The Social Construction of Reality in the Realm of Children's Mental Health Services

ABSTRACT

Across the United States, systems of care have emerged to provide mental health care to children and their families; fragmentation inhibiting the success of collaboration by stakeholders is common and compromises these systems of care. Survey data were collected from 1,428 respondents in a Midwestern state to examine problems that exist within systems of care from the perspective of the different stakeholder groups. Stakeholder group membership was based upon the respondent's employment or involvement within various child-serving systems and included those in child welfare, juvenile justice, and education, mental health providers, and consumers (i.e., caregivers/parents). Group differences revealed patterns of “finger pointing” by the stakeholder groups on where specific problems exist within systems of care. The findings provide insight into how the social construction of service delivery and practice emerges as stakeholder groups describe, understand, and evaluate problems within the system of care as a function of their own practice location within the system of care. Future research should consider exploring methods that might minimize the competitive nature of disparate child-serving systems and its potentially negative impact upon system performance and treatment outcomes.     

Evaluating Outcomes in Health and Social Care by Helen Dickinson

No abstract available for this article.     

Immigrant workers in the Libyan labour force

Using a series of statistical analyses, this study assesses the importance of foreign labour in the Libyan economic and social structures over the last 30 years. It notes the development of a particular series of dependencies on such labour, especially in skilled and professional occupations. Despite the government's declared policy of Libyanization, the authors note the development of a parallel labour market of nationals and non‐nationals and the consequential difficulties of moving towards full implementation of such a policy.     

Transportation Difficulty of Black and White Rural Older Adults

The purpose of this study was to understand self-reported transportation difficulty among rural older adults. We used data from the UAB Study of Aging (255 Black and 259 White), community-dwelling participants residing in rural areas. We examined the relationship of predisposing characteristics, enabling resources, and measures of need for care with self-reports of transportation difficulty. Blacks reported having more transportation difficulty than Whites (24.7% vs. 11.6%; p ≤ .05). When we introduced other variables, race differences disappeared, but there was a race by income interaction with transportation difficulty. Whites with lower incomes were more likely to have transportation difficulty than Whites with higher incomes. When data from Blacks and Whites were analyzed separately, income was the only variable associated with transportation difficulty among Whites. Among Blacks, income was not related to transportation difficulty but several variables other than income (age, gender, marital status, MMSE scores and depression) were.     

On the asymptotic properties of fuzzy c-means cluster prototypes as estimators of mixture subpopulation centers

Several computational studies suggest that the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering scheme may be used successfully in some cases to obtain estimates for the parameters of a statistical mixture (e.g., for a mixture of normal distributions). While these (limited) simulation results for the fuzzy c-means approach support this hypothesis, we provide herein an example that shows that the FCM cluster prototypes cannot generally be statistically consistent estimators of the centers (means) of any univariate mixture having symmetric component distributions     

Characterization of Historical Methane Occurrence Frequencies from U.S. Underground Natural Gas Storage Facilities with Implications for Risk Management,Operations, and Regulatory Policy

Defining a baseline for the frequency of occurrences at underground natural gas storage facilities is critical to maintaining safe operation and to the development of appropriate risk management plans and regulatory approaches. Currently used frequency-estimation methods are reviewed and broadened in this article to include critical factors of cause, severity, and uncertainty that contribute to risk. A Bayesian probabilistic analysis characterizes the aleatoric historical occurrence frequencies given imperfect sampling. Frequencies for the three main storage facility types in the United States (depleted oil-and-gas field storage, aquifer storage, solution-mined salt cavern storage) are generally on the order of 3 to 9 × 10^–2 occurrences, of all causes (surface, well integrity, subsurface integrity) and severities (nuisance, serious, catastrophic), per facility-year. Loss of well integrity is associated with many, but not all, occurrences either within the subsurface or from there up to the surface. The probability of one serious or catastrophic leakage occurrence to the ground surface within the next 10 years, assuming constant number of facilities, is approximately 0.1–0.3% for any facility type. Storage operators and industry regulators can use occurrence frequencies, their associated probabilities and uncertainties, and forecasts of severity magnitudes to better prioritize resources, establish a baseline against which progress toward achieving a reduction target could be measured, and develop more effective mitigation/monitoring/reduction programs in a risk management plan.     

Behavioral Determinants of Target Shifting and Deterrence in an Analog Cyber-Attack Game

This study examines how exploiting biases in probability judgment can enhance deterrence using a fixed allocation of defensive resources. We investigate attacker anchoring heuristics for conjunctive events with missing information to distort attacker estimates of success for targets with equal defensive resources. We designed and conducted a behavioral experiment functioning as an analog cyber attack with multiple targets requiring three stages of attack to successfully acquire a target. Each stage is associated with a probability of successfully attacking a layer of defense, reflecting the allocation of resources for each layer. There are four types of targets that have nearly equal likelihood of being successfully attacked, including one type with equally distributed success probabilities over every layer and three types with success probabilities that are concentrated to be lowest in the first, second, or third layer. Players are incentivized by a payoff system that offers a reward for successfully attacked targets and a penalty for failed attacks. We collected data from a total of 1,600 separate target selections from 80 players and discovered that the target type with the lowest probability of success on the first layer was least preferred among attackers, providing the greatest deterrent. Targets with equally distributed success probabilities across layers were the next least preferred among attackers, indicating greater deterrence for uniform-layered defenses compared to defenses that are concentrated at the inner (second or third) levels. This finding is consistent with both attacker anchoring and ambiguity biases and an interpretation of failed attacks as near misses.     

Extending the pursuit of flow (lean) management to encompass sales,general and administrative functions

Abstract

Operations management tends to be treated independent of other business functions—the silo syndrome. In this article, we call for operations management (OM) to broaden its perspective by strengthening linkages with other functions of the business, thereby to realize competitive advantages and strategic integration, as well as to avoid resource misallocation. The issues involved are presented and tested by examining the effects of intermeshing sales, general and administrative (SG&A) expenditures with customer-centred flow manufacturing, the latter being measured by system inventory as surrogate for customer lead time. In doing so, we designate trends in total inventory as the independent variable—representative of a dominant target of flow/lean management—and trends in SG&A expenditures as the output variable. The research tasks are enabled by inventory and SG&A data being widely available in companies’ audited financial statements. Such hard data offers methodological and validation advantages over, say, opinion-based survey research. The research adds bulk to existing flow/lean management theory and can be helpful in inducing primary business functions (e.g. OM, finance, sales and marketing) and sub-functions (such as SG&A and management accounting) to engage in cross-functional efforts in the cause of flow-oriented process improvement and company competitiveness.