Correlates of perceived effectiveness of the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative

A three-level growth-curve model was applied to estimate perceived impact growth trajectories, using multi-year data from project and school surveys on outcome and program implementation collected from 59 sites and approximately 1165 participating schools in the Safe Schools and Healthy Students Initiative. Primary interest is to determine whether and how project-level and school-level correlates affect schools’ perceptions of the Initiative's effectiveness over time when the effects of the pre-grant environmental conditions, grant operations, and near-term outcomes are considered. Coordination and service integration, comprehensive programs and activities for early childhood development, and change in school involvement were found to be significant predictors of school-perceived overall impact when the effect of poverty was considered. Partnership functioning, perceived importance of school resources, and school involvement were found to be significant predictors of school-perceived impact on substance use prevention when the effect of poverty was considered.     

Resolving complex community problems: Applying collective leadership and Kotter's change model to wicked problems within social system networks

How does collective leadership within social networks resolve chronic and complex problems common to communities? Unfortunately, sometimes it does not, but when it does, the outcome may be truly extraordinary. We use a case study approach to explain how one Midwest community within the USA applied collective leadership within a community network to reduce teen births. It took ten years of what many identified as provocative media campaigns and comprehensive sex education programs to reduce teen births by 65%, significantly exceeding the stated goal. Using Kotter's change model as a backdrop, powerful strategies and provocative creativity reveal courageous leadership within a social network of diverse people and organizations focused on improving the social well being of their community.     

Chaos: A Challenge to Refine Systems Theory

Chaos theory may have relevance to marital and family therapy. Some connections are tentatively explored.     

FIRST AND SECOND MARITAL DISSOLUTION: A DECOMPOSITION EXERCISE FOR WHITES AND BLACKS

Observed distributions of marital dissolutions occurring over time (and thus the divorce rate or other measures of marital dissolution) are dependent on two basic factors: (1) the relative distribution across a population of characteristics influencing the probability of marital dissolution and (2) the relative degree to which each of these characteristics raise or lower the probability of marital dissolution. The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of each of these two factors on the observed distributions of marital dissolution for whites and blacks for both first and second marriages. Using an appropriate statistical methodology, the results indicate a relatively complex pattern of differences between marriage orders and race groups.     

Perceived importance of “social goals” in business organizations

Business organizations operate within a complex socio-technical environment. Interactions between these socio-technical dimensions and the managers' personal value systems are thought to influence managerial role patterns and decisions. This paper investigates shifts in perceived importance of “social goals” from a set of organizational goals. The research concludes that there has been no significant changes occurring in either the ordering or the clustering of organizational goals.     

Fear of people with mental illnesses: the role of personal and impersonal contact and exposure to threat or harm

Vignette and laboratory experiments suggest that negative reactions to people with mental illness are a direct consequence of their symptomatic behavior, but because of their poor external validity, these studies cannot tell us whether widespread negative public reactions to people with mental illness actually result from observation of symptomatic behavior. Focusing on perceived danger, we use a large national survey to test the "behavior hypothesis" in the general population. We reason that, if this hypothesis is correct, contact with people with mental illnesses should be associated with more perceived danger, and exposure to threat or harm should mediate this association. On the contrary, respondents with more personal and impersonal contact perceive people with mental illness to be less dangerous. Exposure to threat is more common among people with more contact, but this exposure explains very little of the variance in perceived danger. These findings do not support the conclusion that public fear of people with mental illness is due to the observation of violent behavior.