The role relationship between victim and perpetrator as a predictor of characteristics of intrafamilial sexual abuse

It is hypothesized that the closeness of the relationship between the perpetrator of sexual abuse and the victim will determine the number of instances of sexual abuse, the duration of the sexually abusive relationship, the level of coercion necessary to gain compliance, and how long it takes the victim to tell. Differences for cases where the perpetrator is the victim's father and married to the victim's mother, the victim's stepfather or victim's mother's live-in boyfriend, and the victim's noncustodial father are explored. It is argued that in the first case type, the relationship is the closest, the second case type falls in the middle, and in the third, the relationship is the most distant. Hypotheses regarding number of instances of sexual abuse, its duration, and the delay in telling are supported by the data.     

Anatomical dolls: their use in assessment of children who may have been sexually abused

This article examines anatomical dolls in interviews of children who may have been sexually abused from three perspectives. The article summarizes research findings on anatomical dolls, discusses advantages and disadvantages of using them, and describes endorsed doll uses. Although additional, ecologically-valid research is needed on anatomical dolls, the selective use of anatomical dolls, as communication aids, when interviewing children who may be reluctant or unable to describe sexual abuse is warranted.     

Child maltreatment in South Korea: An ecological systems analysis

This article reviews risk factors associated with child maltreatment in South Korea within the context of the ecological system theory. Although child maltreatment is a serious concern in South Korea, understanding of this phenomenon is limited because most of the empirical studies address individual characteristics and few consider broader ecological contexts. This review integrates empirical findings on the risk and protective factors associated with child maltreatment in South Korea within the context of micro- (parent-child relationship, intergenerational transmission of abuse, and domestic violence), meso- (interactions between child-teacher and child-parent), exo- (mothers' employment and parents' socio-economic status), macro- (drinking culture and corporal punishment), and chrono-system (Asian economic crisis) levels.     

Demographic scenarios by age,sex and education corresponding to the SSP narratives

In this paper, we translate the five narratives as defined by the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) research community into five alternative demographic scenarios using projections by age, sex and level of education for 171 countries up to 2100. The scenarios represent a significant step beyond past population scenarios used in the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change context, which considered only population size. The definitions of the medium assumptions about future fertility, mortality, migration and education trends are taken from a major new projections effort by the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, while the assumptions for all the other scenarios were defined in interactions with other groups in the SSP community. Since a full data base with all country-specific results is available online, this paper can only highlight selected results.     

Commitment of Private and Public Agency Workers to Child Welfare: How Long Do They Plan to Stay?

ABSTRACT

Method: Child welfare professionals completing training to work in foster care were asked about reasons for taking their child welfare position, commitment to their agencies, and commitment to child welfare. Analyses compared responses from new public agency foster care workers (N = 100), public agency workers making lateral transfers to foster care (N = 64), and new private foster care workers (N = 105).

Results: Private agency foster care workers were less committed to their agencies and to child welfare and more likely to have taken the position because it was the only one available.

Conclusions: The practice by public child welfare of outsourcing foster care services to private agencies needs to be evaluated. This practice may not benefit children in care and may create organizational problems for agencies.     

Are Patients Patient? The Role of Time to Appointment in Patient Flow

The current state of outpatient healthcare delivery is characterized by capacity shortages and long waits for appointments, yet a substantial fraction of valuable doctors’ capacity is wasted due to no‐shows. In this study, we examine the effect of wait to appointment on patient flow, specifically on a patient's decision to schedule an appointment and to subsequently arrive to it. These two decisions may be dependent, as appointments are more likely to be scheduled by patients who are more patient and are thereby more likely to show up. To estimate the effect of wait on these two decisions, we introduce the willingness to wait (WTW), an unobservable variable that affects both bookings and arrivals for appointments. Using data from a large healthcare system, we estimate WTW with a state‐of‐the‐art non‐parametric method. The WTW, in turn, allows us to estimate the effect of wait on no‐shows. We observe that the effect of increased wait on the likelihood of no‐shows is disproportionately greater among patients with low WTW. Thus, although reducing the wait to an appointment will enable a provider to capture more patient bookings, the effects of wait time on capacity utilization can be non‐monotone. Our counterfactual analysis suggests that increasing wait times can sometimes be beneficial for reducing no‐shows.     

Training child welfare workers from an intersectional cultural humility perspective: a paradigm shift

The increasing diversity of the populations encountered and served by child welfare workers challenges cultural competence models. Current concerns focus on the unintentional over-emphasis on shared group characteristics, undervaluing unique differences of individuals served, and privileging worker expertise about the client's culture, thereby exacerbating the power imbalance between them. This article promotes cultural humility in child welfare service delivery as a compliment to cultural competence, to liberate workers from expectations of cultural expertise about others, and to actively engage the clients, inclusive of their cultural differences, in the service delivery process. Skills and practice principles are discussed.     

Tests for cycling in a signalling pathway

Summary.  Cellular signalling pathways, mediating receptor activity to nuclear gene activation, are generally regarded as feed forward cascades. We analyse measured data of a partially observed signalling pathway and address the question of possible feed-back cycling of involved biochemical components between the nucleus and cytoplasm. First we address the question of cycling in general, starting from basic assumptions about the system. We reformulate the problem as a statistical test leading to likelihood ratio tests under non-standard conditions. We find that the modelling approach without cycling is rejected. Afterwards, to differentiate two different transport mechanisms within the nucleus, we derive the appropriate dynamical models which lead to two systems of ordinary differential equations. To compare both models we apply a statistical testing procedure that is based on bootstrap distributions. We find that one of both transport mechanisms leads to a dynamical model which is rejected whereas the other model is satisfactory.     

Benefits of Surgical Smoothing and Spare Capacity: An Econometric Analysis of Patient Flow

In this study, we examine the hospital's ability to admit patients from its emergency department. From a medical perspective, the number of patients being admitted should depend solely on the patients’ clinical conditions. Using a large‐scale econometric study that includes detailed operational and clinical data on all cardiac patient encounters from a set of 128 hospitals over a period of four years, we show that this is not the case. In particular, we find that independent of their medical condition, many emergency patients are denied hospital admission because of a lack of inpatient beds. Our analysis suggests that having one more inpatient bed at the start of a day can increase the likelihood of an emergency room patient admission by around 3% on average. We examine two policies – active discharge and demand smoothing – that can help hospitals improve patient access. We find that some hospitals actively discharge inpatients when beds become scarce; hospitals that follow such an active discharge protocol are, on average, able to admit more patients. We also investigate to what extent the hospital's ability to smooth its surgical schedule impacts hospital admissions. Hospitals tend to schedule their elective patients early in the week (Mondays and Tuesdays), and discharge them by the weekend in order to minimize weekend staffing, effectively maximizing bed occupancy during the middle of the week. This “weekend effect” artificially induces variability, and reduces effective system capacity. We find that by scheduling patients more uniformly over the week, hospitals can dramatically increase patient access, obviating the need for active discharges or additional capacity investment. Our analysis quantifies these effects, and can help hospitals make effective capacity management decisions in order to improve patient flow.