Erfolgsfaktoren effizienter Konfliktregelung durch Verhandlung im juristischen Kontext

This article deals with success factors for an efficient solving of legal conflicts using negotiations outside of trial courts. Negotiations, outside the court, provide the chance of finding a good win-win solution for all involved parties. A survey, which aims at finding the most common barriers to the resolution of conflicts outside trial courts, is presented in this article. The survey was conducted in a major international law firm. The lawyers were asked to list the most important reasons for negotiations failures. The results reveal a much higher importance of soft factors, especially communication and relationship issues over hard factors like e.g. business reasons. It is therefore concluded that communication and relationship are key success factors for dispute resolution in legal contexts. It is as well stressed that social science methodology and theories are useful tools for improving the understanding and effectiveness of legal negotiations. Two possible interventions for improving dispute resolution effectiveness in legal contexts are outlined.     

Warning Systems in Risk Management

A method is presented here that allows probabilistic evaluation and optimization of warning systems, and comparison of their performance and cost-effectiveness with those of other means of risk management. The model includes an assessment of the signals, and of human response, given the memory that people have kept of the quality of previous alerts. The trade-off between the rate of false alerts and the length of the lead time is studied to account for the long-term effects of "crying wolf" and the effectiveness of emergency actions. An explicit formulation of the system's benefits, including inputs from a signal model, a response model, and a consequence model, is given to allow optimization of the warning threshold and of the system's sensitivity.     

The Gap Concept as a Quality of Life Measure: Validation Study of the Child Quality of Life Systemic Inventory

The objective was to determine the interest and psychometric properties of a new QOL self-assessment questionnaire suitable for children 8–12 years old measuring alpha, beta and gamma changes: the “Inventaire Systémique de Qualité de vie pour Enfants” (ISQV-E^©). This was a cross-sectional validation study. 288 children have completed the ISQV-E. Other tools were used: The “Autoquestionnaire de Qualité de Vie Enfants Imagé” (AUQUEI), the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC), the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI). The internal consistency of the four scores of the ISQV-E (state, goal, rank and gap) is satisfactory. All scores have their own specificity. The data show the convergent validity, sensitivity and applicability of the ISQV-E. On the other hand, no satisfactory factorial structure was found although a multidimensional theoretical perspective was applied. The feasibility of the ISQV-E seems clearly demonstrated and the value of this new tool seems evident in contexts of physical, psychological or social problems. The validation study was promising but certain points such as test–retest reliability remain to be studied.     

Burnout �C eine Herausforderung im Coaching

This paper studies the challenges for coaches working on burnout syndromes, located at the interface to severe depressions. There is an apparent similarity of symptoms between relatively light burnout events and rather profound depression episodes. Not surprisingly, the required therapeutic activities differ considerably; an incorrect diagnosis may impair the patient health considerably. I use two case studies to show how difficult it is to distinguish between burnout and depression symptoms early on. The paper concludes by encouraging coaches to cooperate more closely with psychotherapists in an attempt to improve the quality of service.     

Dealing with the past in the transition from care. A post-structural analysis of young people's accounts

Young people experiencing the transition from care often are weighed down by their past, both through their early experiences, but also by the way their past is made relevant in encounters with others. The aim of this article is two-fold. Firstly, to present a critical discursive analysis of young people's accounts of themselves in the transition from care. Secondly, to shed light on three different ways of making the transition from care; transition through a break with the past after moving out, transition through continuing change and transition as a way of dealing with the risk of further problems in their lives. The study is qualitative and includes 27 young women and men recruited from three child welfare institutions in the Oslo region of Norway. A multi-method approach including interviews, observations and documents has been used. The analytical framework is inspired by poststructuralist theory.¹     

Finding and fixing systems weaknesses: probabilistic methods and applications of engineering risk analysis.

Methods of engineering risk analysis are based on a functional analysis of systems and on the probabilities (generally Bayesian) of the events and random variables that affect their performances. These methods allow identification of a system's failure modes, computation of its probability of failure or performance deterioration per time unit or operation, and of the contribution of each component to the probabilities and consequences of failures. The model has been extended to include the human decisions and actions that affect components' performances, and the management factors that affect behaviors and can thus be root causes of system failures. By computing the risk with and without proposed measures, one can then set priorities among different risk management options under resource constraints. In this article, I present briefly the engineering risk analysis method, then several illustrations of risk computations that can be used to identify a system's weaknesses and the most cost-effective way to fix them. The first example concerns the heat shield of the space shuttle orbiter and shows the relative risk contribution of the tiles in different areas of the orbiter's surface. The second application is to patient risk in anesthesia and demonstrates how the engineering risk analysis method can be used in the medical domain to rank the benefits of risk mitigation measures, in that case, mostly organizational. The third application is a model of seismic risk analysis and mitigation, with application to the San Francisco Bay area for the assessment of the costs and benefits of different seismic provisions of building codes. In all three cases, some aspects of the results were not intuitively obvious. The probabilistic risk analysis (PRA) method allowed identifying system weaknesses and the most cost-effective way to fix them.     

Attitudes and Values of Scottish Farmers: “Yeoman” and “Entrepreneur” as Factors,Not Distinct Types1

Abstract We investigate the validity of the classification of farmers into two or more distinct types on the basis of attitudes, objectives, and values. Factor analysis of data from a survey of farm pluriactivity in Scotland (N=472) shows that attributes ascribed to “yeoman” and “entrepreneur” types emerge as separate factors rather than as a single bipolar factor. No clustering of the factor scores corresponding to distinct types is found. We also present correlations of the factor scores with attitudes to on- and off-farm pluriactivity and with observables such as age and off-farm employment. The desirability of analyzing survey data by methods which do not make assumptions about typology is discussed.