Making visits better: the perspectives of parents,foster parents,and child welfare workers

Mothers of children recently placed in foster care, foster mothers, and child welfare workers participated in semistructured, clinical interviews focusing on the challenges of parent visitation with young children. Mothers described their feelings of grief, trauma, and rage about the forced separation from their children and stressed the importance of emotional expression and communication during visits. Child welfare workers described the complexities of supporting emotionally close parent-child interactions while monitoring and assessing parental behavior during visits. Foster mothers described the importance of preparing children for visits and the difficulties of supporting the children afterward. Implications of understanding mothers', foster mothers', and child welfare workers' perspectives on enhancing the quality of visits with young children are discussed.     

The quality of work and the European economic crisis – the theme and the time: an introduction

The theme of the quality of work and working life has gone through ups and downs, recurrent references, at times only opportunistic, in the sociological literature. Our intention here is certainly not to go once again over the stages, both theoretical and empirical, at the international level, but above all european and italian, of this process.     

Self-selection and direct estimation of across-regime correlation parameter

A direct maximum likelihood (ML) procedure to estimate the ‘generally unidentified’ across-regime correlation parameter in a two-regime endogenous switching model is here provided. The results of a Monte Carlo experiment confirm consistency of our direct ML procedure, and its relative efficiency over widely applied models and methods. As an empirical application, we estimate a two-regime simultaneous equation model of domestic work of Italian married women in which the two regimes are given by their working status (employed or unemployed).     

Consumer boycott, household heterogeneity, and child labor

Consumer boycott campaigns against goods that are produced using child labor are becoming increasingly popular. Yet there is still no consensus on which are the effects of such type of activism on child labor in developing countries. In fact, if some agreement is to be found in the recent economic literature, it is that the boycott does not reduce child labor. We contribute to this discussion presenting a simple model which shows that there are conditions under which a consumer boycott reduces child labor. We consider a small country two-factor economy populated by heterogeneous households. The boycott affects both the adult and the child labor markets. We show that the effects are heterogeneous and depend on household characteristics and on the income distribution. We derive the conditions under which the consumer boycott reduces child labor not only for nonpoor households but also for some of the households whose’ income is—before the boycott—under the subsistence level.     

On the validity of the indeterminate latent variables in the lisrel model

The language of abstract vector spaces is used to show that the latent variables and errors of the Lisrel model can always be constructed so as to predict any criterion perfectly,including all those that are entirely uncorrelated with the observed variables.     

On the ratio of generalized variances

This paper examines the ratio of the determinants of two independent central Wishart matrices. The ratio is represented as a product of independent beta type-2 random variables and then the exact density is evaluated for the general case. Different representations and particular cases are also discussed.