Community College Programs for the Human Services

A national survey of 2-year human services programs in community colleges revealed the current status of these programs and identified significant trends in areas such as program number, curriculum design, standard-setting mechanisms, student composition and career paths, and faculty affiliation. Of particular interest was the relationship of these programs and their graduates to social work education and the social services job market. Among the principal findings were (a) these programs are in a period of renewed growth and (b) a need and an opportunity exist for the social work profession, particularly social work education, to be constructively involved in this level of education.     

Selections and social selectivity on the academic track: A life-course analysis of educational attainment in Germany

Graduating from university is just the final step of an extended educational career. Sociological transition research has revealed that final educational attainment must be understood as the result of a sequence of successive decisions. With regard to graduation from university, one has to take into account that upper secondary school qualifications are required for enrolling in the first place, and in Germany, the decision for this kind of schooling is at a much earlier age. So where on the long way to the university degree does Germany ‘lose’ its potential academics and in particular its lower class children?     

Appeals to social norms as policy instruments to address consumption externalities

We consider appeals to social norms as a policy instrument to address consumption externalities. We explore whether appeals to social norms can be an efficient policy instrument and compare the efficiency of such appeals to the efficiency of taxation in addressing consumption externalities. We find that when the existing norm helps to shift consumption towards the socially optimal level of consumption, taxation welfare dominates appeals to social norms as a policy tool. While previous studies have found that economic instruments are superior to information in other contexts, we arrive at a different conclusion for situations where the norm shifts behavior away from what is socially optimal. In such cases appeals to social norms can be a better policy instrument than taxation.     

Constrained Monotonicity and the Measurement of Power

In this paper we will discuss constraints on the number of (non-dummy) players and on the distribution of votes such that local monotonicity is satisfied for the Public Good Index. These results are compared to properties which are related to constraints on the redistribution of votes (such as implied by global monotonicity). The discussion shows that monotonicity is not a straightforward criterion of classification for power measures. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Regional Mobility Spaces? Visa Waiver Policies and Regional Integration

Visa policies today are a central instrument for filtering wanted and unwanted types of travellers, leading to a hierarchy of mobility rights. While there is evidence of a “global mobility divide”, we still know little about the role of regional integration when it comes to the distribution of mobility rights and the (re)structuring of mobility spaces. Against this background, the article examines the structure of visa relations in different bodies of regional integration (EU, MERCOSUR, ASEAN, ECOWAS, EAC, NAFTA, SADC and SICA). The article compares visa policies in the member states of these institutions in 1969 and 2010 from a social network perspective. While one would generally expect each institution's member states to become more similar with regard to both internal and external mobility regulations, we find that not all regional clusters align their visa policies. Potential explanations for this state of affairs are investigated.     

On estimands and the analysis of adverse events in the presence of varying follow‐up times within the benefit assessment of therapies

The analysis of adverse events (AEs) is a key component in the assessment of a drug's safety profile. Inappropriate analysis methods may result in misleading conclusions about a therapy's safety and consequently its benefit‐risk ratio. The statistical analysis of AEs is complicated by the fact that the follow‐up times can vary between the patients included in a clinical trial. This paper takes as its focus the analysis of AE data in the presence of varying follow‐up times within the benefit assessment of therapeutic interventions. Instead of approaching this issue directly and solely from an analysis point of view, we first discuss what should be estimated in the context of safety data, leading to the concept of estimands. Although the current discussion on estimands is mainly related to efficacy evaluation, the concept is applicable to safety endpoints as well. Within the framework of estimands, we present statistical methods for analysing AEs with the focus being on the time to the occurrence of the first AE of a specific type. We give recommendations which estimators should be used for the estimands described. Furthermore, we state practical implications of the analysis of AEs in clinical trials and give an overview of examples across different indications. We also provide a review of current practices of health technology assessment (HTA) agencies with respect to the evaluation of safety data. Finally, we describe problems with meta‐analyses of AE data and sketch possible solutions.