Collaborating with families in differential responses: practitioners' views

Child protection authorities in many countries are concerned with reducing the rates of investigations and with diverting at‐risk families from the child protection service system. In several countries, differential responses have been introduced into child protection law providing service providers with some choice between investigative or family support pathways, depending upon the level of risk posed in the circumstance. In this paper, we report on a study into a form of differential response known as Intervention with Parents' Agreement introduced in Queensland, Australia, in 2005. A unique feature of this differential response is that it occurs after an initial child protection investigation, although it does provide child protection services with options for providing supportive interventions to at‐risk families to prevent the further escalation of concerns. In this paper, we analyse practitioners' perceptions of factors that inhibit and promote implementation of the Intervention with Parents' Agreement. Drawing upon interviews with 25 practitioners, we identify factors that become important for securing participation after an initial investigation has occurred. We discuss the implications for the development of differential responses in child protection service systems.     

Structuring Commitments in Interrupted Careers: Career Breaks,Commitment and the Life Cycle in Teaching

Recent interest in work commitment has been within a unitary paradigm in both the sociological literature on women's commitment to work and in the human resource management literature on the need to generate commitment to work. The paper argues that the ‘commitment concept’ is a social construction with a multiplicity of meanings and that its usage is subjective, contradictory, temporal and frequently gendered. Debates focusing on the ‘masculine’ job model of commitment tend to provide only partial insights by an emphasis on the continuous, linear career and thereby neglect, or negate, the work commitment of women who take a career break. Drawing on a large study of professional teachers, the paper enables a comparison of commitment indicators between stages within a life history and between ‘returners’ and other respondents. The findings demonstrate how commitments change over time and indicate that the commitments of returners are the outcome of the interplay between ‘choices’ and the different structural conditions they encounter during their life cycle which may lead to ‘career curtailment’ or, in times of labour shortages, career opportunities.     

Evaluating the impact of conditional cash transfer programs on fertility: the case of the Red de Protección Social in Nicaragua

Evaluating the impact of poverty-reduction programs on fertility is complicated given that changes in incentives to have children take time to be incorporated into decision making and evaluation periods are usually quite brief. We explore the use of birth spacing as a short-run indicator of the impact of poverty-reduction programs on fertility. The data come from a Nicaraguan conditional cash transfer program that offers incentives for poor households to invest in children’s health, nutrition, and education. We estimate a stratified Cox proportional hazard model and find that the program decreased the hazard of a birth, indicating an increase in birth spacing.     

‘Becoming familiar with a world’: a relational view of socialization

Ethnographic data have frequently been used to examine socialization, but rarely to ground theories of socialization. This paper is an exception. Interest in indigenous representations emerging in situations involving socialization has led to the building of a relational model of socialization, which contrasts with mainstream developmental models of this phenomenon. Socialization is generally defined in terms of cultural learning, the internalization of culture or culture acquisition, that is in terms of the individual's development. The present paper defines it in terms of becoming familiar with a new ‘world’, and a series of changes affecting the structure of the relationship between the human agent and this new world. These structural changes include immersion in a world that is at first strange; subjection to the authority of this world on the basis of acceptance of this authority; and involvement in the world's everyday life structures and activities through doing.     

Gambler’s Ruin: The Duration of Play

We study the gambler’s ruin problem with a general distribution of the payoffs in each game. Assuming the expected value of the payoff distribution is negative, so that eventual ruin occurs with probability 1, we are interested in the distribution of the duration to ruin, also known as the first-passage time distribution. A generating function for this distribution is obtained. Exact expressions for the expected value and variance of this distribution, as well as asymptotic expressions for the case of large initial wealth, are derived.     

Sparsely clustered survival data: application to the evaluation of the safety and effectiveness of medical devices

The effectiveness and safety of implantable medical devices is a critical public health concern. We consider analysis of data in which it is of interest to compare devices but some individuals may be implanted with two or more devices. Our motivating example is based on orthopedic devices, where the same individual can be implanted with as many as two devices for the same joint but on different sides of the body, referred to as bilateral cases. Different methods of analysis are considered in a simulation study and real data example, including both marginal and conditional survival models, fitting single and separate models for bilateral and non-bilateral cases, and combining estimates from these two models. The results of simulations suggest that in the context of orthopedic devices, where implants failures are rare, models fit on both bilateral and non-bilateral cases simultaneously could be quite misleading, and that combined estimates from fitting two separate models performed better under homogeneity. A real data example illustrates the issues surrounding analysis of orthopedic device data with bilateral cases. Our findings suggest that research studies of orthopedic devices should at minimum consider fitting separate models to bilateral and non-bilateral cases.     

The Equality Effects of the ‘Hyper‐formalization’ of Selection

This paper explores how formalization of employee selection procedures for the purpose of ensuring equality of opportunity can become so extensive that the intended outcome of fairness is undermined. Drawing on empirical evidence from a large media organization, the analysis reveals the detrimental impact of formalization in relation to the recruitment of ethnic minority staff. While the existing literature describes how, during recruitment of employees, the circumvention of formal equality procedures can occur through managerial neglect and manipulation, the analysis in this paper shows that, paradoxically, circumvention can also occur through compliance with procedures. This new category takes three forms (robotic, defensive and malicious) and appears under conditions of excessive formalization – the term hyper‐formalization is coined to describe this. The paper develops new concepts that add to understanding of the limitations of equality and diversity procedures, and brings fresh challenges to some of the liberal assumptions about the efficacy and desirability of formalization for achieving fairness.     

Motivating deference: Employees' perception of authority legitimacy as a mediator of supervisor motivating styles and employee work-related outcomes

The two studies presented here examine the extent to which perceived authority legitimacy mediates the association between supervisors' motivating styles and subordinates' work-related outcomes. From the perspective of the self-determination theory (SDT), we examined two supervisory motivating styles: the autonomy-supportive style that nurtures employees' inner motivational resources and the controlling style in which supervisors pressure their employees to behave in specific manager-directed ways. Perceived authority legitimacy was defined according to the Relational Model of Authority (RMA). The results of Study 1 (n?=?191) showed that the autonomy-supportive motivating style, but not the controlling style, was associated with employees' work satisfaction, commitment, and burnout through legitimacy. These results were replicated in Study 2 (n?=?314), even after controlling for task-autonomous and controlled motivation, and extended to other reported employee behavioral outcomes such as organizational citizenship behavior, deviant behavior, and conflicts within the workplace. Taken together, the results suggest that the effectiveness of the autonomy-supportive motivating style is partly due to its association with volitional deference to authority. The paper concludes by discussing theoretical implications of integrating SDT with RMA and the practical implications of the findings.