, evidence about the role that community programmes can play in addressing these inequalities is much more limited. The evidence that does exist tends either to have been imported from other parts of the world (notably the USA), or to be in the early stages of evaluation in the UK, with the initial findings sometimes proving rather unconvincing. In particular, the limitations of targeted funding, and the difficulties of establishing and maintaining the effective partnerships upon which successful programmes rely, are emerging as significant issues. In this paper the implications of these findings for the future of children's services is considered, in the context of ever‐widening inequalities in UK society and the government's plans for children's trusts, integrated children's centres, and extended schools, involving multi‐agency working between health, education and social services.     

Reforming Poor Women: The Cultural Politics and Practices of Welfare Reform

This article employs participant observation and interviewing at a community-based job readiness program operating under welfare reform to explore how attempts at cultural retraining (that is, bringing presumably deviant behavior in line with dominant cultural norms) are delivered, received, and interpreted by welfare-reliant women. This study finds that poor women—the targets of these reforms—largely resist cultural retraining, but, ironically, assert its usefulness for welfare-reliant women generally. These ethnographic data support and expand upon previous interview and focus group studies that have encountered the same attribution paradox among welfare-reliant women.     

The Best Laid Plans: Expectations,Preferences, and Stability of Child‐Care Arrangements

This study considers whether an earlier and more extensive search for child care, and a match of the type used to the type preferred, predicts arrangement stability. We used the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care to estimate multinomial logit models of arrangement changes over 3‐month intervals between 3 and 12 months (n= 958 children and 2,223 observations). Use of preferred care predicted greater arrangement stability, and parents who settled early on 1 option were less likely later to switch care types. Those who planned earlier were more likely to use their preferred care type and to use higher quality settings. This study encourages future research on how, when, and with what success parents search for child care.