The protection of children exposed to marital violence

A review of the available research shows that children who witness violence between their parents have emotional and behavioural difficulties that mirror those of children currently identified as being abused. It is not clear whether these difficulties stem from the violence itself or the insecurity common in such families. However, current understanding of the experience of trauma suggests that some of these children are traumatized by the scenes they witness. Thus they fulfil the criteria for suffering from ‘significant harm’, within the guidelines of the Children Act. Current models of intervention in other areas of identified abuse could be applied to these children, offering adequate protection from further harm.     

Unmet service needs of families of young children with chronic illnesses and disabilities

Data about health and educational services were collected from 187 families with young children (under two years) who have chronic illnesses and disabilities. The purpose was to assess parents' satisfaction with services their families received and to identify families' unmet service needs as well as the reasons for these unmet needs. Although families' ratings of the adequacy of services are relatively high, 28% of the families report unmet service needs. The unmet needs most often reported are occupational, physical, or speech therapy; respite care/child care; and special education. Lack of funding is the most commonly given reason for unmet needs. Children with multiple impairments are at highest risk for unmet needs. Only 22% of unmet needs reported at the initial interview have been met by the time of the six-month follow-up. Increased coordination and monitoring of services across service sectors are indicated. Her research interests include the effects of disability on family identity and families' responses to minority stress. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. She gratefully acknowledges Shelley Blazis and Nadav Casuto for statistical consulting. Her research interests focus on the impact of chronic illness and disability on families. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include families and health and chronic illness and disability in children. She received her Ph.D. in Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota. His areas of interest include neurodevelopmental outcomes of low birth weight infants and training in developmental pediatrics. He was graduated from the University of Minnesota Medical School. His areas of interest include adolescents with chronic illness and disabilities, adolescent sexual decision making, and international adolescent health care issues. He was graduated from Howard University College of Medicine was awarded his earned doctorate in Health Policy from the University of Minnesota. Preparation of this article was supported by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research Grant #H133890012.     

Policy, planning and the state in rural localities

The study of planning and policy-making in rural areas has tended to follow conventional lines of approach until quite recently. Although not atheoretical in nature, there has been a lack of regard to the political processes involved in policy-making and decision-making and a crucial lack of interest in the context within which such processes occur. Rather, research has taken an inherently positivist and largely pragmatic road towards the study of rural policy. It is argued in this paper that concepts and theories of the state generated largely in urban and regional contexts, provide a very necessary backcloth for the study of policy in rural areas. Unless the form, function and mechanisms of the state are fully appreciated, research into policy-making and planning will be dogged by inherent but largely untested assumptions concerning why policies are made, and on whose behalf they are implemented.     

A Review of the Current State of Negotiated Order Theory: an Appreciation and a Critique*

It is argued that the theory of negotiated order, which has remained largely submerged within a series of fairly specific “grounded” case studies of occupations, professions, and complex organizations in the health field, has a number of attractive qualities to it. As such, it represents one of the more exciting recent developments in the study of organizations The present paper examines the more recent historical origins of the theory, summarizes its major points, and critically assesses its strengths and weaknesses. Since most of the substance of the theory is found in studies of health professionals working in hospital settings, the examples used here are also derived from this particular body of literature. Some future possible directions which we believe will improve the overall explanatory power of the perspective are presented in the concluding section.     

Geneticization of deviant behavior and consequences for stigma: the case of mental illness

One likely consequence of the genetics revolution is an increased tendency to understand human behavior in genetic terms. How might this "geneticization" affect stigma? Attribution theory predicts a reduction in stigma via reduced blame, anger, and punishment and increased sympathy and help. According to "genetic essentialist" thinking, genes are the basis of human identity and strongly deterministic of behavior. If such ideas are commonly accepted, geneticization should exacerbate stigma by increasing perceptions of differentness, persistence, seriousness, and transmissibility, which in turn should increase social distance and reproductive restrictiveness. I test these predictions using the case of mental illness and a vignette experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey. There was little support for attribution theory predictions. Consistent with genetic essentialism, genetic attributions increased the perceived seriousness and persistence of the mental illness and the belief that siblings and children would develop the same problem. Genetic attribution did not affect reproductive restrictiveness or social distance from the ill person but did increase social distance from the person's sibling, particularly regarding intimate forms of contact involving dating, marriage, and having children.     

A multimethod assessment of personal space development in female and male,black and white children

In order to obtain evidence of the effects of demographic parameters and measurement techniques on personal space, several different assessments were used to determine the impact of subject age, race, and sex on interpersonal distancing. Thirteen different variables representing stimulation, paper-and-pencil, and behavioral techniques indicated that as age increased, personal space requirements decreased, particularly for whites. Blacks as compared to whites required less space at age 7, and mixed-sex dyads tended to require more space than same-sex dyads. The results thus indicate that while some previous findings appear to be measurement method specific, others show intermethod consistency.     

A Flexible Evaluative Framework for Order Picking Systems

This paper develops a novel framework to evaluate the integral performance of order picking systems with different combinations of storage and order picking policies. The warehousing literature on order picking mostly considers minimizing either elapsed time or distance as the sole objective, whereas warehouse managers in a supply chain have to look beyond single‐dimensional performance and consider trade‐offs among different criteria. Thus managers still need a unified and efficient framework to select a portfolio of appropriate order picking policies from a multi‐criteria and contextual perspective. Our framework—combining data envelopment analysis, ranking and selection, and multiple comparisons—provides an efficient methodology to simultaneously analyze several interrelated problems in order picking systems with multiple performance attributes, such as service levels and operational costs. We demonstrate our approach through comprehensive evaluations of order picking policies in three low‐level, picker‐to‐parts rectangular warehouses facing demand variations.     

Delta Method,Moment Convergence,and Inference

Statistics, as functions of the observations, are usually given by well-behaved functions. This fact is used to obtain limit distributions for statistics whose components are given by asymptotically linear functions. These results are then extended to the moments of distributions, covariance matrices and confidence regions for parameters of interest. These regions may be used to test, through duality, hypothesis on these parameters. A theoretical application is presented.     

Generalized Jackknife-Based Estimators for Univariate Extreme-Value Modeling

In this article, we revisit the importance of the generalized jackknife in the construction of reliable semi-parametric estimates of some parameters of extreme or even rare events. The generalized jackknife statistic is applied to a minimum-variance reduced-bias estimator of a positive extreme value index—a primary parameter in statistics of extremes. A couple of refinements are proposed and a simulation study shows that these are able to achieve a lower mean square error. A real data illustration is also provided.