Promoting leadership skills in field education:a university-community partnership to bring macro and micro together in gerontological field placements

Social workers are being called upon to utilize a wide range of skills in practice including not only skills of working directly with clients, but also skills related to practice in organizations such as program management, inter-organizational cooperation, research and evaluation. This article describes an innovative geriatric field education program that prepares social workers with leadership skills in both direct service and management, and engages community agencies as both sites for student learning and as beneficiaries of their professional development projects. Case examples are provided and benefits and challenges to the model are discussed.     

All Politics is Not Local: National Forces in State Abortion Initiatives

Objective. Although research suggests that national forces can play a role in local and state elections, most of this work has only recently begun to examine the potential role of national forces in state or local ballot initiative or referenda elections. Methods. Our research addresses this gap in the literature by exploring the influence of national forces, such as the timing of elections, Supreme Court rulings, the activities of interest groups, and public opinion, on state direct legislation elections. We incorporate national forces into the morality politics framework and derive specific hypotheses. We then test these hypotheses by conducting a multivariate analysis of county–level voting patterns across 16 abortion–related direct legislation elections. Results. Our results confirm most of the hypotheses derived from the morality politics framework, including those concerning the role of national forces. Conclusions. Voting patterns on abortion tend to be influenced by the presence of presidential elections, Supreme Court rulings, interest–group activity, public opinion, partisanship, college education, and conservative religious forces. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on elections, abortion policy, and morality politics.     

Condorcet's paradox and the likelihood of its occurrence: different perspectives on balanced preferences*

Many studies have considered the probability that a pairwise majority rule (PMR) winner exists for three candidate elections. The absence of a PMR winner indicates an occurrence of Condorcet's Paradox for three candidate elections. This paper summarizes work that has been done in this area with the assumptions of: Impartial Culture, Impartial Anonymous Culture, Maximal Culture, Dual Culture and Uniform Culture. Results are included for the likelihood that there is a strong winner by PMR, a weak winner by PMR, and the probability that a specific candidate is among the winners by PMR. Closed form representations are developed for some of these probabilities for Impartial Anonymous Culture and for Maximal Culture. Consistent results are obtained for all cultures. In particular, very different behaviors are observed for odd and even numbers of voters. The limiting probabilities as the number of voters increases are reached very quickly for odd numbers of voters, and quite slowly for even numbers of voters. The greatest likelihood of observing Condorcet's Paradox typically occurs for small numbers of voters. Results suggest that while examples of Condorcet's Paradox are observed, one should not expect to observe them with great frequency in three candidate elections.     

The price of risk with incomplete knowledge on the utility function*

When a risk is exchanged, the exact value for the minimum price (positive or negative) that the purchaser (investor, or insurer) is willing to pay is given by the certainty equivalent wealth level, which in turn depends on his specific utility function. When this utility function is unknown, then only a sufficient condition on the price can ever be found. This paper provides methods for calculating such a sufficient condition, when only limited information on the utility function is known.     

Old People Living Alone—Is Organized Observation Necessary?

A survey of 192 old people was carried out to assess the need for a paid daily visitor as a means of ensuring prompt help in cases of illness or accident. The survey found evidence of a comprehensive network of care from neighbours for the elderly people living near them. Neighbour observation and support made a daily Street Visitor Scheme superfluous.