The importance of knowing the affective meaning of job demands revisited

This paper starts with the assumption that when people are asked to describe the level of demands they face at work, it cannot be assumed that those demands are necessarily stressful, even if they are rated as strong or high demands. Thirty demand questions were designed for use with a sample of 2,253 public sector employees in Western Australia. As well as rating frequency of demand the respondents were asked to rate their level of dissatisfaction with the demand. For only 16 of the demands was there a correlation high enough to assume that the demand might be a stressor. Having demonstrated this, the rest of the paper compares different ways of combining the two scores to predict the level of psychological distress as measured by the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ12). The results support the claim in the title, that it is important to know the affective meaning of job demands.     

Preschool-Age Adopted Chinese Girls’ Behaviors That Were Most Concerning to Their Mothers

Children's behavioral difficulties are a major source of parental concern. The goals of the current study were to (1) describe preschool-age adopted Chinese girls’ behaviors that were most concerning to their adoptive mothers and (2) examine the relation between children's concerning behaviors and parent/child demographics. Qualitative data from 422 mothers on 480 adopted Chinese girls (M = 44.2 months, SD = 15.2) were collected using three sequenced methods (i.e., open-ended question, follow-ups, and a focus group discussion). These girls were adopted at 3 to 60 months of age (M = 13.8, SD = 8.0) and had lived in the adoptive homes for at least 6 months (M = 30.2, SD = 14.4). Data analysis showed that 242 (57.3%) mothers (representing 274 girls) reported one to three concerning behaviors per child (total = 323 concerns), including behaviors that indicated attachment problems (107 or 33.1%), poor social skills (46 or 14.2%), language/speech problems (42 or 13%), sleep problems (29 or 9%), health/physical problems (24 or 7.4%), and problems in other areas (e.g., potty training) (75 or 23.2%). Further analysis showed that the mothers with prior experience of raising adopted children, but not biological children, were more likely to report concerning attachment behaviors than first-time mothers.     

Institutions and Policies for Pro‐poor Agricultural Growth

Global experience with pro‐poor growth and empirical work spanning India, Malawi and Zimbabwe demonstrates the importance of agricultural growth for poverty reduction in poor rural areas, while also pointing to the need for complementary non‐farm sector growth. Theoretical arguments, historical evidence and livelihoods modelling in poor medium‐potential rural economies suggest that, contrary to thinking dominating much of current development policy, subsidies to relieve critical seasonal credit and cash restraints and reduce market and input supply uncertainties need to help in ‘kick‐starting’ agricultural markets if increased smallholder productivity in food‐grains is to drive rural non‐farm growth. Establishing the base conditions for these to work, designing and implementing them to be effective, and then phasing them out are major challenges facing policymakers.     

The Death Penalty in the Post-Furman Era: A Review of the Issues and the Debate

This is a review of the issues and debate over capital punishment in the United States during the post- Furman era (since 1972). It encompasses a review of the legal issues, highlighting major U.S. Supreme Court cases in which the constitutionality of the death penalty has been challenged. These constitutional challenges have included issues of arbitrariness and race discrimination in the application of the death penalty. Also considered is the Court's 'evolving standards of decency' test in terms of what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment – relative to the execution of juveniles and the mentally retarded and whether lethal injection is cruel and unusual. The post- Furman era death penalty debate is comprised of two phases, both raised questions about public confidence in the criminal justice system. Phase one, occurring in the 1980s and early 1990s, was concerned with the lengthy appeal process and the lack of finality in capital cases. Phase two emerged in the late 1990s and 2000s and focused on the accuracy (wrongful convictions) and fairness (arbitrariness and discrimination) of the administration of capital punishment. The DNA revolution and a parade of high-profile exonerations in the United States contributed to this latter phase. Finally, the death penalty debate is considered from an international and human rights perspective.     

Elicitation

There are various situations in which it may be important to obtain expert opinion about some unknown quantity or quantities. But it is not enough simply to ask the expert for an estimate of the unknown quantity: we also need to know how far from that estimate the true value might be. Tony O'Hagan describes the process of elicitation: the formulation of the expert's knowledge in the form of a probability distribution.     

Mixture Multi-state Markov Regression Model

Although heterogeneity across individuals may be reduced when a two-state process is extended into a multi-state process, the discrepancy between the observed and the predicted for some states may still exist owing to two possibilities, unobserved mixture distribution in the initial state and the effect of measured covariates on subsequent multi-state disease progression. In the present study, we developed a mixture Markov exponential regression model to take account of the above-mentioned heterogeneity across individuals (subject-to-subject variability) with a systematic model selection based on the likelihood ratio test. The model was successfully demonstrated by an empirical example on surveillance of patients with small hepatocellular carcinoma treated by non-surgical methods. The estimated results suggested that the model with the incorporation of unobserved mixture distribution behaves better than the one without. Complete and partial effects regarding risk factors on different subsequent multi-state transitions were identified using a homogeneous Markov model. The combination of both initial mixture distribution and homogeneous Markov exponential regression model makes a significant contribution to reducing heterogeneity across individuals and over time for disease progression.     

Performativity and helping professions: social theory, power and practice

Drawing on Judith Butler's conception of 'performativity', we would argue that the notion has important implications for contemporary debates in international social welfare over agency, subjection and 'resistance'. Professional social workers embedded in discursive institutions function according to particular expectations around performativity. In addition, this organisational context is complex with multiple demands. In light of technologies of surveillance and control in contemporary social work, performativity offers a response to the pressing need to expand notions of worker opposition beyond traditional forms of organised dissent towards the production of subjective space.     

Inequality and Deliberative Development: Revisiting Bolivia's Experience with the PRSP

The deliberative‐development approach to policy‐making has gained popularity in both academic and policy circles. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the requirements necessary for deliberation to have beneficial effects on policy, some of which are detailed in this article, in particular the need for equality among deliberators. The article examines Bolivia's 2000 National Dialogue and demonstrates the effects of inequality — not between elites and non‐elites, but between groups within civil society — on the legitimacy of the outcome. Its findings have important implications for the design of deliberative‐development institutions.