A Statewide Parenting Alternative Sentencing Program: Description and Preliminary Outcomes

ABSTRACT

The Washington State Legislature created the Parenting Sentencing Alternative in 2010, authorizing a substitute to total confinement for parents of minor children. The Alternative is designed to strengthen family bonds and improve parenting skills to encourage successful reintegration. An overview of the Alternative’s history, design, and implementation is presented, followed by preliminary results from an impact evaluation. A case study of a successful participant is presented, and implications for the findings are discussed.     

Public Attitudes towards Income Redistribution: Evidence from Hong Kong

The drivers of public support for redistributive policy have stimulated academic debate around the world. The majority of studies use cross‐country surveys conducted in the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development countries to contribute to the debate on whether self‐interest or social values have more influence on public attitudes towards redistribution. Drawing on a phone survey conducted in 2013, this study advances the discussion by investigating public attitudes towards redistribution and social policy changes against the backdrop of buoyant government revenues in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong welfare model, best seen as a parallel to the liberal welfare state, is selective and residual. Contrary to the usual assumption, the social values hypothesis, viewing poverty as societal problems instead of individual reasons, has been supported in the Hong Kong context. It lends support to greater redistribution in a residual welfare state. The policy implications of the findings are also discussed.     

Dynamic version of weighted cumulative residual entropy

Some extensions of Shannon entropy to the survival function have been recently proposed. Misagh et al. (2011 Misagh, F., Panahi, Y., Yari, G.H., Shahi, R. (2011, September). Weighted cumulative entropy and its estimation. In: Quality and Reliability (ICQR), 2011, IEEE International conference (pp. 477–480), IEEE.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) introduced weighted cumulative residual entropy (WCRE) that was studied more by Mirali et al. (2015 Mirali, M., Baratpour, S., Fakoor, V. (2015). On weighted cumulative residual entropy. Commun. Stat. Theory Methods. doi:10.1080103610926.2015.1053932.[Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In this article, the dynamic version of WCRE is proposed. Some relationships of this measure with well-known reliability measures and ageing classes are studied and some characterization results for exponential and Rayleigh distributions are provided. Also, a non parametric estimation of dynamic version of WCRE is introduced and its asymptotic behavior is investigated.     

Bayesian quantile regression for skew-normal linear mixed models

Linear mixed models have been widely used to analyze repeated measures data which arise in many studies. In most applications, it is assumed that both the random effects and the within-subjects errors are normally distributed. This can be extremely restrictive, obscuring important features of within-and among-subject variations. Here, quantile regression in the Bayesian framework for the linear mixed models is described to carry out the robust inferences. We also relax the normality assumption for the random effects by using a multivariate skew-normal distribution, which includes the normal ones as a special case and provides robust estimation in the linear mixed models. For posterior inference, we propose a Gibbs sampling algorithm based on a mixture representation of the asymmetric Laplace distribution and multivariate skew-normal distribution. The procedures are demonstrated by both simulated and real data examples.     

<Emphasis Type="BoldItalic">MAD-STEC</Emphasis>: a method for multiple automatic detection of space-time emerging clusters

Crime or disease surveillance commonly rely in space-time clustering methods to identify emerging patterns. The goal is to detect spatial-temporal clusters as soon as possible after its occurrence and to control the rate of false alarms. With this in mind, a spatio-temporal multiple cluster detection method was developed as an extension of a previous proposal based on a spatial version of the Shiryaev–Roberts statistic. Besides the capability of multiple cluster detection, the method have less input parameter than the previous proposal making its use more intuitive to practitioners. To evaluate the new methodology a simulation study is performed in several scenarios and enlighten many advantages of the proposed method. Finally, we present a case study to a crime data-set in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.     

Increasing Competency,Self-Confidence,and Connectedness Among Foster Care Alumni Entering a 4-Year University: Findings from an Early-Start Program

Research shows that few foster care alumni enroll and complete post-secondary education. For those who do enroll, many experience challenges associated with academic and social adjustment and are at risk of dropping out. Many college-based programs are being developed and are available to foster care alumni to support them during their post-secondary education. This study used pre-tests, post-tests, and journal entries of seventeen participants to evaluate a strengths-based, resilience-oriented early-start program for newly enrolled students at a large public university that provides knowledge about the institution, resources (e.g., tutoring), and social support necessary for foster care alumni to make a smooth transition into college life and to increase short and long-term student success. Quantitative and qualitative findings indicate that students who participated in the early-start program showed increased confidence and competency in academic and social adjustment. Findings also showed personal growth (e.g., building resiliency) and an increased connectedness among students who participated in the program. Study findings can inform the development of new on-campus support programs and help enhance existing programming. Future research should address short and long-term outcomes and experiences of students who are former foster youth who have participated in on-campus support programs.     

Alone and adrift: The association between mass school shootings,school size,and student support

Background

School shootings have approached epidemic levels in recent years. While mental illness is undoubtedly involved in nearly all cases of mass school violence, we sought to determine how environmental context may exacerbate preexisting personal factors. The present study investigated the associations between mass school shootings, school enrollment size, student–teacher ratios, and student transitions.