Sociometric methods and difference: a force for good – or yet more harm

This paper offers a critique of sociometrics as a ubiquitous method of measuring social relationships among children in social groups such as school classes. This is important in relation to disability politics and research as the apparently scientific measures are frequently used in the process of labelling children or predisposing the children involved, or others involved with them, to view disabled and other children in particular ways. We open a debate about judgements concerning whether the use of sociometric techniques needs to be better informed by questions about the underpinning normalising frameworks on which they depend, about the connotations of blame associated with particular sociometric statuses, and about the way that research constructs difficulties and reflects an adult agenda, marginalising the voices of (disabled) children. We argue for the value of the transactional turn in understanding the implications of this approach and for highlighting alternative perspectives.     

Long‐term Outcomes for Children with Early Language Problems: Beating the Odds

Using the 1970 British Cohort Study, this study examines factors promoting positive language development and subsequent successful education and employment transitions among children showing early receptive language problems (age 5). We find that 61 per cent of children with early receptive language problems develop into competent readers by age 10. Factors promoting positive language development include parental support and more importantly a good school environment, characterised by only few children receiving remedial help. Post‐16 education and employment experiences indicated competent reading to be associated with a less challenging journey into adulthood. Findings are discussed in terms of their policy implications.     

A Lean transportation approach for improving emergency medical operations

Abstract

This paper extends the approach of Lean transportation to improve the performance of emergency medical processes (EMP) by adapting its main concepts into the main characteristics of the EMP environment. The paper is based on an inductive theory-building process initiated from a case study in the field of emergency medical services. The development of the suggested performance improvement approach triggered from an exhaustive analysis of a process involved and an exploratory review of the existing improvement approaches available. The process of concern can be described as a specialized transportation process, where human lives are at risk. Its characteristics led to a natural application of Lean transportation. The results include, a novel approach for improving the agility and efficient EMS processes. This is validated with an application for improving ambulance response times and turnaround times of the Red Cross operations located in Monterrey, Mexico. The approach proved to be an integrated scheme for identifying waste opportunities at a systems level. This characteristic is important to let operations management prioritize improvement efforts in a limited budget situation. This work suggests the application of the emerging Lean transportation approach for increasing the agility performance of EMS processes.     

Sustainable Social Work: An Environmental Justice Framework for Social Work Education

Environmental degradation is not experienced by all populations equally; hazardous and toxic waste sites, resource contamination (e.g., exposure to pesticides), air pollution, and numerous other forms of environmental degradation disproportionately affect low income and minority communities. The communities most affected by environmental injustices are often the same communities where social workers are entrenched in service provision at the individual, family, and community level. In this article, we use a global social work paradigm to describe practical ways in which environmental justice content can be infused in the training and education of social workers across contexts in order to prepare professionals with the skills to respond to ever-increasing global environmental degradation. We discuss ways for social work educators to integrate and frame environmental concerns and their consequences for vulnerable populations using existing social work models and perspectives to improve the social work profession's ability to respond to environmental injustices. There are significant social work implications; social workers need to adapt and respond to contexts that shape our practice, including environmental concerns that impact the vulnerable and oppressed populations that we serve.     

Windows to the Soul? Deliberate Eye Contact as a Cue to Deceit

Although people overwhelmingly believe that liars avoid eye contact, meta-analyses of deception literature have shown a non-significant relationship between gaze and deception. In the present experiment we measured eye movements in an innovative way. We coded the extent to which interviewees deliberately made eye contact with the interviewer. Liars take their credibility less for granted than truth tellers. They therefore may have a greater desire to be convincing and hence more inclined to monitor the interviewer to determine whether they seem to be being believed. We therefore hypothesized that liars would give more appearance of deliberately making eye contact than truth tellers (a relationship which opposes the stereotypical belief that liars look away). A total of 338 passengers at an international airport told the truth or lied about their forthcoming trip. As well as the deliberate eye contact variable, we coded the amount of time the interviewees looked away from the interviewer (e.g., gaze aversion), which is typically examined in deception research. Liars displayed more deliberate eye contact than truth tellers, whereas the amount of gaze aversion did not differ between truth tellers and liars.     

Achieve Boston: a citywide innovation in professional development

Achieve Boston is a broad-based collaborative effort to improve the overall quality of programs for children and youth by establishing a professional development infrastructure that supports those who work with young people during the out-of-school-time hours.     

County child poverty rates in the US: a spatial regression approach

We apply methods of exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and spatial regression analysis to examine intercounty variation in child poverty rates in the US. Such spatial analyses are important because regression models that exclude explicit specification of spatial effects, when they exist, can lead to inaccurate inferences about predictor variables. Using county-level data for 1990, we re-examine earlier published results [Friedman and Lichter (Popul Res Policy Rev 17:91–109, 1998)]. We find that formal tests for spatial autocorrelation among county child poverty rates confirm and quantify what is obvious from simple maps of such rates: the risk of a child living in poverty is not (spatially) a randomly distributed risk at the county level. Explicit acknowledgment of spatial effects in an explanatory regression model improves considerably the earlier published regression results, which did not take account of spatial autocorrelation. These improvements include: (1) the shifting of “wrong sign” parameters in the direction originally hypothesized by the authors, (2) a reduction of residual squared error, and (3) the elimination of any substantive residual spatial autocorrelation. While not without its own problems and some remaining ambiguities, this reanalysis is a convincing demonstration of the need for demographers and other social scientists to examine spatial autocorrelation in their data and to explicitly correct for spatial externalities, if indicated, when performing multiple regression analyses on variables that are spatially referenced. Substantively, the analysis improves the estimates of the joint effects of place-influences and family-influences on child poverty.

Reactions to resistance: the role of contextual factors in sex offending

Upon encountering victim resistance during the commission of a sexual assault, an offender makes a decision as to how to react to the resistance via the use of varying degrees of coercive or noncoercive tactics. Exhaustive chi-squared automatic interaction detection (CHAID) analyses were performed on a sample of 369 criminal events to detect the significant situational and crime-specific factors, the pertinent interactions between these factors, and how these affect an offender's reaction to victim resistance depending on whether the victim is a child or an adult. Findings show that multiple interactions do occur and, moreover, factors affecting the offender's reaction to victim resistance are very different depending on whether the victim is a child or an adult. Planning and preparation variables, such as the offender's attack strategy, were found to be significant in the child victim model, whereas reactive variables, such as the type of victim resistance, were found to be significant in the adult victim model. The findings lend support to the social interac-tionist perspective and the importance of victim-offender dynamics.