The Physical Abuse of Adolescents

The literature on adolescent abuse suggests that it may differ from child abuse. Issues raised in the literature focus on severity, provoking behavior by the adolescents, and community norms for discipline as crucial issues. There are several models of the dynamics of adolescent abuse in the literature. These issues and theoretical models are examined by reviewing twenty-five cases of adolescent abuse from a public welfare office in a large midwestern city. Implications of the findings for reporting injuries and planning interventions are discussed.     

The sexual abuse questionnaire: a preliminary examination of a time and cost efficient method in evaluating the presence of childhood sexual abuse in adult patients

This paper provides the results of two studies designed to evaluate a newly constructed self-report instrument, the Sexual Abuse Questionnaire (SAQ). The SAQ was designed as a brief screening device to aid in the identification of a childhood sexual abuse history. A "unique" feature of the SAQ is the inclusion of a number of non-face valid questions derived from clinical experience. Both studies used an undergraduate population of self-reported abused and non-abused participants. Based upon the combined results of the two studies, the final version of the SAQ was developed, which is comprised of 45 items that manifest good test-retest reliability, internal consistency, and convergent and discriminative validity. The SAQ can discriminate between abused and non-abused male and female participants.     

No child left behind

The No Child Left Behind Act (U.S. Department of Education 2002 U.S. Department Of Education 2002 No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (PL 107–110) Washington D.C. U.S. Department of Education http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html, (accessed 1 July 2004)  [Google Scholar]) has inadvertently engendered literacy programs that are often inappropriate or incompatible with young children's development. It overlooks children's need to access their many intelligences, especially those that enable them to negotiate between and among symbol systems. Inherent in its focus on “scientifically based research to inform their classroom” (Center on Education Policy 2004 Center On Education Policy 2004 Title I funds: Who's gaining, who's losing & why by T. W. Fagan & N. L. Kober Washington D.C. Center on Education Policy  [Google Scholar], 7), is an emphasis on “a standardized, explicit, and systematic approach to teaching reading to students at risk of reading failure” (Manzo 2004 Manzo, KK. 2004, 4 February. Reading programs bear similarities across states. Education Week, 1: 13 [Google Scholar]). Yet, numerous theorists recommend that young learners, especially those that are challenged due to learning disabilities, or cultural or economic diversity, can learn best by using alternative symbol systems that match their “stronger intelligences.” Premier among these “alternative symbol systems” are the arts. This article addresses the issues associated with No Child Left Behind Act and the educational implications of its repudiation of the arts in the literacy development of young learners.     

SOCIAL INCENTIVES AND VOTER TURNOUT: EVIDENCE FROM THE SWISS MAIL BALLOT SYSTEM

This paper uses a natural experiment to document the impact of social pressure on voting behavior. The main hypothesis is that social pressure creates incentives to vote for the purpose of being seen at the voting act. This incentive is particularly high in small and close‐knit communities. Empirically, I analyze the effect of postal voting on voter participation in Switzerland. Optional postal voting decreased the voting costs, but simultaneously removed the social pressure to vote. In spite of the large reduction in voting costs, the effect on aggregate turnout was small. However, voter participation was more negatively affected in the smaller communities. This lends support to the view that social incentives played a role for certain people's voting decisions. (JEL: H0, Z13)     

Worksite e-mail health promotion trial: Early lessons

In preparation for an electronic mail (e-mail) and web-based health promotion intervention across multiple worksites, secure, regulatory-compliant, user-friendly e-mail and Internet applications were used to recruit potential participants across worksites, to enroll participants, and to collect baseline health assessment data. Specific hardware and software information technology environments were required of the 19 participating worksites. Sequential e-mails introduced the study and invited participation. Twenty-four percent of all employees (1106 of approximately 4600) provided consent. E-mail delivered a web link for the baseline study assessment, and reminder e-mails were sent to prompt completion. Of those who consented, 888 (80%) completed baseline health and behavior data surveys. An HTML-native web survey software was more stable across computing environments. Using e-mail and web assessment, this research recruited, enrolled, and collected data from more than 850 participants. Technical and operational challenges emerged at each step. Solutions and recommendations are discussed. Overall, this experience suggests that the use of e-mail and web software can facilitate recruitment, enrollment, and data acquisition through direct contact with study participants. This experience yields a series of lessons learned for using e-mail and the Internet to support multi-site trials.     

Predictors of retention in an alcohol, tobacco, and other drug prevention study

This article explored retention patterns, as well as factors that predicted these patterns, in the evaluation of a relationship-based substance abuse prevention intervention study that targeted inner-city African American youth. A total of 851 contacts were made to retain 82% (n = 104) of the baseline sample (N = 127) in the evaluation. Results from multinomial regression analyses indicated that participants who were retained in the evaluation were more likely to perceive alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use as less risky and were more likely to report higher levels of family supervision than were evaluation attrits. Those who were easy to retain reported lower family conflict and fewer family relocations during the past year than those who were difficult to retain. Implications of these findings for developing retention strategies, as well as future research, are discussed.     

A case of mistaken identity? Debating the dilemmas of street-level bureaucracy with Musil et al.

Lipsky's Street-level Bureaucracy (Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1980 Lipsky, M. 1980. Street-level Bureaucracy: The Dilemmas of Individuals in Public Service, New York: Russell Sage Foundation.  [Google Scholar]) has exerted a strong influence on the study of public service organisations. There has been a growing interest in using this perspective to understand the organisational context of social work and Musil et al.'s article in the EJSW (2004, ‘Do social workers avoid the dilemmas of work with clients?’, European Journal of Social Work, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 305–319) reflects this interest. Musil et al. argue that it is possible to identify two forms of practitioner response to the constraints of street-level bureaucracies: adapting working practices in ways that disadvantage service users or challenging working conditions in order to achieve more professionally acceptable practice. Their contribution to the debate is helpful, particularly with regard to their identification of responses by practitioners that seek to advance the interests of service users. However, we view their approach as constrained by lack of consideration of the construction of social work roles within particular street-level bureaucracies. We suggest that Lipsky's work should be approached as a tentative analytic framework, rather than as a fixed model and we argue that a productive approach to research on social workers as street-level bureaucrats is conjunctural analysis. Such analysis examines the contexts, circumstances and statuses of practitioners and how these factors shape the specific forms of street-level practice that operate in particular organisational settings. We illustrate this in our discussion of the factors that are likely to have had a bearing on the two practice settings used as case studies by Musil et al.     

Tests of association between survival time and a continuous covariate

Proportional hazards model(Cox, 1972) is reviewed for the case of grouped data with one continuously measured covariate. This leads to a logit-rank procedure for tied data which is reduced to the test proposed by O’Brien(1978) and studied by O’Quigley and Prentice(1991) in the absence of ties. The proposed test is then applied to a special ranking method in order to study non-monotonic associations.     

Hellinger distance as a penalized log likelihood

The present paper studies the minimum Hellinger distance estimator by recasting it as the maximum likelihood estimator in a data driven modification of the model density. In the process, the Hellinger distance itself is expressed as a penalized log likelihood function. The penalty is the sum of the model probabilities over the non-observed values of the sample space. A comparison of the modified model density with the original data provides insights into the robustness of the minimum Hellinger distance estimator. Adjustments of the amount of penalty leads to a class of minimum penalized Hellinger distance estimators, some members of which perform substantially better than the minimum Hellinger distance estimator at the model for small samples, without compromising the robustness properties of the latter.