Common Beliefs About Child Sexual Abuse and Disclosure: A College Sample

ABSTRACT

Adults’ common beliefs about child sexual abuse and disclosure were explored. Participants (N = 670) were questioned about key areas of child sexual abuse that could affect decision-making processes of jurors evaluating child sexual abuse cases. These areas included victim and perpetrator characteristics, medical and behavioral indicators of child sexual abuse, memories for the event, and disclosure of the event. The scientific literature pertaining to these same areas are reviewed. While individual beliefs were consistent with some areas of the scientific literature (e.g., victim and perpetrator characteristics), they strongly contrasted the literature in other important areas (e.g., memories for the event, indicators of child sexual abuse, and the likelihood of denial and recantation). Implications, including the option of providing expert testimony to reduce discrepancies, are discussed.     

Ready,Set, Go … Again: Renewing an Academy–Agency Child Welfare Partnership

This article presents a case study of the renewed partnership between a midwestern public child welfare agency and a midwestern university school of social work. The partnership, which includes educating BSW and MSW students, preparing frontline child welfare case managers, and providing leadership training for supervisors and managers, demonstrates relational capital, relational embeddedness, and transparency, all of which are criteria for trust and strong partnerships. We discuss the unique development of collaborative relationships through the history of the partnership. This study provides an exemplar of how the academy and the agency communities can inform each other to enhance the well-being of children and families.     

Approximate Studentization with marginal and conditional inference

Many inference problems lead naturally to a marginal or conditional measure of departure that depends on a nuisance parameter. As a device for first-order elimination of the nuisance parameter, we suggest averaging with respect to an exact or approximate confidence distribution function. It is shown that for many standard problems where an exact answer is available by other methods, the averaging method reproduces the exact answer. Moreover, for the gamma-mean problem, where the exact answer is not explicitly available, the averaging method gives results that agree closely with those obtained from higher-order asymptotic methods. Examples are discussed; detailed asymptotic calculations will be examined elsewhere.     

A taxonomy of all ordinal 2 × 2 games

The 2 × 2 game is the simplest and most commonly employed representation of strategic conflict. The 78 strict ordinal 2 × 2 games have been used as conflict models extensively, and have been related in several different taxonomies. However, interest has recently focussed on the full set of 726 general ordinal games, in which one or both players may have equal preferences for two or more outcomes. This paper describes the development of a practical taxonomy of all 726 ordinal 2 × 2 games. The taxonomy provides for rapid identification of particular games, gives a convenient ordering, is as consistent as possible with previous work, and yet is not tied to any specific solution concepts. As well, definitions of several significant game properties are developed or extended to general ordinal games and applied in conjunction with the taxonomy.     

Narrating Love and Abuse in Intimate Relationships

via email: heather.fraser{at}rmit.edu.au Summary In this article, I use discourse analysis to explore the relationshipbetween love and abuse. I argue that Anglo-American social workhas been reticent to theorize love; and that when it does, theborders separating love from abuse are usually assumed to berelatively stable and readily apparent. After nominating someof the reasons for and repercussions of dichotomizing love andabuse, I suggest that knowledge about intimate abuse will expandif more attention is given to the study of love. I promote theuse of feminist discourses because they provide valuable insightsabout the operations of power in love relationships. Drawingideas from both structural feminism and post-structural feminism,I encourage social workers to move their analytical attentionback and forth between the micro-politics of intimate relationshipsto the wider cultural contexts within which they are staged.I conclude with the assertion that social workers will be betterplaced to understand the dilemmas that many ‘ordinary’women confront in their everyday lives, if they critically analysethe intersections of love and abuse.     

Limitations of P-Values and R-squared for Stepwise Regression Building: A Fairness Demonstration in Health Policy Risk Adjustment

ABSTRACT

Stepwise regression building procedures are commonly used applied statistical tools, despite their well-known drawbacks. While many of their limitations have been widely discussed in the literature, other aspects of the use of individual statistical fit measures, especially in high-dimensional stepwise regression settings, have not. Giving primacy to individual fit, as is done with p-values and R², when group fit may be the larger concern, can lead to misguided decision making. One of the most consequential uses of stepwise regression is in health care, where these tools allocate hundreds of billions of dollars to health plans enrolling individuals with different predicted health care costs. The main goal of this “risk adjustment” system is to convey incentives to health plans such that they provide health care services fairly, a component of which is not to discriminate in access or care for persons or groups likely to be expensive. We address some specific limitations of p-values and R² for high-dimensional stepwise regression in this policy problem through an illustrated example by additionally considering a group-level fairness metric.     

Conical tests: Observed levels of significance and confidence regions

Tests and confidence regions for a p-parameter nonnormal model can require integration in p dimensions, for example with a Bayesian or structural model. For small p, the computer integrations are manageable, see for example Fraser [3], Naylor and Smith [6], but for p beyond 5, 6, or 7, the integrations become unfeasible. This paper proposes conical tests of significance which involve manageable computer calculations. The conical tests also provide confidence regions, giving the confidence bound at a chosen level of significance in any direction from a central 0-confidence point.     

BUCKLEY'S SCHEME OF SCHEMES AS A FOUNDATION FOR TEACHING FAMILY SYSTEMS THEORY

In recent training literature, a consistent recommendation emerges concerning the need for an emphasis on the development of a strong system theory base upon which future practitioners and researchers can build. This paper advocates the use of Buckley's hierarchical scheme as a teaching tool to provide an understandable, yet broadly applicable, theory base for graduate students in an introductory family therapy course. A method of teaching Buckley's scheme is outlined that not only incorporates the recommendations of the literature, but also provides an umbrella model of systems for future application and theory building.