Alternative Question Forms for Attitude Scale Questions in Telephone Interviews

The absence of visual aids in telephone interviews has led investigatorsto seek methods for asking questions which are commonly accompaniedby aids in personal interviews. This study experimentally comparedtwo approaches to asking seven-point scale attitude questionsin a national (N = 4,300) telephone health survey. A randomhalf-sample received the attitude questions as single-step numericalselection tasks. The questions were administered to the otherhalf-sample in two stages, the first asking for a general verbalstatement of attitude and the second asking for a more detailedspecification. The two question forms produced comparable resultsin univariate distributions. Items administered with the one-stepform showed slightly higher intercorrelations. This study representsone step in the process of empirically testing data collectionprocedures which have been deemed necessary in the rich folkloreof survey research. Overall, the results show more comparabilitythan might be anticipated, given the multiple differences betweenthe forms.     

Parental Participation in Child Protection Case Conferences: The Social Worker's View

Correspondence to Dr Ann Macaskill, Health Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University, 36 Collegiate Crescent, Sheffield S10 2BP Summary This article reports the findings of a questionnaire surveyof 118 local authority social workers' attitudes towards parentalparticipation in child protection case conferences. Argumentsfrom the professional literature both in favour of and againstparental participation were presented. Overall social workerswere found to be largely supportive of parental participationalthough aware of the potential problems. Other professionalgroups involved in case conferences were perceived as beingless enthusiastic about parental participation. The implicationsof these findings are discussed and some training needs identified.     

Deprivation and Drug Addiction: A Study of a Vulnerable Sub-group

Summary The results of this survey confirm those of an earlier one,5and suggest that a young person who both uses illicit drugsand has a history of court findings, either for delinquencyor for 'being in need of care and protection', should be lookedupon as at considerable risk for future progression to narcoticuse. This progression is not simply a correlate of delinquencyor of remand home admission, as only one out of 100 controladmissions was discovered to have subsequently used narcotics.Moreover, this risk is not borne equally by all drug takersas, even on admission, there were significant mean differencesbetween the progressor and non-narcotic groups. The items whichwere most effective in distinguishing the three groups werethose relating to prior personality abnormality, prior psychiatricreferral and difficulty in relating to their peers and to adultsevidenced in their school and work reports. These differencesare thus of prognostic importance and may aid the identificationat an early stage of those soft-drug takers who are most vulnerableto the dangers of subsequent progression to narcotic and intravenousdrugs     

Probabilistic Insurance

Probabilistic insurance is an insurance policy involving a small probability that the consumer will not be reimbursed. Survey data suggest that people dislike probabilistic insurance and demand more than a 20% reduction in the premium to compensate for a 1% default risk. While these preferences are intuitively appealing they are difficult to reconcile with expected utility theory. Under highly plausible assumptions about the utility function, willingness to pay for probabilistic insurance should be very close to willingness to pay for standard insurance less the default risk. However, the reluctance to buy probabilistic insurance is predicted by the weighting function of prospect theory. This finding highlights the potential role of the weighting function to explain insurance.     

A Class of Convolution‐Based Models for Spatio‐Temporal Processes with Non‐Separable Covariance Structure

Abstract. In this article, we propose a new parametric family of models for real‐valued spatio‐temporal stochastic processes S ( x , t ) and show how low‐rank approximations can be used to overcome the computational problems that arise in fitting the proposed class of models to large datasets. Separable covariance models, in which the spatio‐temporal covariance function of S ( x , t ) factorizes into a product of purely spatial and purely temporal functions, are often used as a convenient working assumption but are too inflexible to cover the range of covariance structures encountered in applications. We define positive and negative non‐separability and show that in our proposed family we can capture positive, zero and negative non‐separability by varying the value of a single parameter.     

Reception Centres: an Index of Social Service Inadequacy

Summary This article examines reception centres, evaluates the adversecriticism there has been of them and suggests that it has divertedattention from the more important issue that the continued existenceand changed role of reception centres indicates the inadequacyof other health and social services