Independent Living: gender, violence and the threat of violence

In what ways is independent living for young adults with disabilities compromised by violence and its threat? A qualitative study of 42 young adults with severe physical disabilities explored their perceptions and concerns about independent living, access to services and the meeting of needs. Young women especially experienced difficulties about leaving home, because of their own and their parents' fears about vulnerability; some who did leave home experienced highly restricted social lives because of anxiety about neighbourhood violence. Few had established partnerships, but violence and sexual abuse from partners emerged as an issue for which there is little policy. Control and abuse within caring relationships are serious issues for those who need personal care. Violence and lack of protection may undermine independent living, especially for women.     

New Zealand children in the 1990s: beneficiaries of New Right economic policy?

This paper questions the extent to which New Zealand children have benefited from New Right economic policies and argues that the invisibility of children, the role of public concern about children and the social construction of childhood are factors which have facilitated implementation of these changes. Attention is drawn to the ways in which the personal and the political spheres intersect in children's lives. Rather than focusing on either the micro level of intervention in the lives of individual children or the macro level of societal change it is argued that the dualism itself must be transcended in order to move forward from the current position. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bayesian measures of model complexity and fit

Summary. We consider the problem of comparing complex hierarchical models in which the number of parameters is not clearly defined. Using an information theoretic argument we derive a measure p _D for the effective number of parameters in a model as the difference between the posterior mean of the deviance and the deviance at the posterior means of the parameters of interest. In general p _D approximately corresponds to the trace of the product of Fisher's information and the posterior covariance, which in normal models is the trace of the 'hat' matrix projecting observations onto fitted values. Its properties in exponential families are explored. The posterior mean deviance is suggested as a Bayesian measure of fit or adequacy, and the contributions of individual observations to the fit and complexity can give rise to a diagnostic plot of deviance residuals against leverages. Adding p _D to the posterior mean deviance gives a deviance information criterion for comparing models, which is related to other information criteria and has an approximate decision theoretic justification. The procedure is illustrated in some examples, and comparisons are drawn with alternative Bayesian and classical proposals. Throughout it is emphasized that the quantities required are trivial to compute in a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis.     

The contribution of HIV to fertility decline in rural Zimbabwe, 1985-2000

HIV-related sub-fertility has been reported for those populations in sub-Saharan Africa in which contraceptive use is low. We use data from a retrospective survey in rural Zimbabwe and multivariate logistic regression models to show that recent birth rates and current pregnancy rates are also lower among HIV-positive women than among HIV-negative women in those African populations where contraceptive use is high. The fertility reduction is smaller than where contraceptive use is low because age at first sexual intercourse is later and birth rates at older ages are already low. Nevertheless, total fertility is approximately 8.5 per cent lower and HIV-associated sub-fertility may account for as much as one-quarter of fertility decline in Zimbabwe since the late 1980s. Mechanisms for HIV-associated sub-fertility in rural Zimbabwe include more frequent widowhood and divorce, reduced coital frequency, increased amenorrhoea, and possibly, pelvic inflammatory disease. Miscarriage appears to be a less important factor than elsewhere possibly because syphilis is rare.     

Disaggregate-level estimates of indebtedness in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India: an application of small-area estimation technique

The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) surveys are the main source of official statistics in India, and generate a range of invaluable data at the macro level (e.g. state and national levels). However, the NSSO data cannot be used directly to produce reliable estimates at the micro level (e.g. district or further disaggregate level) due to small sample sizes. There is a rapidly growing demand of such micro-level statistics in India, as the country is moving from centralized to more decentralized planning system. In this article, we employ small-area estimation (SAE) techniques to derive model-based estimates of the proportion of indebted households at district or at other small-area levels in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India by linking data from the Debt–Investment Survey 2002–2003 of NSSO and the Population Census 2001 and the Agriculture Census 2003. Our results show that the model-based estimates are precise and representative. For many small areas, it is even not possible to produce estimates using sample data alone. The model-based estimates generated using SAE are still reliable for such areas. The estimates are expected to provide invaluable information to policy analysts and decision-makers.     

‘Like walking on eggshells’: service user views and expectations of the child protection system

This paper reports on a study of service users' views on Irish child protection services. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 67 service users, including young people between 13 and 23. The findings showed that despite refocusing and public service management reforms, service users still experience involvement with the services as intimidating and stressful and while they acknowledged opportunities to participate in the child protection process, they found the experience to be very difficult. Their definition of ‘needs’ was somewhat at odds with that suggested in official documentation, and they viewed the execution of a child protection plan more as a coercive requirement to comply with ‘tasks’ set by workers than a conjoint effort to enhance their children's welfare. As in previous studies, the data showed how the development of good relationships between workers and service users could compensate for the harsher aspects of involvement with child protection. In addition, this study demonstrated a high level of discernment on the part of service users, highlighting their expectation of quality standards in respect of courtesy, respect, accountability, transparency and practitioner expertise.     

Implementing Consumer Choice in Long‐term Care: The Impact of Individual Budgets on Social Care Providers in England

In common with many advanced welfare states, England has increasingly relied on consumerist principles to deliver both greater quality and improved efficiency in the long‐term care system. The Individual Budget (IB) pilots marked the next step in this process, through a new system of funding whereby greater control of resources is given to service users, in lieu of direct in‐kind care provision. IBs have the potential to transform the market for care services as well as the relationships between key stakeholders within it. Purchasing will increasingly be shaped by the demands of IB holders, with providers expected to deliver a wider range of personalized services. What will this mean for providers, and what can they do to prepare for these changes? These questions are relevant not just in England but in many other countries adopting similar mechanisms for devolving control over the design, delivery and funding of care to the end‐user. The article explores the early impact of IBs on providers' services, on their workforces, and on the administrative implications for providers of managing IBs. The study finds that providers were positive about the opportunities for better‐quality services that IBs can bring about. However, participants highlighted a number of obstacles to their effectiveness, and reported a range of potentially adverse administrative and workforce consequences which have the potential to jeopardize the consumerist policy objectives of increased choice and efficiency.     

Relabelling in Bayesian mixture models by pivotal units

Label switching is a well-known and fundamental problem in Bayesian estimation of finite mixture models. It arises when exploring complex posterior distributions by Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, because the likelihood of the model is invariant to the relabelling of mixture components. If the MCMC sampler randomly switches labels, then it is unsuitable for exploring the posterior distributions for component-related parameters. In this paper, a new procedure based on the post-MCMC relabelling of the chains is proposed. The main idea of the method is to perform a clustering technique on the similarity matrix, obtained through the MCMC sample, whose elements are the probabilities that any two units in the observed sample are drawn from the same component. Although it cannot be generalized to any situation, it may be handy in many applications because of its simplicity and very low computational burden.     

Finite mixtures of quantile and M-quantile regression models

In this paper we define a finite mixture of quantile and M-quantile regression models for heterogeneous and /or for dependent/clustered data. Components of the finite mixture represent clusters of individuals with homogeneous values of model parameters. For its flexibility and ease of estimation, the proposed approaches can be extended to random coefficients with a higher dimension than the simple random intercept case. Estimation of model parameters is obtained through maximum likelihood, by implementing an EM-type algorithm. The standard error estimates for model parameters are obtained using the inverse of the observed information matrix, derived through the Oakes (J R Stat Soc Ser B 61:479–482, 1999) formula in the M-quantile setting, and through nonparametric bootstrap in the quantile case. We present a large scale simulation study to analyse the practical behaviour of the proposed model and to evaluate the empirical performance of the proposed standard error estimates for model parameters. We considered a variety of empirical settings in both the random intercept and the random coefficient case. The proposed modelling approaches are also applied to two well-known datasets which give further insights on their empirical behaviour.     

Personality analysis of a swingers' club

Thirty swingers (16 females, 14 males) from a private metropolitan swinging club volunteered to take the MMPI. One half of the 30 had significant elevations on the clinical and/or validity scales, most frequently on the 9 scale (Hypomania). One third of the sample with normal MMPI scale elevations had significant elevations on validity scales that indicate defensiveness in responding. Analysis of a selected group of special scales of the MMPI indicated that a significant minority of the subjects 1) may be seriously emotionally disturbed, 2) may be substance abusers, or 3) may have serious sexual problems. The MMPI records suggest further that the absence of significantly elevated clinical scales among the normal subgroup may have been a function of defensiveness. On the other hand, most of the subgroup evidencing psychopathology possess ego resources sufficient to enable them to cope with emotional problems.A paper based primarily on the clinical scale analysis was read by the senior author at the meeting of the Society for Sex Therapy and Research, Charleston, SC, 1982. A paper based primarily on the special scale and critical item analyses was read by the junior author at the Eastern Regional meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, Philadelphia, PA, 1982. The authors are grateful for the cooperation of Dr. Robert L. McGinley in the collection of the data of this report. Address requests for reprints to: Eugene E. Levitt, Ph.D., Department of Psychiatry, Indiana University School of Medicine, 791 Union Drive, Indianapolis IN 46223.