Evaluation approaches in mental health: Implications of the new federalism

Since the introduction of federal mental health legislation in 1963, there has been a changing emphasis on evaluation and accountability. With direct federal funding of community mental health services, accountability demands were met through expectations for local agency evaluation activities which were overseen by federal authorities. The advent of the New Federalism and the shift to block grant funding of mental health services to state mental health authorities have shifted responsibility for evaluation to the states and local programs. This paper reviews federal mental health statutes to trace the extent and locus of required evaluation activities and discusses two approaches to carrying out program evaluation: "top-down" where the evaluation topic, method, and data collection are mandated by an administering or funding body; and "bottom-up" approaches where the subject, method of study, and data to be collected are developed in response to a felt need at the local agency level. A case study of each approach as used at the state level in mental health is examined. Based on the literature and the case studies, conclusions are presented on the pro's and con's of each method in meeting accountability demands and the barriers which must be overcome for either method to be successful.     

YOUR SECOND LIFE?

This article examines the performativity of intellectual property in digital gaming environments, with a focus on Massively Multi-Player On Line Games (MMOGs). The analysis centers on the creation and management of goodwill, an intangible asset of considerable value to corporations based on affective bonds between consumers, corporations, and their commodities in the marketplace. Most critical analyses of intellectual property consider neither the centrality of goodwill to corporate management of their intellectual properties in digital environments, nor the significance of the legal conditions that structure activity in such contexts. We develop a theoretical framework based on cultures of circulation involving network sociality, circuits of interactivity and the extensibility of the computer/user interface. This enables us to better understand shifting relations of power and reciprocity between corporations and consumers in digital gaming contexts, where the division between player-consumption and player-production is increasingly blurred. Technological capacities for consumers to become producers of gaming content changes the terrain upon which conflicts between corporations and consumers about intellectual property are negotiated and enhances the value of goodwill. An examination of Linden Lab's Second Life – one of the fastest growing MMOGs and the first to affirm players’ intellectual property rights in their digital creations – provides an illustration of both the limits and possibilities afforded by goodwill as a form of emerging governance in game worlds.     

Globalism's 'siren song': the United Nations and international law in Christian Right thought and prophecy

The role of the American Christian Right (CR) as an international social movement has perhaps received less attention than it is due. In this article, I explore the underlying global vision of the CR, and the ways in which this vision shapes the CR's international political activism. I focus on the CR's construction of the United Nations, examining various CR genres including movement publications, fiction, and prophecy writing. I also attempt to analyse the CR's ideological stance in light of the literature on 'religion and globalisation'.     

Fascists at the Fair: Political Resistance at the 1933–1934 Chicago World's Fair

At the 1933–1934 World's Fair in Chicago the local German American population was able to organize some resistance to minimize the Nazi presence on the fairgrounds, while Italian Americans, for their part, were held in check by the close oversight of Fascist Italy's representatives at the Fair. Neither the Fairs organizing committee nor the U.S. State Department offered any objection to either governments presence. The history of the event shows that these differences were fundamentally due to international regulations surrounding international expositions, suggesting that our existing approaches toward meaning‐making and political action at mega‐events need to take better account of larger regulatory structures.     

Estimation of binomial parameters when both , are unknown

We revisit the classic problem of estimation of the binomial parameters when both parameters n,p are unknown. We start with a series of results that illustrate the fundamental difficulties in the problem. Specifically, we establish lack of unbiased estimates for essentially any functions of just n or just p. We also quantify just how badly biased the sample maximum is as an estimator of n. Then, we motivate and present two new estimators of n. One is a new moment estimate and the other is a bias correction of the sample maximum. Both are easy to motivate, compute, and jackknife. The second estimate frequently beats most common estimates of n in the simulations, including the Carroll–Lombard estimate. This estimate is very promising. We end with a family of estimates for p; a specific one from the family is compared to the presently common estimate and the improvements in mean-squared error are often very significant. In all cases, the asymptotics are derived in one domain. Some other possible estimates such as a truncated MLE and empirical Bayes methods are briefly discussed.     

The Effects of Misconceptions on the Properties of Friedman's Test

Friedman's test is a widely used rank-based alternative to the analysis of variance (ANOVA) F-test for identifying treatment differences in a randomized complete block design. Many texts provide incomplete or misleading information about when Friedman's test may be appropriately applied. We discuss the assumptions needed for the test and common misconceptions. We show via simulation that when the variance or skew of the treatment distributions differ, application of Friedman's test to detect differences in treatment location can result in Type I error probabilities larger than the nominal α, and even when α is unaffected, the power of the test can be less than expected.     

Binomial confidence limits adjusted for a confounding variable

A simple transformation of classical binomial confidence limits provides exact confidence limits in situations where a confounding variable is present. An example is the multiple-choice test, where a correct answer may represent either knowledge or guesswork, the latter being the confounding variable.