Monitoring Indicators of Children’s Victimization in School: Linking National-, Regional-, and Site-Level Indicators

The paper presents a conceptual framework and methodology developed by the authors to create systematic empirical basis to monitor important social indicators. The focus here is on ways to employ indicators of victimization in school in order to inform a range of constituencies interested in the well being of school children. The paper outlines the importance of developing a wide range of indicators based on a theoretical model of social context of schools, as perceived from multiple perspectives (students, staff, parents, the general public). The importance of linking national-, regional-, and site-level indicators is emphasized and demonstrated. The paper presents examples of analyses and reports that can inform practice, policy making and evaluation in the area of school safety. Finally, monitoring indicators of victimization on all levels is described as a democratic youth empowering process.     

DBFOM Contracting and Public Stewardship in the Norfolk-Portsmouth Elizabeth River Tunnels Public-Private Partnership

In 2011, the Virginia Department of Transportation issued a request for proposals to upgrade the Norfolk-Portsmouth Elizabeth River Midtown and Downtown Tunnels. The project involved government contracting with a local subsidiary of two foreign entities that would handle all project phases according to a Design-Build-Finance-Operate-Maintain (DBFOM) contract. The case of the Elizabeth River Tunnels (ERT) project is examined through the perspective of transaction cost theory and evaluates the DBFOM contracting method according to its impact on public stewardship. The research findings improve understanding of public-private partnerships (PPPs) by examining the connection between transaction costs and public stewardship.

     

Challenges in Teaching Short Courses by an Academic Department: The University of Florida Experience

“A Week of Short Courses” is the title given by the Department of Statistics at the University of Florida to its offerings each spring. The offerings are short courses, each lasting 2 1/2 days. The program began in the spring of 1991 with four courses, and has grown to six courses in 1994. During this four-year period the Department of Statistics has faced many challenges that are addressed in this paper.     

Indicators of development in Wisconsin counties: 1970

This research focused on the problem of measuring economic and social ‘development’. Existing theories of economic and social change were used to select important indicators of development. For each indicator, principal components analysis was used to collapse several related variables into a single index. The indexes were labeled economic base, economic growth, personal economic opportunity, health inputs, health status, educational inputs, and educational attainment. In each case, selection of variables and indexes were constrained by two factors: (1) the data had to be available from secondary sources; (2) the selection of the indicators, and the procedure, had to be easily understood and cheaply and quickly repeatable by state or local agency personnel. In general the indexes were consistent with each other and the variables enter into the indexes with the expected sign. The high correlation among the indexes suggests that they may indeed measure some underlying attribute, development. There is no rigorous or absolute measure of development against which to check the validity of the indexes. However, the results have been judged ‘reasonable’ measures of development by the state agency staff and local development groups which have utilized the indexes.