Investing in the relationship: practitioners’ relationships with looked‐after children and care leavers in Social Work Practices

Providing more consistent and continuous relationships for looked‐after children and care leavers is a current preoccupation in social work in light of many criticisms of the quality of such relationships. Recommendations for more direct work have spurred new models of service delivery in children's services aimed at improving individual outcomes. Independent Social Work Practices (SWPs), a new organizational model piloted in some areas of England between 2009 and 2012, were established to enable social workers and other practitioners to spend more time in direct work and thus to improve the practitioner/child/young person relationship. This paper uses findings from interviews with 169 children and young people across 11 local authorities and 5 SWPs, undertaken as part of a 3‐year national matched control evaluation of pilot SWPs, to identify key elements of good quality practitioner relationships with children or young people. Focusing on children's and young people's perspectives and experiences, the study demonstrates that more direct work and consistent relationships are valued. The paper deploys Recognition Theory to further understanding of effective practice as defined by children and young people.     

Helping families where parents misuse drugs or alcohol? A mixed methods comparative evaluation of an intensive family preservation service

Option 2 is an intensive family preservation service for families with serious child protection concerns related to parental misuse of drugs or alcohol. A previous evaluation indicated that it reduced the number of children entering care and, as a result, produced cost savings; however, little data were gathered from families. This study involved interviews with 15 families (46 children) who had received the service, and a comparison group of 12 families (28 children) referred but not provided the service due to no workers being available. Outcomes and experiences were compared, on average, 5.6 years following referral. Findings included a significant reduction in children entering care, and improvements in relation to substance misuse, parental well‐being and family cohesion. There was no difference in emotional and behavioural welfare of children. Qualitative accounts were very positive about the impact of the service, identifying effective engagement of parents and key elements of good practice in supporting families to change. The findings provide additional support for suggesting that high quality, intensive interventions with families affected by parental substance misuse can be effective. Key lessons for current attempts to deal with the increase in children entering care and the English government's ‘troubled families’ initiative are considered.     

Utility values in health technology assessments: a statistician's perspective

This paper provides an introduction to utilities for statisticians working mainly in clinical research who have not had experience of health technology assessment work. Utility is the numeric valuation applied to a health state based on the preference of being in that state relative to perfect health. Utilities are often combined with survival data in health economic modelling to obtain quality‐adjusted life years. There are several methods available for deriving the preference weights and the health states to which they are applied, and combining them to estimate utilities, and the clinical statistician has valuable skills that can be applied in ensuring the robustness of the trial design, data collection and analyses to obtain and handle this data. In addition to raising awareness of the subject and providing source references, the paper outlines the concepts and approaches around utilities using examples, discusses some of the key issues, and proposes areas where statisticians can collaborate with health economic colleagues to improve the quality of this important element of health technology assessment. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Further studies on the scale estimation in the censored two sample accelerated life model

Yang (1998) proposes a new class of scale estimators for the censored two sample accelerated life model. Unlike most previous results, Yang's estimators have the property that their asymptotic variance can be easily and reliably estimated, and the inferences on the scale parameter can be easily obtained. In this article, we further study the estimation function of Yang. Several new classes of weights and a new slope estimate are considered. Throughout extensive numerical studies, it was found that a new weight together with the use of the new slope results in an estimating function that improved the choices recommended by Yang.     

Workers' compensation for psychological injury: demographic and work-related correlates

This study aimed to determine the demographic and work-related factors that contributed to the filing of a workers' compensation claim for psychological injury. Four groups of employees were compared: those who filed a workers' compensation claim, those who sought psychological treatment for occupational stress but did not file a workers' compensation claim, those who experienced elevated stress levels but did not seek help or lodge a claim, and those who experienced stressful events at work but did not develop symptomatology. The results indicated few variables that could adequately explain why some stressed employees opted for a workers' compensation claim. The implications of these results are discussed.     

Enhancing the validity of foster care follow-up studies through multiple alumni location strategies

While family-based placement prevention services, family reunification programs, subsidized guardianship, and aggressive adoption programs are reducing the numbers of children spending long periods of time in substitute care, a significant number of America's children will come of age in foster care. Agencies and policymakers should use research and evaluation to assess the effectiveness of foster care in nurturing healthy adults and to explore ways to improve services. Outcome studies that have focused on locating and interviewing young or middle-aged adults emancipated from foster care have been hampered by modest response rates, limiting the field's ability to evaluate the efficacy of foster care programs. This article describes a set of strategies that were used to achieve higher response rates in two recent follow-up studies.     

Thank You to 2005 Reviewers

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Thank You to 2005 Reviewers     

Projection array based designs for computer experiments

In this paper we define a new class of designs for computer experiments. A projection array based design defines sets of simulation runs with properties that extend the conceptual properties of orthogonal array based Latin hypercube sampling, particularly to underlying design structures other than orthogonal arrays. Additionally, we illustrate how these designs can be sequentially augmented to improve the overall projection properties of the initial design or focus on interesting regions of the design space that need further exploration to improve the overall fit of the underlying response surface. We also illustrate how an initial Latin hypercube sample can be expressed as a projection array based design and show how one can augment these designs to improve higher dimensional space filling properties.