Influence of an Anonymous Stranger on a Routine Decision to Act or Not to Act: An Experiment in Conformity*

The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of law-adhering and law-violating contexts on subject-behavior in a potentially law-violating situation in which the probability of negative sanctions was slight. Observations were made on subjects who had to make a decision either to violate or to adhere to a “Don't-Walk’ signal at the intersection with sparse traffic. The three specific conditions included the control-condition in which no model was present and the experimental conditions in which an anonymous male stranger, the experimenter's confederate, acted either as a law-adhering model or as a law-violating model. The presence of a law-adhering model significantly increases the rate of pedestrian-adherence to a minor legal restriction on the part of both males and females. After the ceiling effects arising from the design of the experiment were factored out, the results showed that a law-violating model has greater influence on subject-behavior than the law-adhering model does. In both the law-adhering and the law-violatin contexts, the model influences the behavior of females slightly more than he does the behavior of males.     

Child welfare privatization: quantitative indicators and policy issues

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the development of safety, permanency, and child well-being indicators by using administrative data sets as well as by using these indicators as tools for evaluating Florida's Community-Based Care (CBC) initiative. Longitudinal data from 37 counties including 4 counties that implemented community-based care were examined in this study. The results of the study indicated that the overall performance of CBC counties is at least as good as the performance of their comparison run by the state counties. The findings that emerged from this study may provide important lessons for developing a performance measurement system in the child welfare field.     

Dying in jail: The phenomenon of adolescent suicide in correctional facilities

Adolescent suicide is increasing in the United States and the incidence of suicide gestures and attempts in juvenile correctional facilities is high. The attitudes of correctional staff toward adolescents and toward suicidal behavior may contribute to the increase. Suicide is often the outcome of a progression of problems that have isolated the adolescent from meaningful social relationships. Correctional staff must be aware of the phenomenon of adolescent suicide and be given training to deal with it effectively within the institution. Institutional staff have commonly seen suicide gestures or attempts as acting out behavior rather than a symptom of low self-esteem or inability to cope with institutional placement. This discussion examines the phenomenon of adolescent suicide and the impact the juvenile justice system has on its occurrence. It will also include an examination of interdisciplinary interventive strategies which can be used in an institutional setting.     

Healing in familiar settings: support for children and youth in the classroom and community

The Classroom-Based Intervention emphasizes a specific theme each week to allow children to construct safe places to express their stories and develop coping strategies in a group environment.     

School dropout and injecting drug use in a national sample of white non-Hispanic American adults

In this study we sought to extend our previous finding of an association between school dropout and injecting drug use (IDU) among African Americans by testing the association in a sample of White non-Hispanic Americans. A nationally representative sample of White non-Hispanic Americans age eighteen years and older was drawn from public use data files of the 1995-1996 National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse (NHSDA). Adults with a self-report history of IDU were identified, and were matched to non-IDU adults in the same neighborhoods of residence. Conditional logistic regression was used to estimate the association between dropping out of high school and the occurrence of IDU. White non-Hispanic American high school dropouts were more likely than high school graduates to have injected a drug at least once. The findings of this research on non-Hispanic Whites are generally consistent with our earlier evidence on the association between educational status and a history of IDU among African-American adults. School dropout prevention programs may merit attention in an overall strategy of preventing injecting drug use and HIV/AIDS.     

Competitive information systems

The problem of keeping abreast of relevant competitive developments for strategic purposes is common to many organizations. In this article the authors describe a system which they have developed and which is currently in operation which they believe can prove beneficial in meeting this need. They believe that their system provides competitive data in a useful form. Also it ensures that information, and not data, are processed and provided for planners and managers to support their decision-making.