Decision making in child welfare: A critical review of the literature

The decision to intervene with families has enormous implications for a democratic society. Child protective services must both protect children and families. Practice theory, social policies, and agency procedures have not provided a consensus on the criteria to guide decision making in child welfare. This paper reviews the empirical studies in the decision making literature for the purposes of: identifying variables workers are using to guide their decisions; identifying major professional concerns and issues with this literature; and suggest questions for further research.     

The violence of materialism in advanced industrial society: an eco-sociological approach

The main argument to be developed in this article is that such phenomena as war, vandalism and urban ‘terrorism’are not isolated events, but reflect the values and beliefs embedded in the deep institutional structure of advanced industrial societies. It will be argued that in such societies, however politically patterned, there is a universal, and virtually unequivocal, acceptance of economic growth and expansion as the prime objective to be pursued. As such economic expansion depends on advances in scientific and technological knowledge the control and manipulation of nature is given full legitimacy. This attitude towards nature is seen as a central feature of the industrial culture as a whole and reflects the dominance of material over other human values. And it is the asymmetry between these value systems which predisposes the industrial culture to violence and instability: in short it gives ideological support to the use of violence in the resolution of problems, whether these be of a political, social or economic nature. It will be contended that there is a clear need to go beyond the traditional marxist analysis of capitalism in order to show how the institutional structure of advanced industrial societies plays a part both in stimulating and reproducing the ideology of violence notwithstanding considerable differences in the political arrangements in such societies. It follows from this that what is required is a broad theory of industrialization, rather than specifically of capitalism. As Illich argues     

Statistical approaches for the reliability of structural designs

The Construction Industry Research and Information Association (CIRIA) has produced some guidelines for the assessment of the reliability of components and/or structures. The methods of analysis suggested by these guidelines are far from adequate and, in certain cases, contain some imperfections. In this paper, some of the weaknesses of the guidelines are identified. The shortcomings are mainly in the ease of calculations and the feasibility of the assumptions which are imposed. Three alternative methods aimed at tackling some of the weaknesses are introduced. A simulation study is used to compare these methods.     

FITTING FINITE MIXTURE MODELS IN A REGRESSION CONTEXT

Suppose data are collected in a three-mode fashion (individuals x items X attributes), and it is sought to cluster the individuals into groups on the basis of lineat relations between scores on the attributes for each item and auxiliary measurements made on the same items. A mixture model is pro posed and the EM algorithm is used to fit it to the data by simultaneously estimating the group parameters and allocating individuals to groups. The method is illustrated by a simulation study and a real example in which consumers are clustered on the basis of product scores that are related to a sensory laboratory measurement.