Structure and Psychometric Properties of the Father Involvement Scale Used in a Retrospective Pretest–Posttest Design

Abstract

Several programs that address responsible fatherhood exist; however, these programs need strategic evaluation and appropriate tools to measure success of the programs. The goal of this research was to understand the structure and psychometric properties of a father involvement measure used to assess the change in parenting and co-parenting behaviors of fathers in a child welfare program. Analyses used secondary data from a father parenting program, with a retrospective pretest–posttest design. Participants were fathers (N?=?361) who attended a parenting program in three large counties in the North Texas region. Missing data diagnosis and exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed on 13 items to investigate scale structure and psychometric properties. The following three factors with adequate to good internal consistency emerged: self-efficacy, parenting (emotional and physical support), and co-parenting skills. Fit indices showed good model fit for pretest items and a moderate fit for posttest items. The survey instrument demonstrates potential to be adapted to diverse populations, other languages and cultures to further expand program components. Based on the findings, future research should utilize more items to enhance the alpha reliability of the scales. Furthermore, revised scales can be validated across diverse populations based on socioeconomic, ethnicity, and cultural backgrounds.     

Building Supply Chain Resilience through Virtual Stockpile Pooling

Stockpiling inventory is an essential strategy for building supply chain resilience. It enables firms to continue operating while finding a solution to an unexpected event that causes a supply disruption or demand surge. While extremely valuable when actually deployed, stockpiles incur large holding costs and usually provide no benefits until such a time. To help to reduce this cost, this study presents a new approach for managing stockpiles. We show that if leveraged intelligently, stockpiles can also help an organization better meet its own regular demand by enabling a type of virtual pooling we call virtual stockpile pooling (VSP). The idea of VSP is to first integrate the stockpile into several locations’ regular inventory buffers and then dynamically reallocate the stockpile among these locations in reaction to the demand realizations to achieve a kind of virtual transshipment. To study how to execute VSP and determine when it can provide the most value, we formulate a stylized multi‐location stochastic inventory model and solve for the optimal stockpile allocation and inventory order policies. We show that VSP can provide significant cost savings: in some cases nearly the full holding cost of the stockpile (i.e., VSP effectively maintains the stockpile for free), in other cases nearly the savings of traditional physical inventory pooling. Last, our results prescribe implementing VSP with many locations for large stockpiles, but only a few locations for small stockpiles.     

Effective Design of Products/Services: An Approach Based on Integration of Marketing and Operations Management Decisions*

This paper presents an integrated framework for designing profit‐maximizing products/ services, which can also be produced at reasonable operating difficulty levels. Operating difficulty is represented as a function of product and process attributes, and measures a firm's relative ease or difficulty in meeting customer demand patterns under specified operating conditions. Earlier optimum product design procedures have not considered. operational difficulty. We show that optimum profit, market share, cost, and product profiles are dependent on operating difficulty level. Empirical results from the pizza delivery industry demonstrate the value of the proposed Effective Product/Service Design approach.     

Fear of acquaintance versus stranger rape as a "master status": towards refinement of the "shadow of sexual assault"

Using a sample of 1010 women from a southeastern state university, we explore whether associations between fear of sexual assault and other crime-specific fears vary based on presumed victim-offender relationship. More specifically, we assess the extent to which fear of stranger- and acquaintance-perpetrated sexual assaults differ in the extent to which they are correlated with fear of other crime victimizations. Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that both fear of stranger-perpetrated sexual assault and fear of acquaintance-perpetrated sexual assault were positively associated with nearly all other crime-specific fears under examination. However, associations were particularly strong between fear of sexual assault by a stranger and fear of other stranger-perpetrated crimes. Findings have significant implications for how academic institutions should comprehensively address direct and indirect negative influences of violence against college women.     

Disrupting global disability frameworks: settler-colonialism and the geopolitics of disability in Palestine/Israel

In recent years, Israel has seen an increase in disability studies scholarship and disability rights activism. At the same time, critical disability studies scholars have begun calling attention to the role of colonization and neocolonial powers, too often obscured in disability studies work, in disabling oppressed nations. This article brings these critiques in conversation with disability studies scholarship regarding Occupied Palestine to argue that disability is inextricably intertwined with the settler-colonial project of the Israeli state. By highlighting the geopolitical production of disablement, this work suggests that social approaches to disability have largely effaced disability injustice rooted in geopolitical power imbalances.     

Resisting Neoliberalism from within the Academy: Subversion through an Activist Pedagogy

Teaching and learning in the neoliberal academy means that educators in non-market-oriented departments, such as social work, face several constraints and challenges when trying to implement an anti-oppressive, social justice focused curriculum. This article considers challenges that can arise with an introductory social work course in the current context of neoliberalism, especially when open to both social work and non-social work students. With a particular focus on larger class sizes, the use of precarious labour and the depoliticization of the classroom, the authors use an inductive, reflective approach to analyse observations made about shifts in the behaviour and engagement of students in the course. The authors surmise possible explanations for these shifts, considering changes made to the substantive content and pedagogical practices of the course. Through this process the authors propose that these changes represent an ‘activist pedagogy’ which may offer potential for anti-oppressive education with students both inside and outside social work. As such, the authors propose ‘activist pedagogy’ as a possible way to resist and subvert the neoliberal educational paradigm and to better integrate the principles and practices of social justice and anti-oppressive social work into the classroom.