Turning away from the public sector in children's out-of-home care: An English experiment

This paper reports on the evaluation of an English experiment which, for the first time, moved statutory social work support for children and young people in out-of-home care from the public to the private or independent sector. Five social work practices (SWPs), independent or semi-independent of local government, were established and evaluated using a matched control design with integrated process evaluation. Social work teams in the public sector, selected to correspond to key characteristics of the SWP sites, provided control sites.     

Social Workers Can e-Learn: Evaluation of a Pilot Post-Qualifying e-Learning Course in Research Methods and Critical Appraisal Skills for Social Workers

Social workers are increasingly encouraged to become research minded and integrate research findings into their practice. However, there is a paucity of high-quality accessible training for social workers in research methods and critical appraisal skills. We developed an e-learning version of an MSc degree module to widen access to this kind of training and this paper presents the findings of an evaluation of a pilot of this e-learning course. To test the effectiveness of the e-learning environment in delivering research methods and critical appraisal skills training to social workers in comparison with a classroom group, we adopted a mixed methods approach which comprised concept mapping exercises, semi-structured interviews and evaluation questionnaires administered to the e-learners (n = 3) and a classroom comparison group (n = 12). Our analysis of the students' concept maps revealed no conspicuous differences in the quality of student knowledge changes that were a consequence of the mode of teaching delivery. The e-learners met the learning outcomes of the module to the same extent as the classroom group and were highly satisfied with the mode of delivery. Although this was a small pilot, it provided tentative evidence that social workers can use e-learning to develop evidence-based practice skills.     

Second‐order Accurate Confidence Regions Based on Members of the Generalized Power Divergence Family

Recently, a technique based on pseudo‐observations has been proposed to tackle the so‐called convex hull problem for the empirical likelihood statistic. The resulting adjusted empirical likelihood also achieves the high‐order precision of the Bartlett correction. Nevertheless, the technique induces an upper bound on the resulting statistic that may lead, in certain circumstances, to worthless confidence regions equal to the whole parameter space. In this paper, we show that suitable pseudo‐observations can be deployed to make each element of the generalized power divergence family Bartlett‐correctable and released from the convex hull problem. Our approach is conceived to achieve this goal by means of two distinct sets of pseudo‐observations with different tasks. An important effect of our formulation is to provide a solution that permits to overcome the problem of the upper bound. The proposal, which effectiveness is confirmed by simulation results, gives back attractiveness to a broad class of statistics that potentially contains good alternatives to the empirical likelihood.     

Diverging patterns of interaction around news on social media: insularity and partisanship during the 2018 Italian election campaign

ABSTRACT

The paper considers how social media ecologies are affecting partisan engagement around political news and online attention economies by investigating the case of the 2018 Italian general election. By analyzing Twitter and Facebook interactions around political news in the lead-up to the election, we shed light on levels of insularity characterizing sources preferred by different partisan communities and investigate how specific patterns of active attention emerge around different sources and around stories proposing different framing of specific political actors. Our findings indicate that, on Twitter, sources mainly shared by supporters of populist parties (the Five Star Movement and the League) are characterized by higher levels of insularity compared to those shared by supporters of other parties. We also find that, on Facebook, news items published by highly insular sources receive a higher number of shares per comment. Finally, our analyses show that news presenting a positive framing of the Five Star Movement – the unique ‘cyber party’ in the system – receives a higher number of shares per comment compared to items presenting the Movement in a negative light, while the opposite is true for stories on all other political parties.     

Immigrants’ Children’s Transition to Secondary School in Italy

Choosing a secondary school represents an important step in the lives of students in Italy, in that it has a strong bearing on their ultimate educational achievement and labor force trajectory. In this article, we analyze the effect of generational status and length of residence on the transition to secondary school among immigrants living in Italy. Using data from the ITAGEN2 follow‐up, we analyze scholastic results from the middle school final exam and the choice of secondary school among the adolescents in Italy. Children of immigrants are more likely to have inferior outcomes on the middle school exam and to enroll in vocational and polytechnic schools. Our multivariate results indicate that, after controlling for the family’s human capital and other key background factors, immigrant students show greater propensity to choose a vocational path. Differences between immigrants and natives in secondary school tracks are also manifested when previous scholastic results are taken into account.     

Employment with Alternative Incentive Schemes when Effort is Not Verifiable

Abstract. This paper compares macroeconomic results related to efficiency wages, contracts with bonus and tournaments in a framework with unverifiable effort. When effort is fully observable, both contracts with bonus and tournaments, unlike efficiency wages, solve the incentive problem without generating involuntary unemployment. Only tournaments, however, allow attainment of the Pareto optimal employment level. If effort is not fully observable, previous results must, to some extent, be reconsidered. Contracts with bonus also produce involuntary unemployment, while tournaments, in addition to continuing to produce a higher level of employment, generate involuntary unemployment only if a shirker who is not caught has some probability of winning.     

Lessons learned from Toulouse and Buncefield disasters: from risk analysis failures to the identification of atypical scenarios through a better knowledge management

The recent occurrence of severe major accidents has brought to light flaws and limitations of hazard identification (HAZID) processes performed for safety reports, as in the accidents at Toulouse (France) and Buncefield (UK), where the accident scenarios that occurred were not captured by HAZID techniques. This study focuses on this type of atypical accident scenario deviating from normal expectations. The main purpose is to analyze the examples of atypical accidents mentioned and to attempt to identify them through the application of a well-known methodology such as the bow-tie analysis. To these aims, the concept of atypical event is accurately defined. Early warnings, causes, consequences, and occurrence mechanisms of the specific events are widely studied and general failures of risk assessment, management, and governance isolated. These activities contribute to outline a set of targeted recommendations, addressing transversal common deficiencies and also demonstrating how a better management of knowledge from the study of past events can support future risk assessment processes in the identification of atypical accident scenarios. Thus, a new methodology is not suggested; rather, a specific approach coordinating a more effective use of experience and available information is described, to suggest that lessons to be learned from past accidents can be effectively translated into actions of prevention.     

Maximum likelihood estimation of correlation between maximal oxygen consumption and the 6-min walk test in patients with chronic heart failure

Maximal oxygen consumption (VO₂max) is the standard measurement used to quantify cardiovascular functional capacity and aerobic fitness. Unfortunately, it is a costly, impractical and labour-intensive measure to obtain. The 6-min walk test (6MWT) also assesses cardiopulmonary function, but in contrast to the VO₂max test, it is inexpensive and can be performed almost anywhere. Various medical studies have addressed the correlation between VO₂max and 6MWT in patients with chronic heart failure. Of particular interest, from a medical point of view, is the conditional correlation between the two measures given the individual's height, weight, age and gender. In this paper, we have calculated the maximum likelihood estimate of the conditional correlation in patients with chronic heart failure under the assumption of skew normality. Data were recorded from 98 patients in the Operative Unit of Thoracic Surgery in Bari, Italy. The estimated conditional correlation was found to be much smaller than estimated marginal correlations reported in the medical literature.