Acing the 'chemistry' test

With the right boss, you can go far and learn much. The wrong boss could actually slow or even stall your executive career. When you interview for a job, you're also interviewing for a boss--and it's in your own interest to try to find the individual who is the best possible fit with your own management style. This is a matching process--not quite a courtship, but with some of the same characteristics. What can you do to ensure a good match with your new boss? (1) Do your homework; (2) Make your interview a dialog; (3) Use subtle strategies, too, such as watching for body language; (4) Ask the employer for references; and (5) Know yourself.     

Modeling household fertility decisions with generalized Poisson regression

This paper models household fertility decisions by using a generalized Poisson regression model. Since the fertility data used in the paper exhibit under-dispersion, the generalized Poisson regression model has statistical advantages over both standard Poisson and negative binomial regression models, and is suitable for analysis of count data that exhibit either over-dispersion or under-dispersion. The model is estimated by the method of maximum likelihood. Approximate tests for the dispersion and goodness-of-fit measures for comparing alternative models are discussed. Based on observations from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics of 1989 interviewing year, the empirical results support the fertility hypothesis of Becker and Lewis (1973). Received January 7, 1997 /Accepted April 3, 1997     

Ability, disability, and the oldest old

A measure of range of ability is used to profile the 85-years-old-and-older (oldest old) population, including the highly disabled institutional population. This new measure uses two new questions available in the 1990 Decennial Census concerning a self-care limitation and a mobility limitation as well as the usual question concerning a work limitation. In addition to examining the extent of disability among the oldest old, the article examines the extent of care potentially available in the household as well as the economic characteristics of this age group. It is also profiled in terms of relevant personal characteristics, including age, gender, marital status, race, ethnicity, rural residence, education, and employment. A key question addressed is the need for help or care among the oldest old and how various long-term care proposals would meet such needs. A careful analysis of this unique and growing population is necessary to both allay fears of the cost of care or help as well as to dispel stereotypes of this age group as frail and dependent, and in need of institutional care.     

Promoting Justice in the Delivery of Services to Juvenile Delinquents: The Ecosystemic Natural Wrap-Around Model

Caught between their child and doing the right thing, families of chronic juvenile delinquents often experience a series of injustices in the name of justice. Attempts by the system to correct the delinquency problem often result in the imposition of values and beliefs that negate the family's values, experiences and meanings of their child's behavior. The Ecosystemic Natural Wrap-around (E.N.W.) model attempts to respectfully account for the many influences that maintain problematic interactions, both internal and external, in the nuclear family of chronic juvenile delinquents. The model focuses on a variety of interventions at different levels and contexts, building on the strengths of the family, using the extended family and fictive kin networks, and clarifying the meanings associated with problematic behavior for the multiple players. The model proposed is an integrative theoretical approach, emphasizing systems theory and constructivism.     

Evaluation design for a community prevention trial. An environmental approach to reduce alcohol-involved trauma

The Community Prevention Trial was 5-year effort to reduce alcohol-involved injuries and death through a comprehensive program of community awareness and policy activities. The three experimental communities were of approximately 100,000 population each (one in Northern California, one in Southern California, and one in South Carolina). Matched comparison communities were used for each experimental community. This article describes the evaluation approach used in a program that sought to change environmental factors not a specific population or target group. This approach demanded unique evaluation approaches for determining overall community aggregate effects, that is, distal outcomes, as well as changes in key mediating variables, that is, process effects. The problem of trending and lagged effects of community prevention programs are discussed.     

Summing up. Recommendations and experiences for evaluation of community-level prevention programs

This article provides recommendations and observations about evaluation of a locally based prevention project to reduce problems at a total community or aggregate level. The shift from targeting specific individuals or subpopulations to the overall structure and environment of a community is most demanding. Evaluation tools and analysis techniques have lagged behind program development because community-level interventions are not linked to a specific target group who can be separately studied. Thus assumptions about using random assignment and/or comparison communities as means to control for confounding variables are weakened when the unit of analysis is the community itself and dependent measures are subject to trending and the effects of history.     

Dilemmas in provision of urban mental health services for latency age children

Urban mental health facilities are increasingly overwhelmed by the sheer number of cases, at a time when federal, state and local funding cutbacks are greater than ever before. Additional to the numbers of cases needing care, is a growing number of cases presenting overwhelming social problems, i.e., emotional and medical pathology, economic deprivation, and substance abuse, with resultant family violence and child abuse. The case-loads in mental health agencies have become almost indistinguishable from those on the roles of child protection, juvenile justice, and child welfare agencies. Mental health service is near to impossible to provide, prior to major environmental manipulation, via educational planning, and frequent placement of children in day treatment programs, day care, or securing of in-home assistance, via home-maker services. These needed referrals take inordinate time, given the unresponsive, poorly coordinated bureaucracies providing such services. Many of the families seen are burdened by overwhelming social pathology, e.g., poverty, huge numbers of children per family, single-parenthood, drugs, and neighborhood violence. Treatment is increasingly difficult to provide, given the poor access to child serving systems, by parents and professionals, alike. Token services and worker burn-out in response to overwhelming difficult cases and excessive assignments, suggest a situation of crisis proportion. Clearly coalitions must be formed by over-burdened professionals, to better educate governing bodies, politicians, boards and administrators, and parents regarding this growing crisis. Professionals, battle-weary, are retreating from agency practice, simultaneous with agency cut-backs of staff and service. Agency administrators are cowed by local and state directives regarding budgetary cuts, and the situation worsens daily, as overburdened line staff struggle with an impossible challenge. Some sort of advocacy and social action must be taken by leaders in the field, to better inform and educate those responsible for budgetary allocations. Latency age children are among the most vulnerable, caught in deteriorating schools and neighborhoods, living with incredible daily violence, and pressures from drug dealers, pushers, adolescent gangs, and inadequate supports in their homes. This group of children is being pushed to become the violent adolescents of tomorrow. Major innovations and changes in delivery of services is necessary in health and mental health agencies serving this at-risk population. Proposed is a school based model of practice to provide access, coordination and collaboration of needed services.This paper was presented at the National Health Policy Forum, National Academies of Practice, April 1992.Ph.D. Specialization in the treatment of Children and Adolescents, Ph.D. Program.