Issues in Career Decision Making for Workers With Developmental Disabilities

Persons with developmental disabilities are not usually given the opportunity to make meaningful choices concerning career options. There are, however, five types of partial involvement in career decision making they may experience. Counselors have considered client expressions of occupational preferences prior to deciding on appropriate vocational goals, have merely asked workers to sign a prepared rehabilitation plan, or—at the highest level of client participation—have involved workers and their families in team planning meetings. Several recommendations for both systemic and personal interventions to facilitate career decision-making by workers with developmental disabilities are discussed.     

Public Opinion, Demonstrations,and the Passage of Antidiscrimination Legislation

This paper considers the relationship of public opinion anddemonstrations to the passage of federal civil rights legislationsince World1 War II. Congress passed such legislation when substantialmajorities of the population favored equal rights and the proportionfavoring equal rights was clearly increasing. The evidence isconsistent with the notionthat civil rights demonstrations playeda significant role in the passage of the legislation. Both demonstrationsandchanges in public opinion appear to have been necessary componentsof the drive to provoke congressional action.     

THE DECLINE OF OVER-TIME COMPARABILITY IN THE NATIONAL ELECTION STUDIES

The National Election Studies conducted by the University ofMichigan Survey Research Center and Center for Political Studiesprovide the best data set for studying the political attitudesand behavior of the American electorate. The American NationalElection Studies Data Sourcebook, which complies NES surveyresults between 1952 and 1978, demonstrates the extent to whichthese surveys facilitate over-time analysis. This article usesthe Sourcebook as a baseline and shows that there has been asubstantial decline in the over-time comparability of itemsmeasuring public policy preferences and of items measuring supportfor the political system.     

THE EFFECT OF FISCAL POLICY ON THE SHORT-RUN RELATION BETWEEN NOMINAL INTEREST RATES AND INFLATION

This paper presents a simple empirical model of the relation between the inflation rate and the nominal interest rate. We show that previous results found in the literature may be attributed to specification error and that there are natural explanations for the observed signs of previous Fisher equation estimates. Our results show that fiscal policy shocks may generate short run negative correlations between changes in inflation and changes in the nominal interest rates. These results illustrate the difficulty in discussing the relation between inflation and nominal interest rates without conditioning the analysis with specific assumptions on the course of the economy.     

CORPORATE PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH: CHAMPIONS, LEADERS, AND LAGGARDS

This paper examines the relative productivity growth performance of a sample of large UK firms between 1986 and 1995. We find that superior productivity growth, however measured, is not persistent—firms with high productivity growth rates relative to (say) the average in 1 yr are as likely as not to display below-average performance in the following year. Studying the determinants of the length of time for which firms outperform their peers, we find that innovative firms carrying low debt who are relatively free from financial distress are likely to display whatever persistently superior performance we observe in the data. ( JEL D24, O33, O4)     

Pioneering the life story method

This autoethnography describes how a Korean woman made a decision to be a qualitative researcher, what she has confronted in a positivistic culture, and how she has survived as a qualitative researcher. The author, using self-reflection, raises issues of professional development, academic politics, and coping strategies for qualitative researchers.     

Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Limited Reduction in Electronic Gaming Machine Availability on Perceived Gambling Behaviour and Objective Expenditure

In Australia, there is evidence to suggest that there is a positive association between the geographical accessibility of electronic gaming machines (EGMs) and the frequency and intensity of gambling in local areas. Evidence such as this has been used to introduce regulatory policies to reduce the geographical accessibility of EGMs through the reduction of gaming machine numbers in venues. The aim of this paper was to describe the process involved in the 15 per cent reduction in gaming machine numbers in the state of South Australia and the apparent effects on gaming revenue and gambling behaviours. Detailed analysis of objective EGM data as well as survey-based interviews with 400 regular EGM players provided only limited evidence of behavioural changes or significant reductions in gaming revenue. The paper describes the nature of industry responses to circumvent the effects of the reduction in machine numbers and the implications of these findings for future regulatory policies relating to EGM gambling.     

THE SMALL WORLD OF POLITICS or,SEEKING ELITES FROM THE BOTTOM UP*

Les relations interpersonnelles jouent un rôle important en politique. En guise d'exploration et dans le but de formuler des hypothèses sur les structures de relations et la politique, nous avons établi la distance sociale entre certains électeurs et leurs représentants à Ottawa et nous avons examiné plusieurs variables qui y étaient possiblement reliées. La location stratégique d'une personne dans un réseau de relations dépend principalement de son statut socioéconomique, surtout des possibilités que lui offre sa profession d'étendre son réseau de contacts. Une position plus ou moins proche de la décision politique peut peut-être expliquer une bonne partie du lien entre le statut socioéconomique et les perceptions ou activités qui y sont reliées. Nous avons trouvé des traces de liens possibles entre la proximité aux représentants et l'activité politique du répondant, sa perception de la susceptibilité du gouvernement à réagir, de son efficacité, et de l'importance des contacts pour obtenir un emploi. Plusieurs hypothèses plus spécifiques sont suggérées. Interpersonal relationships play an important part in politics. In order to explore and develop hypotheses about relational structures and politics, we determined the social distance between some constituents and their representatives in Ottawa and examined several possibly related variables. We argue that the extent to which a person is strategically located in a network of relationships stems primarily from his socioeconomic status (SES), especially from his occupational opportunities to make wide contacts, and that his location close to or not close to political decision may account for much of the link between SES and perceptions or activities correlated with it. We found traces of possible ties between closeness to representatives and the respondent's political activity, perception of government responsiveness, efficacy, and perception of importance of contacts in getting jobs. Several more detailed hypotheses were suggested.