THE ASSOCIATION OF POVERTY WITH CHILD WELFARE SERVICE AND CHILD AND FAMILY CLINICAL OUTCOMES

The influences of poverty, family status and violence in the lives of children and families seen at a large urban children's aid society are investigated. Rates of social assistance dependency of child welfare families in 1995 and 2001 are compared. While the rate of poverty of child welfare families is stable across the two time periods, the ability of families to cope with poverty has dramatically changed, with the percentage of children from impoverished families being admitted into care nearly doubling across the six-year period. Violence as a mitigating factor in the relationship between poverty, the extent of child welfare service and child and family outcomes is also reported. Suggestions for enabling women who are caught in the complexity of choosing between physical safety and poverty are reported.

Les influences de la pauvreté, de la position sociale de la famille et de la violence sur la vie des enfants et des familles vues à une grande société urbaine d'aide à l'enfance sont examinées. Les taux de dépendance des familles vis-à-vis des programmes de protection de l'enfance en 1995 et 2001 sont comparés. Tandis que le taux de pauvreté des familles qui se servent du système de protection de l'enfance est stable à travers les deux périodes de temps, la capacité des familles de faire face à la pauvreté a radicalement changé, le pourcentage d'enfants de familles appauvries qui sont placés dans des familles d'accueil ayant presque doublé à travers la période de six ans. On fait aussi compte-rendu de la violence comme facteur atténuant dans le rapport entre la pauvreté, l’étendue du service de protection des enfants et les résultats pour les enfants et les familles. On résume aussi des suggestions favorisant l'habilitation des femmes qui se trouvent coincées dans la complexité de choisir entre la sûreté physique et la pauvreté.     

Ethnic Differences in Interpretive Conventions and the Reproduction of Inequality in Everyday Life

Failure of conversational involvement based on compounding unrecognized clashes of interpreting the intent of utterances has serious consequences in gatekeeping encounters, and also in excluding those socialized within ethnic minorities from easy participation in the informal organizations within workplaces. Examples of some divergent social meanings of interactional features and some interactional breakdowns suggest how unconscious patterns of interpreting the intent of interlocutors can lead to reinforcing stereotypes about ethnic groups.     

Nonprofits accommodate the information demands of public and private funders

In the absence of performance reporting standards, nonprofit organizations face difficulties in accommodating the varied and changing informational requirements of public and private funders. Clients, volunteers, management, and staff also use and demand performance information. The authors studied four human services organizations in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and their performance reporting across the management cycle, from planning through implementation and monitoring, to external reporting and auditing. The authors analyzed documentary evidence and conducted interviews with users of performance information. they conclude this article by proposing a set of general standards nonprofit organizations can use in performance reporting.     

The Evolution (or Devolution) of Privacy

This paper explores changes in the meaning of privacy. Because individuals understandings and experiences of privacy vary by sociohistorical contexts, privacy is difficult to define and even more challenging to measure. Avoiding common obstacles to privacy research, I examine privacy from the standpoint of its invasion. I develop a typology of privacy invasions and use it to analyze discussions of invasions of privacy in U.S. newspapers. I show that the nature of invasions discussed in the news is increasingly covert and continuous and find empirical support for the often-made claim that the concept of privacy is evolving in meaningful ways.     

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Statistics and Computing -     

CULTURAL AND ECONOMIC SOURCES OF HOMICIDE IN THE UNITED STATES

Are high rates of homicide better explained by cultural or economic factors? Some research suggests that a regional culture of violence underlies high rates of homicide, whereas other research suggests that poverty or economic inequality increases the likelihood of homicide. A major limitation of this body of research has been the failure of researchers to include an indicator of cultural support for violence that is analytically separate from measures of southern region. In this article, a 12-item Legitimate Violence Index (LVX) is introduced that measures cultural support for violence. Using the 50 states as the units of analysis, hypotheses derived from cultural and economic theories of homicide are investigated using multiple regression. Several additional variables are included in the analysis to control for spurious relationships. The results show that legitimate violence, poverty, and economic inequality are significantly associated with state-to-state differences in the incidence of homicide.     

ESTIMATION OF THE CONDITIONAL PROBABILITY OF TUBERCULOSIS GIVEN THE RESPONSE OF A MANTOUX TEST

For the planning of community tuberculosis, prophylaxis one must know the prevalence of tuberculosis (TB) infection as a function of response to the Mantoux intradermal tuberculin test; the standard test for indicating Mycobacterium TB infection. The skin induration size used to select individuals for prophylaxis must be chosen carefully, in view of the costs associated with carrying out and supervising such prophylaxis. The Mantoux test was used to obtain measurements on adolescents in metropolitan Victoria and on a small sample of adolescents with clinical TB. These data are employed to obtain estimates and to construct upper confidence bounds for the conditional probability of TB infection, given the level of Mantoux response. Two conservative methods are presented; one is ‘nonparametric’, the other ‘semiparametric’. The analyses indicate that for responses up to and including 13 mm, the probability of TB infection is less than.07 with ninety-five percent confidence.     

A hybrid EM/Gauss-Newton algorithm for maximum likelihood in mixture distributions

A faster alternative to the EM algorithm in finite mixture distributions is described, which alternates EM iterations with Gauss-Newton iterations using the observed information matrix. At the expense of modest additional analytical effort in obtaining the observed information, the hybrid algorithm reduces the computing time required and provides asymptotic standard errors at convergence. The algorithm is illustrated on the two-component normal mixture.     

Measuring the US non-profit sector: a progress report

The input-output model currently used for estimating the size, scope and dimensions of the non-profit sector in the US economy is based on the SIC system. Unfortunately, this system is inadequate to provide detailed information on the non-profit sector. In response, we developed a classification system — the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) — to define and measure the sector more accurately. This article describes the relationship between the SIC-based measures and the NTEE based measures, and reports on current efforts to link the NTEE system with tax data bases maintained at the Internal Revenue Service.Virginia Hodgkinson is Vice President for Research at Independent Sector, Washington, DC, 20036.Murray Weitzman is a Senior Research Consultant at Independent Sector.     

Normalisation and the psychology of ‘mental retardation‘1

The 1950 and 1960s witnessed a revival of interest among psychologists in mental retardation closely associated with the development of a behaviourist model. These developments effected a decisive break in the discourse of retardation by inserting a ‘behaviour’ component into the definition of retardation. This strengthened claims by psychology of professional primacy vis-à-vis medicine. The objective of professional assertion helped create the conditions in which the service model of Normalisation² took root in North America and, to a lesser extent, the UK. As a semi-autonomous discourse, Normalisation provided a vehicle in which elements of contradictory discourses, principally psychology and interactionism, could be appropriated. The interventions which emerged from this comprised a dual strategy of enhanced social integration and the more precise definition and identification of mental retardation.