Hybrid Strategies: Allocating Involvement in the Digital Age

An important trait of mobile phones is their capacity to superimpose multiple social interactions in time and space. Little research examines how individuals choose between face‐to‐face and digitally mediated interactions in specific social contexts. Drawing upon focus group interviews with a diverse sample of university students in the United States, we argue that, contrary to a perspective that is popular in theory and journalistic commentary, mobile phone users do not experience the digital and the face‐to‐face as distinct realms. In deciding where to direct their attention, users enmesh the distant and the present, making moves that are expressive and strategic in their own right that reveal the interest, intimacy and urgency that users place in multiple, coinciding social involvements.     

Implementing Looking After Children in Australia

Five of the Australian States and Territories are involved in projects using the Looking After Children materials. Few changes have been required for cultural reasons: initial fears of increasing workloads have been outweighed by positive responses from practitioners, carers and young people.     

Reviving Hayek’s Dream

This short piece suggests that the roots of the successful Brexit vote can be found in the free market purity that was implicit within the ideals behind Thatcherism. Whilst the rhetoric of populist and British (or in many parts English) nationalism were utilised in order to win support, the ideological driving force implicit within many Brexit figureheads rested in the belief that the EU watered down their visions of a harder neoliberal reality. Yet, by stimulating right-wing reactionary forces, they may have created more than they bargained for. I concur with Karl Polanyi that free market liberalism tends to generate the forces of its own demise.     

An approximation to percentiles of a variable of the bivariate normal distribution when the other variable is truncated,with applications

A Cornish-Fisher expansion is used to approximate the per-centiles of a variable of the bivariate normal distribution when the other variable is truncated. The expression is in terms of the bivariate cumulants of a singly truncated bivariate normal distribution. The percentiles are useful in the problem of personnel selection where we use a screening variable to screen applicants for employment and a correlated performance variable to screen employees for rehiring. This paper provides a bivariate cumulants table for determining the cutoff score of the performance variable. The following two problems are also con¬sidered: (1) determine the proportion of applicants who would have been successful had no screening been applied, and (2) determine the proportion of individuals being rejected byscreening who would have been successful had they been hired, The variable that is used to measure job performance and the variable that measures the outcome of an aptitude test are assumed to be jointly normally distributed with correlation ρ     

‘A Place of Our Own'? Teenage Mothers’ Views on Housing Needs and Support Models

Since 2003, government policy has required local authorities to provide support when they house lone teenage parents seeking accommodation. This qualitative study addresses young mothers’ routes into housing need and their experiences of housing access and support, drawing on interview and focus group data collected in 2003. The findings emphasise mothers’ preferences for forms of support which facilitate moves towards increased choice and independence. Reinforcing messages from other research, these findings also show a gap between concepts of ‘support’ embodied in government policy and those which inform practice, within agencies and among young people. © 2006 The Author(s). Journal compilation Copyright © 2006 National Children's Bureau.     

Enrollment management and strategic planning: Resolving a classic tension in higher education

Enrollment management in higher education is an important tool to operationalize strategic planning. The ever present danger, however, is that short-term concerns will dominate enrollment management decisions and in turn postpone attainment of strategic planning objectives. This article describes three models of enrollment management and explains how each is supposed to be incorporated into strategic planning. It uses classical growth theory from economics to explicate the dilemma of long-run and short-run objectives in conflict and develops an integrated model for strategic planning and enrollment management. Finally, some ways in which this analysis might apply to other nonprofit institutions are suggested.     

An analysis of the type I error in the one sample Student t-test

In the one-sample Student t-test, the occurrence of a type-I error is dependent on the estimates of the mean and standard deviation for a fixed sample size, n. The statistic can achieve significance either by the sample mean being too different from the hypothesized mean or by the sample standard deviation being too small. The critical region is partitioned to determine the characteristics of samples in the critical region, assuming the null hypothesis is true. As might be conjectured from the use of the t-statistic, mis-estimation of the mean is shown to be the predominant characteristic of samples in the critical region for sample sizes larger than 20 and significance level greater than 0.01. Underestimation of the variance, unless accompanied by a misestimation of the mean, is a far less frequent characteristic of critical region samples.