An integrative approach to threat assessment and management: security and mental health response to a threatening client

Workplace violence threat assessment and management practices represent an interdisciplinary approach to the diversion of potentially dangerous employees and clients. This case study illustrates such an intervention in a complex situation involving a social service agency and its client. Following a curtailment of services and an arrest, the client developed an escalating homicidal anger toward the agency administrator. Once a Tarasoff warning was received, the agency contacted a security company who organized a threat assessment and management plan involving interdisciplinary collaboration. Information developed in the course of the assessment was presented to prosecutors, who facilitated the client's arrest and involuntary psychiatric commitment until he was judged to be no longer dangerous. This case ultimately involved an integration of the services of security, law enforcement, mental health professionals, prosecutors, the courts and the state mental health system in leading to a successful diversion of the client from a path of intended violence.     

NEGOTIATED TRANSFER PRICING AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION IN ORGANIZATIONS

An experiment was conducted to test hypotheses about conflict related to negotiated transfer pricing. A business game with repeated decision periods was used to simulate transfer pricing negotiations between corporate divisions. When the evaluation of division executives emphasized corporate profits rather than divisional profits, there was more smoothing and integrative problem solving and less aggressive-competitive behavior, relations between the divisions were better, and more cooperation was observed to occur in other decisions unrelated to the transfer pricing. Moreover, corporate profits from the transfer product and its derivative product tended to be larger. All of these effects were most pronounced when the transfer product was important to both divisions as a source of profits.     

Improving the Utilization of Front-Line Service Delivery System Personnel*

There are two types of work typically performed in services which differ in the degree of control management has over when the work must be done. Serving customers, an activity that can occur only when customers are in the system is, by its nature, uncontrollable work. In contrast, the execution of controllable work does not require the presence of customers, and is work over which management has some degree of temporal control. This paper presents two integer programming models for optimally scheduling controllable work simultaneously with shifts. One model explicitly defines variables for the times at which controllable work may be started, while the other uses implicit modeling to reduce the number of variables. In an initial experiment of 864 test problems, the latter model yielded optimal solutions in approximately 81 percent of the time required by the former model. To evaluate the impact on customer service of having front-line employees perform controllable work, a second experiment was conducted simulating 5, 832 service delivery systems. The results show that controllable work offers a useful means of improving labor utilization. Perhaps more important, it was found that having front-line employees perform controllable work did not degrade the desired level of customer service.     

A Computerized Approach to Decision Process Tracing for Decision Support System Design*

We propose the use of computerized process tracing (CPT) tools as an appropriate approach for monitoring the information acquisition and evaluation phase of specific decision processes. CPT tools are unobtrusive and seem particularly relevant for evaluating certain decision tasks that may be supported by decision support systems (DSS). CPT tools can be an important component of DSS development. An information systems research taxonomy developed by previous researchers [29] [36] is used to position research work involving the methodology of CPT. Using a critique suggested by Libby [28], CPT tools are evaluated and compared to alternative process tracing tools. A brief empirical example using CPT is provided, and future uses relative to DSS are suggested. The appendix includes an example of a specific CPT tool.     

Suicide and suicide risk in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender populations: review and recommendations

Despite strong indications of elevated risk of suicidal behavior in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, limited attention has been given to research, interventions or suicide prevention programs targeting these populations. This article is a culmination of a three-year effort by an expert panel to address the need for better understanding of suicidal behavior and suicide risk in sexual minority populations, and stimulate the development of needed prevention strategies, interventions and policy changes. This article summarizes existing research findings, and makes recommendations for addressing knowledge gaps and applying current knowledge to relevant areas of suicide prevention practice.     

Nonprofit mission statement focus and financial performance

Mission statements have been adopted nearly universally in nonprofit organizations. Their ubiquity is based on a presumption that a well‐designed mission statement is linked to better organizational performance because it provides a framework for decision making, influence over staff and volunteer motivation, and a mechanism for signaling organizational legitimacy to stakeholders. Despite collective confidence in mission statement utility, the relationship between mission statements and performance has received minimal attention. In this exploratory study we measured several attributes of mission statements in women's rights nonprofit organizations, with particular attention to the degree to which the statement focuses on organizational purpose and the relationship between focus and several measures of organization financial performance. The findings indicated that mission statements with a more focused geographic scope were associated with lower overhead ratios. In contrast, mission statements that identified more target client groups were associated with larger one‐year increases in contribution. Despite the statistical significance, the relationships were weak, calling into question common assumptions about the importance of the mission statement to a nonprofit organization.     

Influences and Consequences of Well-being Among Australian Young People: 1980–1995

This paper investigates the determinants and consequences of subjective well-being. Although there is an extensive literature on well-being there are few panel studies which measure well-being frequently and over a long time period. The Australian Youth in Transition panel data is used to examine several aspects of well-being: the influence of sociodemographic and labour market characteristics, the dynamics of well-being and its determinants; the isolation of aging, cohort and contextual effects, and the effects of well-being on marital status and labour market outcomes. Women and those married or in de facto relationships show higher levels of well-being. The effect of being in a de facto relationship is sensitive to age. The presence of children decreases subjective-well-being and again this effect is age-specific. Income and occupational statusalso influence well-being with income having consistent effects and status effects declining. The unemployed consistently show substantially lower levels of well-being. Contextual effects were identified, increases in the national level of unemployment decrease average well-being levels in all but the youngest cohort. Controlling for lagged effects, subjective well- being has substantial effects on the odds of being married and unemployed, smaller effects on income and age specific effects on being in a de facto relationship.     

Civilization's Wake: Ecology,Economics and the Roots of Environmental Destruction and Neglect

Population and Environment -     

Methodological challenges of designing a survey to capture young people’s (non-binary) affiliations in relationship to religion,sexuality and gender

ABSTRACT

Large-scale population studies surveying young people in relation to their worldviews have tended to frame their identities in a fixed and limited capacity while also treating the topics of religion/spirituality and sexuality/gender as discrete categories of scholarly analysis. We highlight the affordances and limitations of foregrounding fixed religious, sexual and gender-based identity categories in the process of collecting and analysing data related to the worldviews of young people. In this paper we argue the value of studying the complexities and intersections of these identities and worldviews together in one study. We do this through reference to the Australia’s Generation Z (AGZ) study: the first nationally representative sample focused on providing an evidence-based understanding of both the religious/spiritual/non-religious and sexuality/gender identities and worldviews of young Australians aged 13–18. We discuss how we built on existing surveys in designing the AGZ survey. We also demonstrate how this survey allowed for the incorporation of young people’s non-binary understandings of religion, sexuality and gender.     

The glm log-rank test:general linear modeling of log-rank scores as a method of analysis for survival data

The use of general linear modeling (GLM) procedures based on log-rank scores is proposed for the analysis of survival data and compared to standard survival analysis procedures. For the comparison of two groups, this approach performed similarly to the traditional log-rank test. In the case of more complicated designs - without ties in the survival times - the approach was only marginally less powerful than tests from proportional hazards models, and clearly less powerful than a likelihood ratio test for a fully parametric model; however, with ties in the survival time, the approach proved more powerful than tests from Cox's semi-parametric proportional hazards procedure. The method appears to provide a reasonably powerful alternative for the analysis of survival data, is easily used in complicated study designs, avoids (semi-)parametric assumptions, and is quite computationally easy and inexpensive to employ.