Professionalism and the Public*

To explore the factor of public opinion as a component of professionalism, the prestige ratings of rehabilitation occupations, as given by a representative national sample replicating the North-Hatt technique, are analyzed. Visibility of an occupation does not necessarily increase prestige. Segmental visibility varies by exposure to the needs served by an occupation and by familiarity arising from work experiences. Stereotyping in terms of broad occupational categories, however, appears more likely to form lay opinion than specific job knowledge. Attitudes of particular segments, rather than general public views, are considered critical in professionalism.     

Ethical and psychosocial issues raised by the practice in cases of mistreatment of older adults

Intervention regarding older adult mistreatment raises many questions for practitioners. They have to interact with the victim, the abuser, and, in many cases, with both of them at the same time. In such cases, five themes emerge from the literature review on psycho-social and ethical issues in practice: practitioners' pre-construction and axiological frameworks, victims' capacity, confidentiality versus collaboration between practitioners or between agencies, social and family responsibilities and the balance between competing values in practice. Practitioners are well placed to offer a critical reflection on their practice and on ways of improving it. The goal of our qualitative study is to identify issues and ethical dilemmas in elderly mistreatment situations as represented in the discourses of practitioners in reference to interventions in their psychosocial practice. Sixteen practitioners from the public and community (non-profit organization) sectors were interviewed using a practice history approach. This paper presents the main ethical and psychosocial issues raised by practitioners and some ideas to improve the practice. It is motivated by the crucial question haunting the practitioners' minds: "How far should we go?"     

Darling–Erdős limit results for change-point detection in panel data

We wish to test the null hypothesis if the means of N panels remain the same during the observation period of length T. A quasi-likelihood argument leads to self-normalized statistics whose limit distribution under the null hypothesis is double exponential. The main results are derived assuming that the each panel is based on independent observations and then extended to linear processes. The proofs are based on an approximation of the sum of squared CUSUM processes using the Skorokhod embedding scheme. A simulation study illustrates that our results can be used in case of small and moderate N and T. We apply our results to detect change in the “corruption index”.     

The utility of situational theory of publics for assessing public response to a disaster prediction

The study of public response to disasters is a relatively recent discipline that developed following the passage of the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977. Because earthquake prediction is an inexact science, few formal predictions have been issued, which has limited the opportunity to study public response to predictions. The purpose of this study was to examine the utility of public relations theory, specifically situational theory of publics, for assessing response to the New Madrid earthquake prediction.Situational theory demonstrates that there is not a single, general public for disaster predictions as has been assumed in studies of disaster response. Instead, multiple publics develop in response to a prediction based on how members of those publics view the situation. Contrary to previous findings that believability and personalized risk are correlated constructs, high personalized risk was associated with high constraint recognition regardless of belief in the prediction. Based on the findings, suggestions are proposed for the development of more effective messages for communicating with publics at risk.     

Nadaraya–Watson estimator for I.I.D. paths of diffusion processes

This paper deals with a nonparametric Nadaraya–Watson (NW) estimator of the drift function computed from independent continuous observations of a diffusion process. Risk bounds on the estimator and its discrete-time approximation are established. The paper also deals with extensions of the PCO and leave-one-out cross-validation bandwidth selection methods for our NW estimator. Finally, some numerical experiments are provided.     

Decision-Making and Evidence in Direct Practice

This article presents the results of research designed to explore decision-making by direct practitioners in selected non-profit human service settings. Forty interviews were conducted with workers at front-line, supervisory and higher-management levels. The research questions included; what sources of information are used in decision-making, what variables enhance or impede utilization of evidence-based knowledge in decision-making and what would be important resources for improving availability, access and utilization of evidence-based knowledge in decision-making? Our results indicate that respondents relied most heavily on experience; on their professional values and beliefs, and on an empathic understanding of their clients’ uniqueness. Compared to these sources of information use of research and the professional literature were less enthusiastically endorsed.     

Modification of Tukey's additivity test

In this paper we discuss testing for an interaction in the two-way ANOVA with just one observation per cell. The known results are reviewed and a simulation study is performed to evaluate type I and type II risks of the tests. It is shown that the Tukey and Mandel additivity tests have very low power in case of more general interaction scheme. A modification of Tukey's test is developed to resolve this issue. All tests mentioned in the paper have been implemented in R package Additivity Tests.