A tool for selecting residential child care workers: an initial report

What strengths and talents make an outstanding child care worker? How can these qualities be measured? How can one predict whether an individual will succeed as a child care worker? The authors attempt to answer these questions by focusing on the "life themes" of highly rated child care workers and using a technique to measure these themes.     

The Philippine Population Program: an overview

Since 1970 the Philippine population program has made considerable achievements in its effort to curb the country's high fertility rate. The program presently aims to attain a population growth rate of 2.0% in 1992 and eventually achieve replacement fertility for the country by the year 2000. To achieve these rates, the program has set into motion the so-called "high scenario" targets of greatly increasing the overall rates of use-effectiveness of program methods of contraception. The program continues to be guided by policies implemented since its start, as well as by new ones in resonse to recent developments. Though the program continues to receive funds from international donors, the Philippine government's share in the funding has steadily increased.     

Voting cycles and the structure of individual preferences

Empirical studies have shown that cyclical preferences are infrequent, but they have been less clear about why. Using thermometer ratings from nationally-representative samples of the U.S., we examine preferences for presidential candidates in order to determine what it is about them that leads to few cycles. Single-peaked preferences as usually construed (meaning that all of a set of preferences satisfy single-peakedness criteria) are, of course, rare. Yet we find a high degree of unidimensionality in the sense that for any given set of preferences, a relatively high proportion of the preference orders are consistent with single-peakedness. We also find that the highest amounts of unidimensionality often do not occur along partisan or left/right lines. Strong feelings for or against candidates, often not derived from an issue base, form the basis for the dimensionality discovered.We would like to thank Daniel Severance for programming the random model calculations and three anonymous referees, whose comments were very helpful in clarifying the presentation in this paper.     

WHY THE DEMOCRAT-REPUBLICAN PARTISANSHIP GAP VARIES FROM POLL TO POLL

Polls taken in late 1980 and 1984 varied by up to 20 pointsin the spread they reported between Democratic and Republicanidentifiers. We found three systematic and sizable differencesacross polls: polls that sample only voters, polls that emphasize"today" or the present in their question wording, and pollsthat are taken close to election day (at least in circumstanceslike those of 1984) tend to favor the party currently advantagedin the presidential race.     

Poisson regression with misclassified counts: application to cervical cancer

"Errors in disease classification can give misleading inferences for covariate effects when the probability of error is itself related to the covariates. More accurate inferences are possible using supplemental data on both true and fallible disease counts at various covariate levels. We present a method for incorporating such supplemental data into disease rate regression and use it to show that, although observed intercountry differences in European cervical cancer mortality rates are exaggerated by errors in death certification, they are not completely explained by such errors." The data concern Belgium, England and Wales, France, and Italy.     

Marriage and conjugal roles in Swaziland: persistence and change

"This paper examines one set of relationships central to the Swazi household--marriage and conjugal roles--and how those relationships have changed over the last half century. Information has been analyzed on such topics as types of marriages contracted, the age at marriage, choice of spouse, attitudes towards and participation in polygyny, the nature of conjugal roles, and the question of divorce. This study has drawn upon a wide range of sources including (1) an analysis of civil records from the office of the District Commissioner in Manzini, Swaziland; (2) data collected previously by other social scientists; and (3) survey data gathered especially for this study. The study concludes that while changes have occurred, many traditional patterns of marriage and family continue to be important in contemporary Swazi society."     

The seasons of a CEO's tenure

This article proposes a model of the dynamics of the CEO's tenure in office. The central argument is that there are discernible phases, or seasons, within an executive's tenure in a position, and that these seasons give rise to distinct patterns of executive attention, behavior, and, ultimately, organizational performance. The five delineated seasons are (a) response to mandate, (b) experimentation, (c) selection of an enduring theme, (d) convergence, and (e) dysfunction. The theoretical and practical implications of the model are discussed.