A look at an interactive classroom-based drug abuse prevention program: interactive contents and suggestions for research

Interactivity has been shown to be a critical element of effective drug abuse prevention programs. This study examined the contents of Project Towards No Drug Abuse, a program that has revealed strong effects only when delivered in a highly interactive version. Types of teacher and student interactive messages were identified. It is speculated that explicit action on the part of the teacher to have students make statements and ask questions of one another may be the essence of effective drug education program delivery. Suggestions for future research on interactivity were made.     

The Effects of Modern Treaties and Opt-In Legislation on Household Incomes in Aboriginal Communities

This paper investigates the influence of country risks, including economic, financial, and political risks, on income inequality for a broad sample of 110 countries. Our empirical results reveal that higher economic and political risks generally lead to higher inequality. Lower income country appears to have higher income inequality. Furthermore, with the consideration of the non-monotonic effect of country risk, the improvement of income distribution is only sustainable dynamically after a certain threshold level of country risk has been brought down. Policymakers should improve the level of country stability by exploring the benefits of country risk reduction in order to improve income distribution.     

Index-number tests and the common-scaling social cost-of-living index

For a change in prices, the common-scaling social cost-of-living index is the equal scaling of each individual’s expenditure level needed to restore the level of social welfare to its pre-change value. This index does not, in general, satisfy two standard index-number tests. The reversal test requires the index value for the reverse change to be the reciprocal of the original index. And the circular test requires the product of index values for successive price changes to be equal to the index value for the whole change. We show that both tests are satisfied if and only if the Bergson–Samuelson indirect social-welfare function is homothetic in prices, a condition which does not require individual preferences to be homothetic. If individual preferences are homothetic, however, stronger conditions on the Bergson–Samuelson indirect must be satisfied. Given these results, we ask whether the restrictions are empirically reasonable and find, in the case that individual preferences are not homothetic, that they make little difference to estimates of the index.     

Absent presence: the ongoing impact of men's violence on the mother–child relationship

This paper draws from interviews with 45 mothers and 52 children who participated in an action research project to develop activities to support women and children in the aftermath of domestic violence. A thematic analysis was used to analyse the data and explore the question: In what ways does the perpetrator of abuse remain present in the lives of women and children following separation? The paper invites workers to recognize the distortions created by domestic violence that may need to be identified and addressed in the aftermath of violence. The ways in which past trauma, erosion of self‐esteem and the undermining of the mother–child relationship continues to create a shadow across the present relationship are identified. The continued presence of the perpetrator of abuse through child contact arrangements and ongoing harassment is also highlighted. The ‘absent presence’ of the abusive partner is posited as a concept to assist workers with a framework through which to understand problems in the mother–child relationship which emerge when living with and separating from a violent partner. The paper has implications for social workers orientating practice to focus on perpetrator accountability and support strengthening the mother–child relationship.     

走向"扁平化"的知识型城市

中国即将成为先进的知识经济大国的趋势,也为其他国家带来了发展机遇,、本文所研究的核心问题是,如果以知识经济发展为指导的管理政策作为工具,一个人口大国的发达与欠发达地区之间的不均衡是否能够以及如何能够“扁平化”。我们特别要关注的是正在发展中的知识社会是否能够缩窄知识鸿沟以及由此缩短整体的发展差距,“扁平化世界”的概念就是大家都在同一水平的起跑线上。我们选择以中国为例,是因为她悠久的历史和地缘政治的复杂性对其他发展中国家具有借鉴意义。不少学者们认为,是邓小平的改革开放政策改变了中国的落后面貌,但笔者却持相反观点,认为中国的兴衰成败,并不单纯地取决于国界的开放与否,而是取决于整个社会是否存在积极的学习态度以及可供借鉴学习的参照体．