Kinship care for children in the UK: messages from research,lessons for policy and practice1

This article presents a comprehensive overview of kinship care, or as it is also known, family and friends care, paying particular attention to the UK child welfare, legal, policy/practice contexts. The aim of the article is to raise awareness, and provide information, about a hitherto largely invisible, yet expanding placement option being widely used in child welfare systems in the UK, in Europe and elsewhere. The article places kinship care within a UK and European child welfare legal context, including the European Convention on Human Rights 1998 [Articles 8 and 14] and European kinship care developments are also highlighted. It contains the main findings of a kinship care research study conducted by the author, based on interviews with children and young people living with kinship carers, as well as with the kinship carers. Following an examination of theoretical and policy issues, the article examines ways forward for developing and supporting kinship care. In the final section, and based on the research findings and literature review, a new paradigm for child welfare is introduced. It is argued that this new paradigm is necessary in order for kinship care practice and policy to develop within a supported and sustainable family support framework.     

A Note on Influence Assessment in Score Tests

Recently, [1] Ebrahimi, N. 1996. How to measure uncertainty about residual life time. Sankhya Ser. A, 58: 48–57.  [Google Scholar] proposed a dynamic measure based on differential entropy applied to the residual lifetime. This measure has been used for the classification and ordering of survival functions. More recently, [2] Ebrahimi, N. 1997. Testing whether lifetime distribution is decreasing uncertainty. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, 64: 9–19. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] has considered the problem of testing the monotonicity of this measure. We propose and study several kernel type estimators of the entropy of residual life through the estimation of f(x) log f(x). These estimators can be applied to the classification and comparison of lifetime distribution.     

Confidence Intervals for the Hyperparameters in Structural Models

This article deals with the bootstrap as an alternative method to construct confidence intervals for the hyperparameters of structural models. The bootstrap procedure considered is the classical nonparametric bootstrap in the residuals of the fitted model using a well-known approach. The performance of this procedure is empirically obtained through Monte Carlo simulations implemented in Ox. Asymptotic and percentile bootstrap confidence intervals for the hyperparameters are built and compared by means of the coverage percentages. The results are similar but the bootstrap procedure is better for small sample sizes. The methods are applied to a real time series and confidence intervals are built for the hyperparameters.