Joining up children's services: safeguarding children in multi‐disciplinary teams

In this article we reflect on the complexity and the contested nature of the roles of multi‐disciplinary teams working with children. This is an increasingly important issue in the current UK child welfare policy environment. The article uses the theories of Etienne Wenger to understand data gathered from five multi‐disciplinary teams working with children. We explore key issues relating to location; information sharing; models of understanding; and professional identities. We hope to demonstrate that the teams addressed tensions creatively through their engagement with diversity while at the same time developing common team values. We argue that effective strategies for making multi‐disciplinary teams work will combine inter‐agency issues with internal team‐specific aspects. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fruit machine addiction in adolescence: A case study

A majority of the research on adolescent fruit machine gambling has been survey type studies concentrating on incidence, demographics and quantitative analysis of motivations, subjective feelings and negative consequences of fruit machine addiction. The data from this study are reported as a case study of an 18 year old former adolescent fruit machine addict with additional information from the addict's mother. The study examines a number of distinct stages and circumstances in the development of the addiction including die discovery of the problem, the motivations to constantly gamble, the role of family distress, loss chasing, excitement and skill in maintenance of problem gambling, in addition to a personal examination of the problem's confrontation and eventual recovery. These personal insights are discussed with relation to the contemporary literature. It is shown that previous speculations on some issues arising from quantitative analysis may have to be re-evaluated in the light of more detailed qualitative accounts such as this study.The author would like to thank the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council for funding this work through a research studentship, and the Parents of Young Gamblers organization for their help in this research.     

Singly and Doubly Censored Current Status Data: Estimation, Asymptotics and Regression

In biostatistical applications interest often focuses on the estimation of the distribution of time between two consecutive events. If the initial event time is observed and the subsequent event time is only known to be larger or smaller than an observed point in time, then the data is described by the well-understood singly censored current status model, also known as interval censored data, case I. Jewell et al. (1994) extended this current status model by allowing the initial time to be unobserved, with its distribution over an observed interval [A, B] known; the data is referred to as doubly censored current status data. This model has applications in AIDS partner studies. If the initial time is known to be uniformly distribute d, the model reduces to a submodel of the current status model with the same asymptotic information bounds as in the current status model, but the distribution of interest is essentially the derivative of the distribution of interest in the current status model. As a consequence the non-parametric maximum likelihood estimator is inconsistent. Moreover, this submodel contains only smooth heavy tailed distributions for which no moments exist. In this paper, we discuss the connection between the singly censored current status model and the doubly censored current status model (for the uniform initial time) in detail and explain the difficulties in estimation which arise in the doubly censored case. We propose a regularized MLE corresponding with the current status model. We prove rate results, efficiency of smooth functionals of the regularized MLE, and present a generally applicable efficient method for estimation of regression parameters, which does not rely on the existence of moments. We also discuss extending these ideas to a non-uniform distribution for the initial time.     

Risk Perception and the Value of Safety

This paper examines the relationship between perceived risk and willingness-to-pay (WTP) for increased safety from technological hazards in both conceptual and empirical terms. A conceptual model is developed in which a given household's WTP for risk reductions is a function of traditional socioeconomic variables (i.e., income and base level of risk) and perceived characteristics of the hazards (i.e., dread, knowledge, and exposure). Data to estimate the model are obtained through a combined contingent valuation and risk perception survey that considers 10 technological hazards, five of which are well-defined (e.g., death rates are known and the risks are relatively common) and five are less well-defined. Econometric results, using TOBIT estimation procedures, support the importance of both types of variables in explaining WTP across all 10 hazards. When the risks are split into two groups, the results show that WTP for well-defined hazards is most influenced by perceived personal exposure, while WTP for less well-defined risks is most influenced by levels of dread and severity.     

Variables related to patterns of union Stewards’ commitment

This article examines whether the union and employer commitment of stewards can be predicted by the same antecedent factors and whether any o f those factors are related to dual or unilateral commitment. It modifies a conceptual framework of organizational commitment to recognize the presence of a union and then applies that framework to both union and employer commitment. The analysis found that the predictors of union and employer commitment were mostly different, and structural characteristics of the union, employer, and work significantly differentiated between stewards with high and low dual commitment and between standards with high and low unilateral commitment.     

Smuggled Sound: Bootleg Recording and the Pursuit of Popular Memory

This paper explores the meanings that bootleg recording holds in peoples’ lives. “Bootlegging” refers to the practice of making unauthorized recordings of live performances. Our paper is an interpretive analysis of interviews with bootleg producers and collectors. In their accounts, they suggest how their activities offer an extraordinary example of what it means to participate in contemporary popular culture. As bootleggers smuggle tape recorders into concerts, or trade tapes in underground networks, they pursue rare artifacts of popular culture. Their stories of bootleg taping, collecting and trading suggest an alternative to depictions of popular culture as merely a process of production and consumption. Instead, these accounts demonstrate how some people document their participation in mass cultural events on their own terms and for their own uses. Here, bootlegging is seen as an attempt by people to capture live performances, to collect them as a source of memory and authenticity, and to mediate the events of their lives through means of technological reproduction.     

Captured by the Game: Might a Focus on the ‘Therapeutic Relationship’ Diminish the Attention We Give to the Client's Intimate Network?

A recent project sought to clarify how psychotherapists and mental health workers understand psychosocial health and pathology. In this enquiry, I paid particular attention to the client's interpersonal networks: did the professionals actively consider, and if so to what extent, ‘intimate social and family relationships’ in constructing their understanding of the presenting problem and in the process they used for goal setting. Twenty‐two semi‐structured interviews were undertaken, eleven with psychotherapists and eleven with mental health workers. Across both groups, interviewees tended not to see their clients as embedded, relational entities, but primarily, often quite exclusively, as autonomous beings. Second, interviewees accorded a high value to the importance of ‘the therapeutic relationship’. Is it possible that the emphasis practitioners place on ‘the therapeutic relationship’ has the effect of marginalising the attention that is given to the client's significant‐other network?