Developmental outcomes after five years for foster children returned home, remaining in care, or adopted

A substantial proportion of children who enter foster care in the US are infants or toddlers and will exit from foster care before they have been in care for long, either returning home or to adoption. These first years of involvement may predict a significant amount about children's longer term development so understanding developmental outcomes after five years is valuable to understanding if child welfare services (CWS) are serving the intention of promoting the well-being of children. A subsample of 353 infants (less than 13 months of age when investigated by CWS) and subsequently placed into foster care were selected from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being. After 66 months, these infants had been reunified, adopted, or were still in foster care. Bivariate comparisons were completed. Statistical controls for maltreatment type and severity, demographic traits, and current caregiver education were implemented to help clarify the role of terminal child welfare placement, current caregiver behaviors, and household income, on eight linear regression models of developmental outcomes. Results support the longstanding tenet of child welfare services policy that remaining in foster care is less developmentally advantageous than having a more permanent arrangement of return home or adoption.     

Growth in medical director numbers continues.

A recent survey shows that nearly two-thirds of all hospitals have or are considering a medical director position. Comparative data show that the average bed size of hospitals with a medical director continues to decline as more and more institutions add the position. The reasons for the growth, according to the survey, are the increasing demands of administering a medical staff and responding to regulatory agencies.     

Whose Project is it Anyway? Sharing and shaping the research and development agenda

The NHS and Community Care Act 1990 (NHSCCA) requires that local authorities should consult with service users in their review and planning of services. This requirement is open to various levels of interpretation. The exercise becomes more complex when planning and review are based on a funded research project, in which the voice of users can easily be lost or their participation only nominal. This article examines some of the key issues and dilemmas in partnership research, through critical evaluation of a research project in which the authors were involved. Paradoxically, it is issues of power, control, expertise, authority and accountability which emerge as recurrent themes in examination of the practice of partnership.     

SOME ISSUES ARISING FROM THE ANALYSIS OF 2×2 CONTINGENCY TABLES

We review the 40 year old controversy over the correct analysis of 2×2 tables. It is argued that conditioning on all marginal totals is appropriate by examining the likelihood based on these margins and secondly by comparing conditional and unconditional evaluations of certain specific outcomes. Several foundational issues which naturally arise are also discussed.     

ANCILLARIES SUFFICIENT FOR THE SAMPLE SIZE1

The process of recovery of information proceeds by conditioning on ancillaries which are part of the minimal sufficient statistic (MSS), so-called internal ancillaries. This is motivated by the notion that ancillaries function as precision indices. In some cases the ancillary can itself replace the sample size entirely in the model. It is decided that such ancillaries must be conditioned on if one of the sufficiency or conditionality principles is not to be violated.     

Tests for noninferiority trials with binomial endpoints: A guide to modern and quasi‐exact methods for biomedical researchers

Applied statisticians and pharmaceutical researchers are frequently involved in the design and analysis of clinical trials where at least one of the outcomes is binary. Treatments are judged by the probability of a positive binary response. A typical example is the noninferiority trial, where it is tested whether a new experimental treatment is practically not inferior to an active comparator with a prespecified margin δ. Except for the special case of δ = 0, no exact conditional test is available although approximate conditional methods (also called second‐order methods) can be applied. However, in some situations, the approximation can be poor and the logical argument for approximate conditioning is not compelling. The alternative is to consider an unconditional approach. Standard methods like the pooled z‐test are already unconditional although approximate. In this article, we review and illustrate unconditional methods with a heavy emphasis on modern methods that can deliver exact, or near exact, results. For noninferiority trials based on either rate difference or rate ratio, our recommendation is to use the so‐called E‐procedure, based on either the score or likelihood ratio statistic. This test is effectively exact, computationally efficient, and respects monotonicity constraints in practice. We support our assertions with a numerical study, and we illustrate the concepts developed in theory with a clinical example in pulmonary oncology; R code to conduct all these analyses is available from the authors.     

Anti‐Americanism,Political Cartoons,and a Socio‐Geographic Imagination: An Invitation to Further Work*

This research note synopsizes previous studies to present future directions for the measurement of anti‐Americanism within the United States and comparatively. We explain new vectors in our research design and posit new hypotheses for future research. The note highlights the importance of cross‐national investigation of anti‐Americanism, and suggests some methodological considerations in that endeavor.     

Rear gunners and troubled privates: Wordplay in a dick joke competition1

A humorous competition called ‘The Adventures of Naked Man’ ran in a Wellington (New Zealand) newspaper from 1999 to 2000. The competition's protagonist is the sole naked person in a drawn setting where, because of some convenient object or body position, his penis is obscured from sight. Entrants to the competition submitted a caption to go with the drawn setting, the point being to make humour. Without explicit instruction, most entrants constructed some form of dick joke, the interesting questions being, just how, and with what variations? These questions are pursued by drawing on the full corpus of Naked Man settings and captions. Basic principles of conversation analysis, including some early work of Sacks on punning, are used to analyse the nature and popularity of the Naked Man competition. The article also offers some more speculative comments to do with gender and the organisation of language about sexuality.     

EXACT P‐VALUES FOR DISCRETE MODELS OBTAINED BY ESTIMATION AND MAXIMIZATION

In constructing exact tests from discrete data, one must deal with the possible dependence of the P‐value on nuisance parameter(s) ψ as well as the discreteness of the sample space. A classical but heavy‐handed approach is to maximize over ψ. We prove what has previously been understood informally, namely that maximization produces the unique and smallest possible P‐value subject to the ordering induced by the underlying test statistic and test validity. On the other hand, allowing for the worst case will be more attractive when the P‐value is less dependent on ψ. We investigate the extent to which estimating ψ under the null reduces this dependence. An approach somewhere between full maximization and estimation is partial maximization, with appropriate penalty, as introduced by Berger & Boos (1994, P values maximized over a confidence set for the nuisance parameter. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 89 , 1012–1016). It is argued that estimation followed by maximization is an attractive, but computationally more demanding, alternative to partial maximization. We illustrate the ideas on a range of low‐dimensional but important examples for which the alternative methods can be investigated completely numerically.     

The link between parenting approaches and health behavior: A systematic review

The familial home environment, where parenting takes place, plays an important role in the health behaviors that children and adolescents engage in and has implications on health and well-being in later life. Lifestyle-related behaviors predispose children and adolescents to the global burden of non-communicable and other lifestyle-related diseases. This review therefore examined and described previous studies looking at the associations between health behaviors and parenting approaches. It suggests that engagement in health behaviors, which promotes overall health and well-being, was associated with autonomy, supportive parenting, parental encouragement, behavior control, parental nurturance, warmth and responsiveness, and parental involvement. The review highlights the gap in literature focusing on the health behavior of children and adolescents as well as on parenting. In addition, the review also provides an overview of the continents where fewer studies have examined the presented associations. The findings presented also serve as a guide for program development and implementation to address the increase in non-communicable and other lifestyle-related diseases.