Airline Safety Improvement Through Experience with Near‐Misses: A Cautionary Tale

In recent years, the U.S. commercial airline industry has achieved unprecedented levels of safety, with the statistical risk associated with U.S. commercial aviation falling to 0.003 fatalities per 100 million passengers. But decades of research on organizational learning show that success often breeds complacency and failure inspires improvement. With accidents as rare events, can the airline industry continue safety advancements? This question is complicated by the complex system in which the industry operates where chance combinations of multiple factors contribute to what are largely probabilistic (rather than deterministic) outcomes. Thus, some apparent successes are realized because of good fortune rather than good processes, and this research intends to bring attention to these events, the near‐misses. The processes that create these near‐misses could pose a threat if multiple contributing factors combine in adverse ways without the intervention of good fortune. Yet, near‐misses (if recognized as such) can, theoretically, offer a mechanism for continuing safety improvements, above and beyond learning gleaned from observable failure. We test whether or not this learning is apparent in the airline industry. Using data from 1990 to 2007, fixed effects Poisson regressions show that airlines learn from accidents (their own and others), and from one category of near‐misses—those where the possible dangers are salient. Unfortunately, airlines do not improve following near‐miss incidents when the focal event has no clear warnings of significant danger. Therefore, while airlines need to and can learn from certain near‐misses, we conclude with recommendations for improving airline learning from all near‐misses.     

Respect: A philosophical perspective

This article explicates the concept of respect as philosophers discuss and utilize it. After identifying the main questions about respect which philosophers have raised and addressed, including questions about the nature, importance, objects, grounds, psychological and behavioral elements, and implications of respect, I sketch an account of the most general elements of the attitude of respect and identify different kinds of respect and their connections to and differences from similar attitudes such as esteem and honor. I then discuss the most influential account of respect for persons, that of Immanuel Kant. The final section explores the importance of respect in moral, social and political life and in moral, social, and political theory, and highlights some implications for issues in applied ethics and social and political theory.     

NCWWI Traineeships: A National Cross-Site Evaluation of Child Welfare Stipend Programs for Ethnically Diverse Students

The task of recruiting and retaining ethnically diverse, qualified, and committed social workers in child welfare is challenging. Federal funding supporting BSW and MSW education has been a catalyst for university–agency partnerships across the country. An important goal of these partnerships is to prepare social work students with the knowledge, skills, and competencies for effective child welfare practice. The National Child Welfare Workforce Institute’s innovative child welfare traineeships program prepares students from 12 social work programs around the country. This study focused on diversity, competency attainment, and readiness for the job. Results showed that programs recruited ethnically diverse students, and after receiving child welfare–specific content and hands-on experiences in the field, students felt competent and prepared for child welfare work.     

A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting Reproducibility,Best Practices,and Theory‐Building

The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline‐specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and promoting replicability in infancy research: large‐scale, multi‐laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less‐biased estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be used for later study planning, and a series of best‐practices blueprints for future infancy research.     

Everyday territories: homelessness,outreach work and city space

This article develops a situational approach to understanding urban public life and, in particular, the production of urban territories. Our aim is to examine the ways in which city space might be understood as comprising multiple, shifting, mobile and rhythmed territories. We argue that such territories are best understood through attending to their everyday production and negotiation, rather than handling territory as an a priori construct. We develop this argument from the particular case of the street‐level politics of homelessness and street care. The experience of street homelessness and the provision of care in the public spaces of the city is characterised by precarious territorial claims made and lost. We describe some of the ways in which care work with rough sleepers is itself precarious; ‘homeless’, in lacking a distinct setting in which it might get done. Indeed, outreach work takes place within and affirms homeless territories. The affirmation of territory is shown to be central to the relationship developed between the workers and their rough sleeping clients. We also show, however, the ways in which outreach workers operate on territory not their own, twice over. Outreach work is precarious in that it is practised within, and can run counter to, other territorial productions in which the experience of urban need and the work and politics of care are entangled. In sum, this article aims to move beyond static and binary understandings by developing a mobile and situational approach to city space which recognises the intensive yet overlooked work of territorial production.     

Unequal opportunities among unequal states: The importance of examining state characteristics in making social welfare policies regarding children

This paper examines the disparate social well-being outcomes children experience across states in the United States. The paper seeks to extend the study of child social well-being by examining the extent to which state characteristics influence aggregate child social well-being outcomes. The results indicate that socioeconomic and population characteristics of states influence the magnitude of aggregate child social well-being deficits. It is argued that the disparities in child social well-being outcomes for children across states should be taken into consideration in the current welfare reform climate. Because states have gained greater control over programs that assist the poorest and most vulnerable families and children, states with large child social well-being deficits will likely experience even larger deficits as many state TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) policies and practices do not adequately support poor families.     

Keeping Parents in the Driver's Seat

Parents receive social work services (both voluntary and involuntary) in a variety of settings. Although the parents may have come to need social work interventions for different reasons, one reason is constant: They are experiencing some difficulty with their children. Children are likely to benefit when parenting ability is strengthened. In all settings, social workers have a unique opportunity to assist parents in establishing, restoring, or maintaining healthy family dynamics.