CMHS/CSAT Collaborative Demonstration Program for Homeless Individuals

The Collaborative Demonstration Program for Homeless Individuals is providing an opportunity for several community agencies in the United States to explore innovative intervention and treatment strategies to address the needs of homeless people with co-occurring (mental illness and substance abuse) disorders. This cooperative agreement, funded jointly by the Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) and the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT), is a $3 million project supporting programs in various community agencies to develop, document, and evaluate programs for persons who are homeless with co-occurring disorders to be used as models in other communities. The program models include: Assertive Community Treatment, Psychosocial Rehabilitation, Therapeutic Community, and an integrated treatment model. The first phase of the two-phase project funded 16 programs in the U.S. to develop manuals within their primary treatment modalities for homeless people with co-occurring disorders. For Phase II of the project, six of the 16 model programs were competitively selected to demonstrate program impact through formal program evaluation efforts. The data derived from the various projects will be compiled into a compendium of information for state agencies and community service providers throughout the U.S.     

Pleas,priors, and prison: Racial/ethnic differences in sentencing

Final case disposition and sentencing decisions for whites, blacks, and Chicanos are modeled with event-history data from the State of California. Dynamic analyses are used to link processing models and theories. The three-way interaction of (1) pleading guilty × (2) racial/ethnic group membership × (3) the extent of prior court experience on rates of moving through the legal system is assessed, controlling for other legitimate and nonlegitimate influences. In a jurisdiction handling large numbers of defendants representing diverse racial/ethnic and cultural groups under determinate sentencing, the timing of legal processing is shown to be critical. Results demonstrate that pleading guilty increases the speed of processing most when sentences do not involve incarceration, though this effect is not found for second or later arrests of Chicanos. Generally, theories of resource mobilization receive greater support than cultural stereotyping.     

Portfolio assessment in a collaborative program evaluation: the reliability and validity of a family literacy portfolio

Evaluations increasingly use open-ended assessments, such as portfolios, to gather information about program impact. Portfolios, however, present challenges in achieving acceptable levels of reliability and often lack evidence to support validity. This article describes the components of a portfolio assessment system developed in a collaborative evaluation of a family literacy program. Staff of a family literacy program and two evaluators collaborated to develop the assessment and the tools that frame the review of the portfolios. Rubrics, exemplar portfolios, portfolio logs, and lists of ‘look-fors’ were developed to guide raters in the scoring and to improve the reliability of scores and validity of decisions about the program. Inter-rater reliability for the portfolio assessment was 0.79 for holistic scores and 0.74 for analytic scores. With respect to validity, holistic and analytic scores correlated with criterion measures from 0.50 to 0.59, providing initial evidence of a common construct.     

Existence of Maximum Likelihood Estimates for Multi-dimensional Exponential Families

This paper deals with the existence of maximum likelihood estimators for multi-dimensional exponential families, including curved exponential families. It first gives an algorithm for determining the MLE from the data. Then it establishes that when the parameter set is either open or relatively closed in the natural parameter set, the MLE of the parameter exists in the sense of Hoffmann-Jorgensen.     

Parental mental health: disruptions to parenting and outcomes for children

The association between parental mental health problems and negative outcomes for children has been long known. This paper addresses three issues in relation to this. First, the scale of the problem is outlined, in terms of both the prevalence of mental health problems in parents and the likelihood of children exhibiting negative outcomes in these circumstances. Secondly, the specificity, or lack of it, of particular outcomes in the child in relation to different parental mental health problems is explored. Thirdly, the paper focuses on the importance of disruptions to parenting as a mechanism in the transmission of mental health problems to negative impacts on the child. Examples are given of how parenting is disrupted in non‐clinical community populations, and the subsequent impacts on the child. The case is made for the preventative importance of parenting and family support in mediating between parental mental health problems and negative impacts on the child.     

“Are We Alone?”

Qualitative Sociology -