Integrating research,policy, and practice in juvenile justice education

This article provides an overview of the history and context leading to Florida's efforts to implement an evaluation-driven research and associated quality assurance system for its juvenile justice education policies and practices. The Juvenile Justice Educational Enhancement Program began implementing Florida's evaluation research and quality assurance system to juvenile justice education in 1998. The article includes a brief summary of articles comprising this special issue of Evaluation Review that address the Juvenile Justice Educational Enhancement Program's various functions, methodological components, data, preliminary findings, continuing evaluation research efforts, and impediments.     

Statistical simulations on the BBC microcomputer: significance tests of the pseudo-random number generator

Statistical tests of significance are carried out on the feedback shift register pseudo-random number generator employed on the BBC microcomputer. The tests are based on the practicalities of using a microcomputer in simulations for statistical education. The results indicate that the generator is not universally acceptable in this role.     

Students as a resource for introducing intercultural education in business schools

Despite a recognized need for a global mindset, opportunities for US business school students to gain hands‐on diversity training regarding intercultural issues remain rare. The reasons for this neglect include a lack of agreement on how to teach intercultural awareness and a paucity of faculty qualified to do so. In order to introduce intercultural education into a core business course, students were offered the opportunity to participate in an extra‐credit project that required the development of a proposal for an international joint venture and afforded them the chance to learn about each other while pursuing a superordinate goal of value to each. Thirty‐nine cross‐cultural teams were created, each of which had a partner from the US and a partner from a different country. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed that the value of the project was closely related to the amount of learning that reportedly took place in both the business and cultural realms. Importantly, 73% of the students reported a strong interest in meeting people from different cultures as a result of participation in the project.     

Solidarity in choosing a location on a cycle

We study the implications of two solidarity conditions on the efficient location of a public good on a cycle, when agents have single-peaked, symmetric preferences. Both conditions require that when circumstances change, the agents not responsible for the change should all be affected in the same direction: either they all gain or they all loose. The first condition, population-monotonicity, applies to arrival or departure of one agent. The second, replacement-domination, applies to changes in the preferences of one agent. Unfortunately, no Pareto-efficient solution satisfies any of these properties. However, if agents’ preferred points are restricted to the vertices of a small regular polygon inscribed in the circle, solutions exist. We characterize them as a class of efficient priority rules.     

Choice and circumstance: Qualitative insights into contemporary childlessness in Australia

Using data from in-depth interviews with 115 women, men and couples in eastern Australia for whom family formation was a recent, current or imminent future issue, this article explores contemporary childlessness among those physically able to have children. It differentiates between those childless by choice and by circumstance, and among other themes highlights (i) the role preservation of lifestyle appears to play as a motive for deliberate childlessness following development of a life course through early adulthood that both generates lifestyle aspirations and often places parenthood on the backburner until after age 30, and (ii) the roles difficulty forming suitable relationships, women’s desire for meaningful careers, and male involvement in family formation decisions play in bringing about childlessness by circumstance.     

Gamesmanship for internal evaluators: Knowing when to “hold 'em” and when to “fold 'em”

This article discusses the ethical conflicts between an internal evaluator's altruistic social reform motivation and an organization's practical survival motivation. The internal evaluator might encounter (a) pressure to downplay negative and emphasize positive findings; (b) reinforcement for nonthreatening, routine evaluation activities; (c) greater interest in making the evaluation unit visible than in using evaluation results; or (d) reduced access to privileged information.     

Remarriage Among Divorced Persons in New Zealand

Trends in the remarriage of divorced persons in New Zealand since World War Two are examined with special attention to the period since 1968 during which the divorce rate has risen rapidly. While remarrying divorcees have formed increasing proportions of marriage cohorts since the late 1960s the remarriage rate, especially for females, has risen only because the divorced population has become more youthful. Comparison of the remarriage experience of synthetic divorce cohorts for 1961 and 1976 suggests that the likelihood of remarriage has fallen for both sexes where divorce occurs at ages below forty, but in particular for females divorced in their thirties.