Adult protective services clients confirmed for self-neglect: characteristics and service use

Self-neglect is a complex and inadequately understood phenomenon that accounts for the majority of Adult Protective Services cases. This retrospective, record-based study of the characteristics of 210 older adults who were reported to Adult Protective Services and confirmed for self-neglect revealed that common health problems included nutritional frailty, arthritis, and incontinence. Comparisons based upon length of service showed differences in worker-rated social environment risk, client capacity, and activities of daily living performance. Comparisons of findings with those of other studies of self-neglect underscore the need for systematic research on this population.     

SOCIAL COMPARISON AND EFFORT PROVISION: EVIDENCE FROM A FIELD EXPERIMENT

Social comparison has potentially far reaching consequences in many economic domains. We conducted a field experiment to examine how social comparison affects workers' effort provision if their own wage or that of a co‐worker is cut. Workers were assigned to groups of two, performed identical individual tasks, and received the same performance‐independent hourly wage. Cutting both group members' wages caused a decrease in performance. But when only one group member's wage was cut, the affected workers decreased their performance more than twice as much as when both workers' wages were cut. This finding indicates that social comparison among workers affects effort provision because the only difference between the two wage‐cut treatments is the other group member's wage level. In contrast, workers whose wage was not cut but who witnessed their group member's pay being cut displayed no change in performance relative to the baseline treatment in which both workers' wages remained unchanged. This indicates that social comparison exerts asymmetric effects on effort.     

Bringing the community in: partnerships for aging enrichment

Aging enrichment of undergraduate social work curricula ensures that program graduates will be prepared to practice with older adults. This article reports the results of focus group research that was designed to engage social workers from community agencies serving older adults in preparing students to become "aging-savvy" social workers. The workers highlighted the importance of wide-ranging exposure to older adults, the changing needs of older adults, and the importance of increasing students' comfort with self-determination. These findings informed the program's ongoing curricular transformation process through the incorporation of new assignments that enabled increased contact with older adults in a variety of settings.     

Comparing local and national service systems in social care Europe: framework and findings from the STEPS anti-discrimination learning disability project

This paper outlines the methodology and findings of a cross-national comparison of social care services for people with learning disabilities in Europe, developed from the EU funded STEPS anti-discrimination project. The comparative framework developed for the project is profiled and summary findings are organised into thematic dimensions. Wide variations in service organisation were evident, providing particular challenges for those involved in cross-national research or social work practice. Key variation was evident between local and national systems, the varying impact of generic and specialist community care and the degree of individualisation in services, with various structural, funding and policy barriers to integrated social work and ongoing de-institutionalisation evident. Development priorities for inclusive and anti-discriminatory practice included individual funding and planning, self-advocacy and user involvement in quality management.     

Union Power and (Un)Employment

Is the monopoly face of unions, i.e. their ability to enforce wages above what non-unionised firms would pay, harmful to employment and output? It is shown that a positive answer to this question is far less compelling than commonly held views based on a negatively sloped labour demand curve suggest. First, the labour demand curve may be irrelevant for the employment decision of unionised firms. Second, even if the labour demand curve is relevant, selfish union workers are likely to accept a system of wage discrimination which does away with discrepancies between the marginal product and the reservation wage. And third, the labour demand curve may have a positive slope.     

Inventory Models with Continuous and Poisson Demands and Discounted and Average Costs

We develop a new, unified approach to treating continuous‐time stochastic inventory problems with both the average and discounted cost criteria. The approach involves the development of an adjusted discounted cycle cost formula, which has an appealing intuitive interpretation. We show for the first time that an (s, S) policy is optimal in the case of demand having a compound Poisson component as well as a constant rate component. Our demand structure simultaneously generalizes the classical EOQ model and the inventory models with Poisson demand, and we indicate the reasons why this task has been a difficult one. We do not require the surplus cost function to be convex or quasi‐convex as has been assumed in the literature. Finally, we show that the optimal s is unique, but we do not know if optimal S is unique.