Shildrick’s monster: exploring a new approach to difference/disability through collective biography

Working with memories generated in a collective biography workshop on difference/disability and drawing in particular on Shildrick’s analysis of monstrosity, this article analyses the ambivalent processes through which difference is othered and abjected. The article argues that through the process of abjection we disown for ourselves whatever qualities are being categorised as monstrous, with negative effects not just on the other, but also on the self. We look at the ambivalence of ‘reclaiming the monster’. This article opens up an alternative of expanding the possibilities of being by focusing not on difference as categorical otherness, but rather difference as movement, as differenciation, or becoming.     

‘Book don’t feed our children’: Nonconformist missionaries and the British and Foreign School Society in the development of elementary education in the British West Indies before and after emancipation

This study examines the ways in which Nonconformist missionaries joined with the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) to provide elementary instruction to enslaved and emancipated children in the nineteenth-century British West Indies. Using predominantly untapped historical sources from the BFSS archive’s newly catalogued West Indian collection, this article seeks to address a long-standing historiographic gap regarding the pedagogic methods and practices employed by Nonconformist missionaries in the British Caribbean. In so doing, it highlights the combined impact that local conditions and global currents of missionary and educational fervour had on establishing an effective elementary system during the emancipation era.     

Optimal Forecasts from Markov Switching Models

We derive forecasts for Markov switching models that are optimal in the mean square forecast error (MSFE) sense by means of weighting observations. We provide analytic expressions of the weights conditional on the Markov states and conditional on state probabilities. This allows us to study the effect of uncertainty around states on forecasts. It emerges that, even in large samples, forecasting performance increases substantially when the construction of optimal weights takes uncertainty around states into account. Performance of the optimal weights is shown through simulations and an application to U.S. GNP, where using optimal weights leads to significant reductions in MSFE. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Representations of Attachment to Father in the Narratives of Preschool Girls in Post-Divorce Families: Implications for Family Relationships and Social Development

This study used the Attachment Story Completion Task-Revised (ASCT-R) (Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cassidy, 1990), a representational measure of attachment security, to examine characteristics of preschool-aged girls' narratives associated with portrayals of attachment to the father. The children's (n = 27) parents had been divorced or legally separated for at least 2 years, and they lived in the primary custody of their mothers. We had previously discovered that girls' responses to the ASCT-R differed from those of boys in unexpected ways. Whereas boys' representations of child-father attachment varied positively with teacher ratings of social behavior in child-care settings, the opposite was the case for girls. Girls who portrayed children's attachment to the father more frequently were rated lower in social competence, contrary to expectations. A more detailed analysis of responses to the ASCT-R suggests that girls' representational attachment behavior toward the father was associated with narrative representations of both parents as unavailable, family instability, and concerns for the father's well-being.     

Community-based psychosocial rehabilitation for schizophrenia service users in the north west province of South Africa: A formative study

Psychosocial support is recognized as important for recovery for service users with schizophrenia, in addition to provision of antipsychotic medication. This study aimed to develop a community-based psychosocial rehabilitation programme for service users with schizophrenia to be facilitated by auxiliary social workers, and to investigate acceptability and feasibility of the programme. A task-sharing approach was adopted in which auxiliary social workers were trained to facilitate psychosocial rehabilitation groups. In-depth individual qualitative interviews were conducted with six group members at baseline, midpoint, and endpoint (18 interviews in total). NVivo10 was used to store data and conduct qualitative framework analysis. Participants reported benefits of the programme, including improvements in group members’ self-esteem, social support, illness knowledge, self-care, and contribution to their households. A key barrier to acceptability was the lack of provision of income generating opportunities. Implementation challenges include difficulties in tracing and engaging service users and families, lack of an appropriate venue, and issues with supply of antipsychotic medication. This study has provided evidence for the benefits and acceptability of this contextually adapted programme. Key barriers to implementation can be addressed through the provision of the necessary resources for auxiliary social worker input in the community.     

Performance measurement in industrial R&D

Currently, the need for R&D performance measurements that are both practically useful and theoretically sound seems to be generally acknowledged; indeed, the rising cost of R&D, greater emphasis on value management and a trend towards decentralization are escalating the need for ways of evaluating the contribution of R&D to corporate performance. However, although recent research and writing on the subject shows that the challenge of developing such sound measurements has been taken up by many academics and organizations, it is also clear that there is no generally applicable approach.
In this review, we consider various approaches for measuring the performance in industrial R&D and identify their key characteristics. We also include a brief summary of the 'history' of performance measurement in R&D, which shows that although there are some new ways of looking at the issue there are many examples from the past that can contribute to our current thinking.
The approaches found in the literature and practice are very varied in their application, some being more suitable for the project level, others for the R&D department, and some for the development process or for the organization as a whole. Furthermore, the uses of the approaches tend to be different. For example, some approaches are intended to justify the continuation of investment in R&D to upper management, whilst others are more suited to support learning and self-correction by empowered R&D teams. In this paper these uses, or 'functions', of performance measurement and a taxonomy of typical subjects of measurement in R&D environments are explored.
Finally, we conclude the review with a discussion of some limitations of the growing literature on R&D performance measurement.     

The Public Acceptance of Voluntary Childlessness in the Netherlands: from 20 to 90 per cent in 30 years

Within a relatively short period of 30 years, public acceptance of voluntary childlessness has increased enormously in the Netherlands. In this paper, we address two research questions, which we answer with data from 13 waves of the repeated cross-sectional survey Cultural Change in the Netherlands (CCN, 1965–1996). First, we investigate to what extent the increasing permissiveness is due to cohort replacement and to intra-cohort change. We find that between 1965 and 1980 the change is primarily due to intra-cohort (period) effects, whereas cohort replacement has become more important since 1980. Second, we address the question which social categories constitute the 10% of the population who do not accept voluntary childlessness. Church attendance—and not religiosity or religious socialization—turns out to be the most important factor. Low levels of income and education also negatively affect the acceptance of voluntary childless.