International Humanitarian Law and Combat Casualties

The purpose of the article is to provide an overview of the law regulating combat in order to assist in determining whether casualties inflicted in combat should be classified as victims of war or victims of war crimes. The boundaries and the content of International Humanitarian Law are indicated. A brief statement of the law regulating combat is given. The concepts of military objective and of proportionality are analyzed. The scope of an unlawful attack is addressed as is the relationship between unlawful attack offences and other offences in International Humanitarian Law. The article concludes with a discussion of when combat casualties are war crimes victims.     

Professional Perspectives on Decision Making about the Long-term Care of Older People

With the increasing pressure on social and health care resources,professionals have to be more explicit in their decision makingregarding the long-term care of older people. This groundedtheory study used 19 focus groups and nine semi-structured interviews(99 staff in total) to explore professional perspectives onthis decision making. Focus group participants and intervieweescomprised care managers, social workers, consultant geriatricians,general medical practitioners, community nurses, home care managers,occupational therapists and hospital discharge support staff.The emerging themes spanned context, clients, families and services.Decisions were often prompted by a crisis, hindering professionalsseeking to make a measured assessment. Fear of burglary andassault, and the willingness and availability of family to helpwere major factors in decisions about living at home. Serviceavailability in terms of public funding for community care,the availability of home care workers and workload pressureson primary care services influenced decision ‘thresholds’regarding admission to institutional care. Assessment toolsdesigned to assist decision making about the long-term careof older people need to take into account the critical aspectsof individual fears and motivation, family support and the availabilityof publicly funded services as well as functional and medicalneeds.     

Child maltreatment and foster care

In “Child Maltreatment and Foster Care,” Richard J. Gelles, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, reports what is known about the incidence of child maltreatment and foster care placement rates since welfare reform. He relies on four major sources of data: Current Trends in Child Abuse Reporting and Fatalities: Results of the 1998 Annual Fifty State Survey, the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), the National Incidence Survey of Reported and Recognized Child Maltreatment (NIS), and the Voluntary Cooperative Information System (VCIS).     

Joint Attention,Self‐Recognition,and Neurocognitive Function in Toddlers

Recent studies have attempted to understand the processes involved in joint attention because of its relevance to both atypical and normal development. Data from a recent study of young children with autism suggests that performance on a delay nonmatch to sample (DNMS) task associated with ventromedial prefrontal functions, but not an A‐not‐B/delayed response task associated with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was related to joint attention skills (Dawson et al., 2002). Recent research also suggests that joint attention is associated with dorsalmedial brain systems linked to self‐monitoring (Mundy, 2003). This study investigated the relations among joint attention, DNMS, and self‐recognition performance in a longitudinal study of 39 normally developing toddlers from 14 to 18 months. The results indicated that development on the DNMS and self‐recognition tasks, but not a means end task, predicted joint attention at 18 months. Further analysis showed that the model was only significant for initiating joint attention (IJA). The implications of these results for the neuro‐development of IJA are discussed.     

现代国际贸易理论中的国内和国际规模收益

在二战后的国际贸易中,工业化国家之间的制造业产品的交易量巨大,这种产业内贸易现象的出现,在一定程度上对传统的赫克歇尔-俄林-萨缪尔逊贸易模型产生了冲击和质疑。经济学家从多个角度寻求对这种现象的理论解释,并开始注意产品差别化及其对规模经济的影响,但是,这些研究对贸易理论的影响很小,并且解释现实的能力也很弱。因此,把差别化的生产资料作为研究的重点,在国际收益的框架下,建立模型以推出国际规模收益,并且运用这一模型得出了国际规模收益、传统的国内规模收益和要素禀赋论之间的关系。     

Pathways between education and health: a causal modelling approach

Summary.  The association of poor education and poor health has been consistently observed in many studies and in various countries. Thus far, studies examining the mechanisms underlying this association have looked at only a limited set of potential pathways. This study simultaneously examines six distinctive pathways, which have been hypothesized to link education and health and found support from previous studies. A causal analysis of education and health was performed using structural equation models. Data were used from six phases of the National Child Development Study, which is based on following up an initial sample of 17416 children who were born in 1958. The association between education and health appears to be explained by a combination of mechanisms: adolescent health and adult health behaviours for men and women, adult social class among men and parental social class among women. We conclude that improvements in population educational attainment may not automatically lead to improvements in population health, and that health policies for improving health and reducing health inequalities need to target specific causal pathways.     

Sektion Jugendsoziologie Tätigkeitsbericht 2004

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Happiness has traitlike and statelike properties: A reply to Veenhoven

Veenhoven (1994) contrasted hypotheses of whether happiness is a trait or state, concluding that it is a state variable. This article critiques the conceptual foundation of Veenhoven's paper, and examines technical deficiencies in his review of evidence. Based on previous findings and new analyses, we conclude that happiness has both traitlike and statelike properties, but that individual differences in happiness endure despite its situational reactivity, and explain greater variance than situational effects.