Exploring the essence of enabling child participation within child protection services

The chances that children have to participate in child protection services are largely contingent upon the attitudes and skills of case managers. They have a crucial role in ensuring that a child's voice is being listened to and acknowledged in often sensitive dialogues. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate what case managers need to facilitate child participation. By handing case managers a participation toolbox developed by children and through the use of reflexive monitoring in action, we elaborated on the barriers faced in practice. The results show that the intention to facilitate child participation is quickly overruled by often subconscious thoughts and beliefs, stemming from the complex interplay of child image, protection, and participation. Case managers need to be aware of this interplay and how this unknowingly steers their actions. Therefore, iterative reflection should be facilitated within organizations for an actual change in their daily practice and to amplify the role of children in the decision‐making processes within child protection services.     

Sexual Minorities,Social Context,and Union Formation

Population Research and Policy Review - The current study examines the association between social context and the formation of same-sex coresidential unions, with a particular focus on sexual...     

Simultaneous edit-imputation and disclosure limitation for business establishment data

Business establishment microdata typically are required to satisfy agency-specified edit rules, such as balance equations and linear inequalities. Inevitably some establishments' reported data violate the edit rules. Statistical agencies correct faulty values using a process known as edit-imputation. Business establishment data also must be heavily redacted before being shared with the public; indeed, confidentiality concerns lead many agencies not to share establishment microdata as unrestricted access files. When microdata must be heavily redacted, one approach is to create synthetic data, as done in the U.S. Longitudinal Business Database and the German IAB Establishment Panel. This article presents the first implementation of a fully integrated approach to edit-imputation and data synthesis. We illustrate the approach on data from the U.S. Census of Manufactures and present a variety of evaluations of the utility of the synthetic data. The paper also presents assessments of disclosure risks for several intruder attacks. We find that the synthetic data preserve important distributional features from the post-editing confidential microdata, and have low risks for the various attacks.     

Understanding the Followers of Toxic Leaders: Toxic Illusio and Personal Uncertainty

Toxic leaders are one of the main threats to the wellbeing of people in the workplace and in society in general, and followers play a critical role in constructing and maintaining toxic leaders. In this narrative review, we draw on Bourdieu's concept of illusio and incorporate it with the social and cognitive psychology approaches in an attempt to frame the dynamic system that sustains toxic leadership through continued support of the followers. More specifically, as we introduce the illusio perspective in a process‐relational context to the toxic leadership discussion, we (i) address the allure of toxic leaders as an incentive for followers to join the toxic illusio as a way to cope with their high personal uncertainty and (ii) illustrate the mechanisms and processes that motivate followers of toxic leaders to remain in the toxic illusio once they join. In this context, we also briefly discuss and differentiate between the ethical and moral dimensions of toxic leadership.     

Sequential Monte Carlo for rare event estimation

This paper discusses a novel strategy for simulating rare events and an associated Monte Carlo estimation of tail probabilities. Our method uses a system of interacting particles and exploits a Feynman-Kac representation of that system to analyze their fluctuations. Our precise analysis of the variance of a standard multilevel splitting algorithm reveals an opportunity for improvement. This leads to a novel method that relies on adaptive levels and produces, in the limit of an idealized version of the algorithm, estimates with optimal variance. The motivation for this theoretical work comes from problems occurring in watermarking and fingerprinting of digital contents, which represents a new field of applications of rare event simulation techniques. Some numerical results show performance close to the idealized version of our technique for these practical applications.     

Conceptualizing reflection in experience-based workplace learning

This paper seeks to understand key dimensions of reflection in experience-based workplace learning for research being collaboratively undertaken by scholars in Dutch and US research institutions. We systematically explore and compare Tara Fenwick’s analysis of five perspectives on cognition to distinguish among constructivist, psychoanalytic, situative, critical-cultural, and enactivist perspectives on reflection. Our aim is to examine how to conceptualize reflection so that one or more perspectives can complement our understanding of learning through experience at work. We position reflection not only from a practical but also from a theoretical perspective that moves beyond the individual focus of the constructivist perspective. Fenwick’s five perspectives are described in terms of whether and how reflection is utilized, key activities in the process of reflection, relative focus on the individual and/or the context, triggers for reflection, role of power and positionality, role of emotions, and reflection outcomes. We conclude that adding other lenses to the dominant constructivist perspective helps expand our understanding of reflection as well as identify and attend to other tools, people, and factors in the work situation that influence reflection processes and learning outcomes. The paper closes with a discussion of promising new approaches that have emerged since Fenwick’s analysis.     

Corporate social responsibility and corporate governance in Italian SMEs: the experience of some “spirited businesses”

The study proposes to individuate the relationship between social engagement, social statements and governance of SMEs. Does an adhesion to the philosophy and to the practices of CSR, which are reflected in a firm’s mission and accountability, positively influences its governance? If so, is this influence more or less significant for SMEs with respect to large-sized firms? This paper winds itself around these questions and describes the principle findings that have emerged from a qualitative investigation focused on a selected group of “cohesive” Italian SMEs, in which their management complies with both economic and social issues. The empirical study finds that the diffusion of CSR is tied above all to the entrepreneur’s values and orientation and to the company embeddedness to the local socio-economic environment. The concluding reflections trace the features of a territorial model of socially responsible orientation centered on the best practices of SMEs who are excellent examples of “spirited businesses” and are part of a network (which includes institutions, trade associations, non-profit organizations, etc.) that contributes to the diffusion of an orientation towards CSR and to sustainability across the territory.     

Mobility and Professional Networks in Academia: An Exploration of the Obligations of Presence

This article explores the obligations of presence behind work-related mobility for academics in internationalizing higher education systems. By further developing John Urry’s concept of ‘meetingness’, the article reveals how academics depend on corporeal and virtual mobility to create and maintain a networked professional life outside their own institution, which is crucial in the context of changing work conditions. Our insights are drawn from original qualitative research (42 interviews) in a Flemish and Danish context. The data reveal obligations of presence associated with an interrelated mix of functionality, and the construction of dense and sparse social networks that together support career success and work at the frontiers of academic knowledge. Despite the now well-recognized costs of corporeal mobility, obligations of presence result in virtual and corporeal mobility coexisting, rather than the former substituting for the latter. Virtual mobility is mainly used when conflicting obligations of presence exist, and as a means of sustaining networks over time given the processual nature of meetingness, rather than as a means to reduce levels of corporeal mobility.     

Mean shift and influence measures in linear measurement error models with stochastic linear restrictions

We present influence diagnostics for linear measurement error models with stochastic linear restrictions using the corrected likelihood of Nakamura in 1990. The case deletion and mean shift outlier models are developed to identify outlying and influential observations. We derive a corrected score test statistic for outlier detection based on mean shift outlier models. The analogs of Cook's distance and likelihood distance are proposed to determine influential observations based on case deletion models. A parametric bootstrap procedure is used to obtain empirical distributions of the test statistics and a simulation study has been used to evaluate the performance of the proposed estimators based on the mean squares error criterion and the score test statistic. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the theoretical results.