Trust: Missing Piece(s) in the Safety Puzzle

While trust is increasingly recognized as a factor that impacts on safety behavior, the exact nature of trust and its role in shaping organizational safety is poorly understood. This special issue contains six articles that examine the relationship between trust and safety behavior in a range of high-risk work contexts. The issue begins with two articles that introduce the complex nature of trust and the positive and negative roles that trust can play in shaping an organization's safety culture. This background is then developed by two articles that explore the role of trust and distrust in safety performance, and uncover a range of significant but often counterintuitive relationships between forms of trust and safe behavior. Finally, the issue concludes with two articles that examine the role that leadership may play in developing trust. These articles examine the conditions important for the development of trust in leaders, and the trust-promoting actions that leaders can employ to influence employees' engagement in safety participation.     

Three Big Breakthroughs for Social Research

The past two years have brought three developments almost certain to change radically the way social scientists and policy analysts view the conduct of their enterprise. These have been the release of samples of data collected by the ABS as unit records on magnetic tape, major modifications to the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences and the development of the completely new Australian Standard Classification of Occupations. The impact of each individually will be enormous, but the extraordinarily complementary nature of these almost simultaneous innovations is emphasised to demonstrate that together this impact will be revolutionary.     

Identifying Dangerous Trucking Firms

The paper develops a statistical procedure for predicting the safety performance of motor carriers based on characteristics of firms and results of two government safety enforcement programs. One program is an audit of management safety practices, and the other is a program to inspect drivers and vehicles at the roadside for compliance with safety regulations. The technique can be used to provide safety regulators with an empirical approach to identify the most dangerous firms and provide a priority list of firms against which educational and enforcement actions should be initiated. The government needs to use such an approach rather than directly observing accident rates because the most dangerous firms are generally small and, despite relatively high accident rates, accidents remain rare events. The technique uses negative-binomial regression procedures on a dataset of 20,000 firms. The definition of poor performance in roadside inspection is based on both the rate of inspections per fleet mile and the average number of violations found during an inspection. This choice was made because selection for inspection has both a random and nonrandom component. The results of the study suggest that both of the government's safety programs help identify the most dangerous firms. The 2.5% of firms that do poorly in both programs have an average accident rate twice that of the mean for all other firms.     

Tests for Comparing Mark-Specific Hazards and Cumulative Incidence Functions

It is of interest in some applications to determine whether there is a relationship between a hazard rate function (or a cumulative incidence function) and a mark variable which is only observed at uncensored failure times. We develop nonparametric tests for this problem when the mark variable is continuous. Tests are developed for the null hypothesis that the mark-specific hazard rate is independent of the mark versus ordered and two-sided alternatives expressed in terms of mark-specific hazard functions and mark-specific cumulative incidence functions. The test statistics are based on functionals of a bivariate test process equal to a weighted average of differences between a Nelson-Aalen-type estimator of the mark-specific cumulative hazard function and a nonparametric estimator of this function under the null hypothesis. The weight function in the test process can be chosen so that the test statistics are asymptotically distribution-free. Asymptotically correct critical values are obtained through a simple simulation procedure. The testing procedures are shown to perform well in numerical studies, and are illustrated with an AIDS clinical trial example. Specifically, the tests are used to assess if the instantaneous or absolute risk of treatment failure depends on the amount of accumulation of drug resistance mutations in a subject's HIV virus. This assessment helps guide development of anti-HIV therapies that surmount the problem of drug resistance.     

The Child Client

In court cases involving children the child is often a party to proceedings and is thus entitled to Legal Aid and representation by a solicitor. This representation of the child happens not just in youth courts under the Criminal Justice Act 1991 but also in Family Courts in proceedings under the Children Act 1989. This article looks at how a solicitor ascertains whether a child client is competent to give instructions and offers information on the techniques employed by the solicitor in communicating with the child, especially in proceedings under the Children Act.     

A note on bias reduction in variable-kernel density estimates

It is well known that the inverse-square-root rule of Abramson (1982) for the bandwidth h of a variable-kernel density estimator achieves a reduction in bias from the fixed-bandwidth estimator, even when a nonnegative kernel is used. Without some form of “clipping” device similar to that of Abramson, the asymptotic bias can be much greater than O(h⁴) for target densities like the normal (Terrell and Scott 1992) or even compactly supported densities. However, Abramson used a nonsmooth clipping procedure intended for pointwise estimation. Instead, we propose a smoothly clipped estimator and establish a globally valid, uniformly convergent bias expansion for densities with uniformly continuous fourth derivatives. The main result extends Hall's (1990) formula (see also Terrell and Scott 1992) to several dimensions, and actually to a very general class of estimators. By allowing a clipping parameter to vary with the bandwidth, the usual O(h⁴) bias expression holds uniformly on any set where the target density is bounded away from zero.     

The cultural division of labour in the Canadian North: a statistical study of the Inuit

Les développements sur l'identité ethnique des Inuit et sur les origines historiques de la dépendance dans le Nord canadien ne fournissent pas de théorie capable de rendre compte des différences dans l'intégration des Inuit au Labrador, dans la partie artique du Québec. Nous y sommes parvenus à la suite de notre analyse, en évaluant la validité d'un type de colonialisme interne pour le Nord canadien, qui poserait a priori l'existence d'une division ethnique du travail. Cette théorie s'appuie sur des données fournies surtout par le recensement. Celles-ci se regroupent autour des modes de participation de la population active Inuit, le maintien de l'identité et la survie de la langue.
Discussions of Inuit ethnic identity and of the historical origins of dependency in the Canadian North often fall short of an adequate theory capable of explaining the varying patterns of Inuit integration in Labrador, Arctic Quebec, and the eastern and western Northwest Territories. Our analysis does this by evaluating the validity of an internal colonialism model for the Canadian North, which posits the existence of a cultural division of labour. Data to support this contention are drawn largely from census material. The data focus is on patterns of Inuit labour force participation, identity maintenance and language retention.