Estimation in an empirical bayes model for longitudinal and cross‐sectionally clustered binary data

Some studies generate data that can be grouped into clusters in more than one way. Consider for instance a smoking prevention study in which responses on smoking status are collected over several years in a cohort of students from a number of different schools. This yields longitudinal data, also cross‐sectionaliy clustered in schools. The authors present a model for analyzing binary data of this type, combining generalized estimating equations and estimation of random effects to address the longitudinal and cross‐sectional dependence, respectively. The estimation procedure for this model is discussed, as are the results of a simulation study used to investigate the properties of its estimates. An illustration using data from a smoking prevention trial is given.     

Financial capability and psychological health

Financial capability is receiving increasing interest among policy makers, who wish to reduce problem debt and welfare dependency and increase savings and general skills. We examine whether financial capability has impacts on psychological health independent of income and financial resources more generally using a nationally representative survey. Data from the British Household Panel Survey 1991-2006 are used to construct a measure of financial capability, which we relate to respondents’ psychological health using the 12-item General Health Questionnaire. Estimates from within-group panel data models indicate that financial capability has significant and substantial effects on psychological health over and above those associated with income and material wellbeing more generally. For men, having low financial capability has an effect larger than that associated with being unemployed, while for women it is similar to that of being divorced. Furthermore having low financial capability exacerbates the psychological costs associated with unemployment and divorce, while high financial capability reduces these costs.     

Social work in mental health services: A survey of the field

Abstract

A survey of social workers employed in mental health services was conducted in Victoria in mid-1997. Approximately 300 social workers were identified as working in the sector. About half were employed in adult clinical services, 23% in psychiatric disability services, 12.4% in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, and the rest in a range of other services. More than 90% worked in a community based service or team. The number of entry-level (SW I) positions in clinical services was found to have declined over the last ten years from 61 to 14, resulting in a lack of opportunities for social workers to gain experience in base grade positions, and difficulty in recruiting to SW II positions. Major issues of concern reported by social workers included: the lack of accommodation and other community resources for consumers; diminished opportunities for professional development, supervision, and discipline-specific training; lack of professional recognition; increasing workloads; and organisational emphasis on throughput rather than quality.     

A characterization of the uniform rule with several commodities and agents

We consider a problem of allocating infinitely divisible commodities among a group of agents. More specifically, there are several commodities to be allocated and agents have continuous, strictly convex, and separable preferences. We establish that a rule satisfies strategy-proofness, unanimity, weak symmetry, and nonbossiness if and only if it is the uniform rule. This result extends to the class of continuous, strictly convex, and multidimensional single-peaked preferences.     

Comment

Bonferroni inequalities often provide tight upper and lower bounds for the probability of a union of events. The bounds are especially useful when this probability is difficult to compute exactly. There are situations, however, in which the Bonferroni approach gives very poor results. An example is given in which the upper and lower Bonferroni bounds are far from the probability they seek to approximate and successive bounds do not converge. Even an improved first upper Bonferroni bound may not be close to the probability of the union of events.     

"Bridging the Gap": New Relationships between Primary Care Groups and Local Authorities

Current policy places great emphasis on the development of "partnerships", particularly between NHS and local authority services, with the aims of increasing service coordination and delivery and improving health. To this end, primary care groups (PCGs), at the forefront of NHS organizational developments, are required to include a social services representative on their governing boards; similarly, primary care trusts (PCTs) have a social services representative on their executive committees. Drawing on a representative longitudinal national survey of English PCGs, the paper evaluates the contribution of these new governance arrangements to the development of inter-agency partnerships. Despite poor histories of collaboration and some major organizational barriers, there are some signs of progress, with social services representatives playing an active part in PCG affairs and having clear lines of communication about PCG matters with their employing authorities. Equally significantly, PCGs have also quickly established a wide range of contacts directly with other local authority services and departments. However, these early gains risk being limited by traditional professional inequalities between social work and medicine and, in particular, by the prospect of further organizational upheaval as PCGs merge with each other and/or acquire trust status.     

Child Support: The Limits of Social Policy Based on Assumptions of Knavery Extending the Pillars of Social Policy Financing to Aged Care

Julian Le Grand has argued that a key component of welfare reform involves changes in the assumptions about human behaviour which are embedded in social policies. Policy assumptions have been transformed from espousing a belief that social service providers act as well-intentioned knights and recipients as passive pawns, to a stance in which all participants are regarded as self-seeking knaves. These ideas are particularly pertinent to policy developments concerning financial obligations for children, and this paper examines these issues in relation to child support policy in New Zealand. It highlights the evident and inevitable failure of this policy to meet its primary stated aim of revenue generation. In New Zealand this failure is compounded by the creation of parallel systems for dealing with children and families, one for financial obligations and the other for care and development, which are founded on diametrically opposed assumptions about human behaviour and capabilities. This confusion is symptomatic of a wider failure in government policy towards families in New Zealand.     

The particularity of the universal: critical reflections on Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power and the state

A critical review of Bourdieu’s theory of the state is developed here against the backdrop of both his wider theoretical project and empirical studies. Elaborating the concepts of symbolic capital, symbolic violence, and symbolic domination, the centrality that Bourdieu accords to symbolic forms is compared to benchmark Weberian accounts that start with the state monopoly of violence. Reviewing also some of the burgeoning secondary literature discussing his theory of the state, Bourdieu’s writings, which encompass various antinomies, are shown to vacillate between two distinct perspectives—a strong and a weak theory of the state. His rejection of the “physicalist” approaches of Marx, Elias, and Tilly is elaborated and subject to a counter-critique, particularly in relation to the notion of symbolic “violence.” Bourdieu’s account of the state is shown to be as much a political as theoretical intervention. His antagonism towards Marxist accounts in particular is shown to be rooted in a pragmatic interest in the role of the “left hand of the state” in progressive reform; and this perspective is traced back to the twin influences of Durkheim and Hegel, French republicanism, and in particular the potential of the state to express a universal interest. At the same time, compared with sophisticated Marxist and Weberian accounts and the work of Norbert Elias and Gramsci, Bourdieu’s theory is shown to be severely lacking in the way that he deals with violence and coercion. His “expanded materialism,” particularly with the “strong theory,” bends the stick too far and overplays the symbolic basis of consent. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s insights with regard to the pervasive influences of state practices of classification, taxonomy, delegation, and naming are shown to have real utility with regard to focused empirical investigations of the state in modern societies.