Beyond Contact? Policy approaches to work with families of looked after children in four European countries

In England, placement within the looked after system is not viewed as a desirable long‐term solution for most children, and policy has prioritised continued contact with parents, and swift return home, wherever possible. This review examines policy approaches to work with families of looked after children in England and in three other European countries: Denmark, France and the Netherlands, aiming to identify areas for shared learning in relation to this challenging area of policy and practice. The research highlights relationships between care populations and policy understandings of the purpose of work with families, including understandings of children's and/or parents’ rights.     

What Drives Citizen Participation in Political Gatherings in Modern South Africa? A Quantitative Analysis of Self-Reported Behaviour

Social Indicators Research - Community and public gatherings are an important component of political participation in sub-Saharan Africa. Formal and informal community meetings and rallies are...     

Introduction. Ce que les écrits font au travail

As is known, large numbers of writings circulate within every kind of professional environment. As a result, there is extensive research on the formats, uses and roles of writings in work. However, the approach taken here is not to describe what is done with writings in work. The central hypothesis rests on a performative vision of writings, one that gives them the power to act, agency. It can be summed up as follows: what do writings “do” to work? Studying work through its writings is a way to connect two dimensions that are too often kept separate: situated activities on the one hand, organizational functions on the other. Indeed, writings are material and robust — though not always lasting — traces of concrete activities, and they provide a handhold for the rigorous analysis of work as close as possible to its conditions of realization. However, writings travel and circulate. They form links between workers, groups, workshops, services, firms, without which production could not take place. They stretch work beyond its source. To track them is therefore to shift the field of enquiry to moments other than the present of the observed situation, and also to other nearby, surrounding workspaces. This brings out the procedural and interactive dimensions of organizations, their integrating capacity. Exploring what writings do to work is therefore not only to place oneself at an intermediate level between situated action and organized action. For the sociologist, it is a way of connecting these two perspectives “on paper”, by embedding the analysis of the actual work in spatially and temporally broader collective actions, and by documenting organizational analysis on the basis of observed work situations. It is a way of contributing to a more extensive ecology of activity, more clearly anchored within its organizational envelope.     

Impact of physical activity and sedentary behaviour on fall risks in older people: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies

The objective of this work was to summarise and evaluate the evidence showing that physical activity is a protector factor as regards falls in older people. Relevant studies were identified through a systematic search in the MEDLINE and Cochrane Library, under the keywords of accidental fall/numerical data and risk factors, and with the bibliographies of retrieved papers. The combined odds ratio (OR) [95% confidence interval] for physical activity was 0.75 [0.64, 0.88] with moderate heterogeneity (I ²?=?33%). For fall injury, it was 0.59 [0.47, 0.74] and, for falls in general, it rose to 0.94 [0.76, 1.17] with nil heterogeneity. The combined OR for sedentary factors was 1.14 [1.10, 1.82] with moderate heterogeneity (I ²?=?36%). Regular physical activity in daily life yields significant reduction in falls in older people, especially falls with injuries.     

« Comment ? Vous n’avez pas de projet ? » : ethnographie du démarchage en matière de crédit à la consommation

Many a product and service is proposed to consumers who have not individually expressed any prior interest to a salesperson or a firm. Two situations of prospecting people for a revolving credit are presented. Based on data gathered during a month of observation in the company of salespersons who deal in this type of credit, the processes are analyzed that these persons use to arouse a potential buyer's interest. Light is shed on the organizational, material and technical conditions that enable them to turn the latter into a customer or, at least, to make interactions with him/her last longer. This analysis of one form of mediation in the marketing of credit also sheds light on the situations of those who subscribe to loans, whether or not they are over indebted.     

Production and changeover control policies of a class of failure prone buffered flow-shops

This article deals with a stochastic optimal control problem for a class of buffered multi-parts flow-shops manufacturing system. The involved machines are subject to random breakdowns and repairs. The flow-shop under consideration is not completely flexible and hence requires setup time and cost in order to switch the production from a part type to another, this changeover is carried on the whole line. Our objective is to find the production plan and the sequence of setups that minimise the cost function, which penalises inventories/backlogs and setups. A continuous dynamic programming formulation of the problem is presented. Then, a numerical scheme is adopted to solve the obtained optimality conditions equations for a two buffered serial machines two parts case. A complete heuristic policy, based on the numerical observations which describe the optimal policies in system states, is developed. It will be shown that the obtained policy is a combination of a KANBAN/CONWIP and a modified hedging corridor policy. Moreover, based on our observations and existent research studies extension to cover more complex flow-shops is henceforth possible. The robustness of such a policy is illustrated through sensitivity analysis.     

On smoothness of Tukey depth contours

The smoothness of Tukey depth contours is a regularity condition often encountered in asymptotic theory, among others. This condition ensures that the Tukey depth fully characterizes the underlying multivariate probability distribution. In this paper we demonstrate that this regularity condition is rarely satisfied. It is shown that even well-behaved probability distributions with symmetrical, smooth and (strictly) quasi-concave densities may have non-smooth Tukey depth contours, and that the smoothness behaviour of depth contours is fairly unpredictable.     

Bootstrapping regression models with BLUS residuals

To bootstrap a regression problem, pairs of response and explanatory variables or residuals can be resam‐pled, according to whether we believe that the explanatory variables are random or fixed. In the latter case, different residuals have been proposed in the literature, including the ordinary residuals (Efron 1979), standardized residuals (Bickel & Freedman 1983) and Studentized residuals (Weber 1984). Freedman (1981) has shown that the bootstrap from ordinary residuals is asymptotically valid when the number of cases increases and the number of variables is fixed. Bickel & Freedman (1983) have shown the asymptotic validity for ordinary residuals when the number of variables and the number of cases both increase, provided that the ratio of the two converges to zero at an appropriate rate. In this paper, the authors introduce the use of BLUS (Best Linear Unbiased with Scalar covariance matrix) residuals in bootstrapping regression models. The main advantage of the BLUS residuals, introduced in Theil (1965), is that they are uncorrelated. The main disadvantage is that only n —p residuals can be computed for a regression problem with n cases and p variables. The asymptotic results of Freedman (1981) and Bickel & Freedman (1983) for the ordinary (and standardized) residuals are generalized to the BLUS residuals. A small simulation study shows that even though only n — p residuals are available, in small samples bootstrapping BLUS residuals can be as good as, and sometimes better than, bootstrapping from standardized or Studentized residuals.     

Self-Reported Personal Well-Being of Youth Accessing Intensive Mental Health Treatment

Normative samples have been shown to rate their personal wellbeing (PWB) as positively high and high PWB is associated with many enduring benefits. Cummins (J Happiness Stud 10(6):1–17, 2009) has suggested that PWB has an equilibrium that is set at a rather high positive state and maintained through psychological mechanisms he termed homeostatic protected mood (HPM). Investigators who have explored PWB and mental health disorders have often focused on schizophrenia in adult populations, with varied results, and scant attention has been paid to clinical samples of youth with emotional and/or behavioral disorders. The purpose for this report was to explore the level of PWB reported by a subsample of youth who accessed residential treatment (n = 30) and intensive home based treatment (n = 33) at 12–18 months post-discharge, and explore whether clinical variables could predict PWB. Many youth reported high PWB despite experiencing continued challenges in symptoms and psychosocial functioning. Demographic and clinical characteristics did not predict participants’ PWB scores, lending support for the HPM theory with this sample of youth with emotional and behavioral disorder.