‘The Bad People Go and Speak to Her’: Young People’s Choice and Agency when Accessing Mental Health Support in School

Concerns about the mental health and well‐being of children and young people have been articulated in health and education policy fields as a call for closer working between schools and providers of mental health support services. Drawing from a Scottish study, this article explores issues of access, when mental health initiatives are sited in formal educational settings. In particular, it focuses on the implications for the agency of children and young people seeking support from those services when and how they choose. The study argues that over‐reliance on teachers as the main referral route to service influences what is deemed to be a problem, who is thought to need support and how the interventions are viewed by the children and young people. Alternative approaches are discussed, which offer opportunities for children and young people to explore the available services and make their own choices about their level of engagement.     

Effect of Gender Composition on Group Performance

The effect of gender composition on group performance was investigated over three years using the MARKSTRAT 2 simulation. Senior undergraduates formed groups and competed within five‐firm (group) industries over 10 weeks, as well as submitting group reports on their performances. Performance and report marks were independent of group size and individual performance in other course assessment. Women per group (numbers, percentage, gender ratio) was positively related to simulation performance, with few women‐dominated groups ranking lower than first or second within each industry. Very few all‐men groups achieved first or second rankings. There were no significant correlations between group gender compositions and marks for the group written report. Women's more interactive, people‐oriented and co‐operative work styles apparently facilitate the MARKSTRAT 2 group process and, when combined with men's more analytical decision‐making tendencies and competitive orientation, appear to explain the superior performances of mixed groups. The emergence and utilization of these tendencies within groups are discussed in terms of Social Contact Theory and Competition Theory. Although generalizations from student‐based studies to the workplace is problematic, the results indicate that groups may be more effective when women outnumber or equal men, especially in complex management activities requiring extensive information management and processing, planning and decision‐making over protracted periods.     

Who Lives Near Coke Plants and Oil Refineries? An Exploration of the Environmental Inequity Hypothesis

Facility-specific information on pollution was obtained for 36 coke plants and 46 oil refineries in the United States and matched with information on populations surrounding these 82 facilities. These data were analyzed to determine whether environmental inequities were present, whether they were more economic or racial in nature, and whether the racial composition of nearby communities has changed significantly since plants began operations.The Census tracts near coke plants have a disproportionate share of poor and nonwhite residents. Multivariate analyses suggest that existing inequities are primarily economic in nature. The findings for oil refineries are not strongly supportive of the environmental inequity hypothesis. Rank ordering of facilities by race, poverty, and pollution produces limited (although not consistent) evidence that the more risky facilities tend to be operating in communities with above-median proportions of nonwhite residents (near coke plants) and Hispanic residents (near oil refineries). Over time, the racial makeup of many communities near facilities has changed significantly, particularly in the case of coke plants sited in the early 1900s. Further risk-oriented studies of multiple manufacturing facilities in various industrial sectors of the economy are recommended.The authors are all affiliated with the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis     

Observing different orders of risk aversion

A decision maker's attitude towards risk is said to be of orderi, i=1, 2, if for every given riskē with expected value zero, the risk premium the decision maker is willing to pay to avoid the risktē goes witht to zero at the same order ast ⁱ. This article presents an experiment testing the order of decision makers' attitudes toward risk. Its major result is that both attitudes exist, each in significant proportions. Moreover, two classes of first-order behavior are defined. The rank-dependent model (Quiggin, 1982) belongs to one, the disappointment aversion model (Gul, 1991) to the other. We show that only the first of these two classes appears among our subjects.     

Validating Benefit and Cost Estimates: The Case of Airbag Regulation

Preregulation estimates of benefits and costs are rarely validated after regulations are implemented. This article performs such a validation for the mandatory automobile airbag requirement. We found that the original 1984 model used to estimate benefits became invalid when 1997 values were input into that 1984 model. However, using a published 1997 cost-effectiveness model, we demonstrate, by replacing the model inputs with the values from 1984, that the 1997 cost-effectiveness ratios, based on real-world crash data and tear-down cost data, are less attractive than what would have been originally anticipated. The three most important errors in the 1984 input values are identified: the overestimation of airbag effectiveness, the overestimation of baseline fatality/injury rates, and the underestimation of manual safety belt use. This case study, which suggests that airbags are a reasonable investment in safety, shows that the regulatory analysis tools do not always produce findings that are biased against health, safety, and environmental regulation. Future validation studies of health, safety, and environmental regulation should focus on validation of benefit and risk estimates, areas where we found significant error, as well as on cost estimates.     

Distribution of angles between unit vectors and the multiple comparison problem for unit vectors

We suppose that L x i = Fq(μi, KiK) for i=1,...,p, where the independent Fisher distributions on the unit sphere in Rq have modal vectors μi and known concentrations KiK, where K will be large—in fact, to obtain asymptotic distributions, we will let K tend to infinity. The term x'iXj=cos 0ij estimates cos 0ij= μiμy. The asymptotic joint distribution of the terms will be studied when all the vectors μi μ are distinct, and for the special case when all the vectors μi=μ, so that all the terms are zero. These very different results have a variety of applications as well as being interesting in themselves. One of these applications is the 'multiple comparisons problem' for unit vectors. However, it was found necessary to give here a different way of solving this problem.