The Planets Aligned: Is Child Protection Policy Reform Good Luck or Good Management?

Abstract

Governments across Australia are struggling to address escalating child protection notifications, a marked increase in the number of children in State care, a decrease in the number of foster carers and chronic workforce shortages in child welfare services. This paper explores the reform process that culminated in the proclamation of the Victorian Children, Youth and Families Act, 2005 and represents an aspect of the response in Victoria to these wider issues. It explores the history of the reform from the perspective of key actors from government, non-government sectors and academics who participated in the process. The paper explores the “ingredients of social policy reform” and how the change process was managed in Victoria. It does not seek to evaluate the reform but rather to understand the complex processes through which a propitious moment for reform was both seized and constructed.     

Liberal Education and Social Welfare

The author presents the vulnerability, risk, and resilience model as a mechanism for improved content integration in the Human Behavior and the Social Environment sequence in social work education. The model demonstrates the interaction of community and social context variables with individual characteristics in the development of social work problems. The five steps in the model are (1) define the social work problem of concern, (2) identify risk and protective factors in the social context, (3) identify intrinsic vulnerability and invulnerability characteristics, (4) intersect these two, and (5) explore intervention: and prevention options. In addition, she provides a rationale and background for the model, describes the model itself, and develops an example from social work practice (adolescent substance abuse) for social work education.     

Conflict Between Work and Family: An Investigation of Four Policy Measures

Welfare states enact a range of policies aimed at reducing work-family conflict. While welfare state policies have been assessed at the macro-level and work-family conflict at the individual-level, few studies have simultaneously addressed these relationships in a cross-national multi-level model. This study addresses this void by assessing the relationship between work-family and family-work conflict and family-friendly policies in 10 countries. Applying a unique multi-level data set that couples country-level policy data with individual-level data (N = 7,895) from the 2002 International Social Survey Programme, the author analyzes the relationship between work-family and family-work conflict and four specific policy measures: family leave, work scheduling, school scheduling, and early childhood education and care. The results demonstrate that mothers and fathers report less family-work and mothers less work-family conflict in countries with more expansive family leave policies. Also, in countries with longer school schedules mothers report less and women without children more work-family conflict.     

The Role of Revenue‐Focused Managerial Performance Measures in Supply Chain Coordination

Many firms employ revenue‐focused managerial performance measures (RF‐MPMs) that cause managers to worry more about revenues than about costs. Although this can seemingly misalign the interests of a manager, we show that the use of such measures can help supply chain partners to overcome hold‐up issues with respect to capacity and promotion investments. We develop a game theoretic model in which two supply chain partners engage in repeated interactions in which the supplier invests in capacity and the buyer invests in demand promotion. Following the realization of demand in each period, the two firms negotiate over the output quantity and wholesale price. The novelty of our model is that we allow the owners of each firm to delegate decision‐making power and negotiating responsibility to a free‐agent manager. We characterize the conditions under which the owners of both firms employ RF‐MPMs in equilibrium and benefit from doing so. For a special case of our model, we show that for the owners of the buyer, an RF‐MPM is equivalent to a price only relational contract, and that it complements a price and quantity relational contract as a mechanism for mitigating hold‐up issues.     

Correlates of gay and lesbian couples' relationship satisfaction and relationship dissolution

A sample of committed gay and lesbian cohabiting couples engaged in two conversations after being apart for at least 8 hours: (a) an events of the day conversation and (b) a conflict resolution conversation. Physiological data were collected during the conversations and a videotape record was made. Couples viewed the videotapes and rated their affect during the interaction. The video records were coded with a system that categorized specific affects displayed. Models derived from physiology, from the perception of interaction, and from specific affective behavior were related to relationship satisfaction, and to the prediction of relationship dissolution over a 12-year period. Results supported previous findings that satisfaction and stability in gay and lesbian relationships are related to similar emotional qualities as in heterosexual relationships.     

Altruistic and contractual remittances between male and female migrants and households in rural Thailand

Past research has questioned the extent to which remittances are altruistic behaviors versus payments in a contractual relationship between households and migrants. This article explores altruistic and contractual patterns of remittances using a gendered approach. On the basis of results with various levels of significance in regression models, male and female migrants from Nang Rong, Thailand, behave both altruistically and contractually. However, women and migrants from poorer households behave more altruistically, while men and migrants from richer households behave more contractually. These results point to the need for further research and theory development to explain heterogeneities in migrants' behavior.     

The Effects of Competing Verbal Behavior on Performance in a Math Task

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - The purposes of this study were to evaluate the effects of an auditory-distractor stimulus and vocal-blocking task on performance on a math task and measures of...