Labour Underutilisation and Gender: Unemployment Versus Hidden-Unemployment

As labour markets have become more complex there has been increasing interest among researchers in understanding the ways that social and labour market processes and contexts impact on various labour market states. One important area has been in understanding the differences between unemployment and hidden unemployment. This paper considers the ways in which these two labour market states differ for a sample of male and female respondents to the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Australia (HILDA) survey. It presents data related to the reasons why respondents in these two labour force states consider they are jobless and analyses the characteristics of male and female respondents in the two labour market states to consider differences in outcomes. The findings suggest that there are differences in the two states of labour market outcomes and that these are further complicated when one considers processes for males and females.     

Accent on Teaching Materials

This department includes the two sections New Developments in Statistical Computing and Statistical Computing Software Reviews; suitable contents for each of these sections are described under the respective section heading. Articles submitted for the department, outside the two sections, should not be highly technical and should be relevant to the teaching or practice of statistical computing.

An unbiased estimator of e is used to motivate a simple simulation exercise that requires only observations from the distribution uniform on (0, 1). Antithetic variables are introduced and applied to the simulation problem to give a second unbiased estimator of e with reduced variance.     

Comparing several experimental groups with a control in the multivariate case

This paper presents a multivariate extension of Dunnett's test for comparing simultaneously k treatment group means with a single control group mean. A test based on Hotelling T²statistics is presented and approximate critical values are evaluated for the case of equal numbers of observations in each group, for the .05 and .01 levels of significance, for 1 to 5 variates, for 1 to 10 treatment groups, and for varying degrees of freedom. The accuracy of the procedure for generating approximate critical values is assessed via simulation studies conducted for selected cases and an example is presented using real data.     

Revisiting the model of creative destruction: St. Jacobs,Ontario, a decade later

Ten years ago, the model of creative destruction was developed to predict the fate of communities that base their development on the commodification of rural heritage (Mitchell, C.J.A., 1998. Entrepreneurialism, commodification and creative destruction: a model of post-modern community development. Journal of Rural Studies 14, 273–286). Its application to the village of St. Jacobs, Canada, demonstrated that entrepreneurial investment had fostered the creation of a setting for aestheticized consumption. In this paper we demonstrate that creative destruction has continued to unfold in the village over the course of the past decade. The evolutionary path taken is assessed in light of current literature on rural space. It is concluded that to fully understand the transformative process, one must integrate the demands of myriad sub-cultures, whose social relations, ideologies and actions will contribute to the development of a contested landscape of consumption. This finding necessitates that modifications be made to the model and its various stages. The most significant is recognition that the “heritage-scape” is an interim state of landscape change; one that displaces the productivist landscape of the industrial period, and precedes the creation of the “neo-productivist” leisure-scape of post-industrialism. Whether or not such a “final” state is achieved is dictated by the power struggle that inevitably arises amongst sub-cultures engaged in the transformation of rural space.     

Quantifying the Hurricane Catastrophe Risk to Offshore Wind Power

The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that over 50 GW of offshore wind power will be required for the United States to generate 20% of its electricity from wind. Developers are actively planning offshore wind farms along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts and several leases have been signed for offshore sites. These planned projects are in areas that are sometimes struck by hurricanes. We present a method to estimate the catastrophe risk to offshore wind power using simulated hurricanes. Using this method, we estimate the fraction of offshore wind power simultaneously offline and the cumulative damage in a region. In Texas, the most vulnerable region we studied, 10% of offshore wind power could be offline simultaneously because of hurricane damage with a 100‐year return period and 6% could be destroyed in any 10‐year period. We also estimate the risks to single wind farms in four representative locations; we find the risks are significant but lower than those estimated in previously published results. Much of the hurricane risk to offshore wind turbines can be mitigated by designing turbines for higher maximum wind speeds, ensuring that turbine nacelles can turn quickly to track the wind direction even when grid power is lost, and building in areas with lower risk.     

Simulated and live practice teaching: The practice teacher's craft

The paper considers the assertion that students can learn how to practise exclusively through simulations, without working with real clients. The authors look at the benefits and difficulties of both live and simulated practice for the student's learning, and discuss two fallacies which, if left unchallenged, could threaten the existing arrangements for practice learning in social work. Finally, the paper describes practice teaching in terms of a craft.

This paper was first presented to a Conference of practice teachers and it preserves some of its original informality.     

Personalisation,individualism and the politics of disablement

This paper assesses the social policy narrative personalisation, and particularly the implications of the narrative for disability politics. The advantages and disadvantages of positioning specific funding mechanisms within the narrative are explored. It is argued that personalisation is insufficiently aligned with collective aspects of empowerment. More particularly, it disproportionately emphasises improvements in individual autonomy through personalised support, and lacks reference to structural oppression or the need for collective forms of action that bring about structural change. It is further argued that personalisation lack a multi-faceted analysis of disability and disempowerment, and as a result also lacks any vision of a positive alternative society. In assessing personalisation, the positive and negative dimensions of disabled people’s freedom are considered. As a response to the apparent shortcomings of personalisation, the integrated living approach and Centres for Independent Living are considered important elements in an alternative narrative to personalisation.     

Forcible,Drug-Facilitated,and Incapacitated Rape and Sexual Assault Among Undergraduate Women

Abstract

Objective: To examine the prevalence of drug-related sexual assaults, identify the frequency of assaults that occur following voluntary versus involuntary drug or alcohol consumption, and identify contextual correlates of drug-related assaults. Participants: College-student females (n = 314). Methods: Volunteers reported experiences with forcible and drug-related sexual assaults in the spring semester of 2004. Follow-up queries regarding the most severe drug-related assaults determined whether the assaults followed voluntary or involuntary alcohol or drug consumption. Results: 29.6% (n = 93) of the respondents reported a drug-related sexual assault or rape; 5.4% (n = 17) reported a forcible sexual assault or rape. Voluntary incapacitation preceded 84.6% of drug-related assaults and involuntary incapacitation preceded 15.4% of drug-related assaults. The majority of drug-related assaults (96.1%) involved alcohol consumption prior to assault. Conclusions: Drug-related sexual assaults on college campuses are more frequent than are forcible assaults and are most frequently preceded by voluntary alcohol consumption.     

Stories of (Social) Distress: Applied Narrative Analysis and Public Policy for the Homeless

Recent attention to the use of social science research in the formation of social policy highlights the role of narratives in the mediation of the relationships between research and practice, science and policy. This paper demonstrates the value of applied narrative analysis in revealing the function of narratives in this mediation. Public debate over a universal “right to shelter” for homeless persons in Washington D. C. is the central case study. The results illustrate the usefulness of applied narrative analysis in the study of social distress and in the forging of new links between research and policy.