Eight years after – a follow‐up study of mothers and children at psychosocial risk who received early treatment: does early intervention leave its mark?

One‐hundred forty‐five mothers at psychosocial risk who, with their babies, had been given treatment at a parent–baby clinic during a 2‐year period starting in 1999, treatment designed to strengthen the mother–child relationship, were followed up 8 years later. Both the mothers who had agreed to take part in the treatment programme (n= 73) and those who had declined (n= 72) were searched for in the records of the Social Welfare office to determine if the treated mothers had been focused on to a lesser degree in the following 8 years than those who had declined treatment, a hypothesis that was initially put forward. The behaviour of the children whose mothers had undergone treatment (n= 46) was studied. The initial hypothesis had to be rejected; support and intervention from the social authorities had been equally common in both groups. However, the children of treated mothers had fewer externalizing behaviour than children of untreated mothers at psychosocial risk.     

Information aggregation and preference heterogeneity in committees

This paper is concerned with the efficiency of information aggregation in a committee whose members have heterogeneous preferences over a binary decision variable. We study a voting game with a pre-vote communication stage and identify conditions under which full information aggregation is possible. In particular, if preferences are common knowledge and each committee member is endowed with information, full information aggregation is possible despite preference heterogeneity.     

Lifestyles,and Risk Perception Consumer Behavior

In this article, the concept of lifestyle is traced to its early roots in personality psychology and in marketing. In the latter field, many commercial marketing firms have made strong claims as to the explanatory power of lifestyle dimensions, often based on procedures which have been kept secret, but researchers have seldom been able to verify such claims. In spite of this, the approach is very popular, has wide credibility and is often given very favorable media coverage. Probably because of this, it is often considered as a very important and promising approach by administrators working with the regulation of risk and risk communication. It may also be credible in some quarters because it affords a way of ‘explaining’ risk perception as being non-rational. In this paper, we give results from an empirical study of nuclear waste risk perception which is related to a basic risk perception model and three approaches to lifestyles: Kahle's List of Values, a Swedish adaptation of the ‘Agoramétrie’ approach suggested by a group of French researchers, and Dake and Wildavsky's Cultural Theory dimensions. It was found that nuclear waste risk perception could be modeled successfully with risk attitudes and perception data (basic model about 65% of the variance explained), but that lifestyle dimensions added virtually nothing to the explanatory power of the model. Lifestyle dimensions in isolation only explained a minor part of the variance.     

Erfolgsfaktoren effizienter Konfliktregelung durch Verhandlung im juristischen Kontext

This article deals with success factors for an efficient solving of legal conflicts using negotiations outside of trial courts. Negotiations, outside the court, provide the chance of finding a good win-win solution for all involved parties. A survey, which aims at finding the most common barriers to the resolution of conflicts outside trial courts, is presented in this article. The survey was conducted in a major international law firm. The lawyers were asked to list the most important reasons for negotiations failures. The results reveal a much higher importance of soft factors, especially communication and relationship issues over hard factors like e.g. business reasons. It is therefore concluded that communication and relationship are key success factors for dispute resolution in legal contexts. It is as well stressed that social science methodology and theories are useful tools for improving the understanding and effectiveness of legal negotiations. Two possible interventions for improving dispute resolution effectiveness in legal contexts are outlined.     

Warning Systems in Risk Management

A method is presented here that allows probabilistic evaluation and optimization of warning systems, and comparison of their performance and cost-effectiveness with those of other means of risk management. The model includes an assessment of the signals, and of human response, given the memory that people have kept of the quality of previous alerts. The trade-off between the rate of false alerts and the length of the lead time is studied to account for the long-term effects of "crying wolf" and the effectiveness of emergency actions. An explicit formulation of the system's benefits, including inputs from a signal model, a response model, and a consequence model, is given to allow optimization of the warning threshold and of the system's sensitivity.     

An equilibrium analysis of the gender wage gap

Within a two‐sector general equilibrium model, women's productivity in the marketplace decreases with the amount of household work they perform at home. Assuming that men's and women's household labour inputs are complementary here we prove the existence of multiple equilibria. In some, men and women allocate their labour equally and earn identical wages. In others, they allocate labour differently and earn different wages. In this context, beliefs about the inferiority of women's productivity are shown to be self‐fulfilling. By use of numerical examples, we show that welfare is highest when spouses allocate labour equally and suggest policy recommendations.     

Ad hoc rural regionalism

A new regionalism has been much documented and researched for metropolitan areas; this article documents that there is a new rural regionalism as well. In the United States, these groups appear most likely to emerge in areas that are challenged by outcomes characterizing globalization's effects on the rural condition: namely, exurban or metropolitan sprawl and the resulting landscape fragmentation, often in combination with extreme pressure on the profitability of small farms or other resource uses. This research asks: what impetus is behind rural regional efforts; and what sort of processes of institutionalization do these groups utilize? The paper builds on theory developed by the new regional geographers over the last twenty years, most notably Anne Gilbert and Anssi Paasi, and applies the theoretical framework to three North American case studies in what can be classified as ad hoc rural initiatives in contested landscapes, initiated by local or grassroots actors to foster a specific conceptualization of region. While specific programming varies for different groups, rural regionalism addressed the balance between and interconnections of landscape and land use change, social networks, economic viability, and impacts of global industry. Central to the case studies are actors' efforts to create a regional identity, including forming institutions, defining regional boundaries, and identifying social/symbolic shapes for the region. The research discusses the importance of viewing regionalization through the lens of agency.     

Burnout �C eine Herausforderung im Coaching

This paper studies the challenges for coaches working on burnout syndromes, located at the interface to severe depressions. There is an apparent similarity of symptoms between relatively light burnout events and rather profound depression episodes. Not surprisingly, the required therapeutic activities differ considerably; an incorrect diagnosis may impair the patient health considerably. I use two case studies to show how difficult it is to distinguish between burnout and depression symptoms early on. The paper concludes by encouraging coaches to cooperate more closely with psychotherapists in an attempt to improve the quality of service.     

Dealing with the past in the transition from care. A post-structural analysis of young people's accounts

Young people experiencing the transition from care often are weighed down by their past, both through their early experiences, but also by the way their past is made relevant in encounters with others. The aim of this article is two-fold. Firstly, to present a critical discursive analysis of young people's accounts of themselves in the transition from care. Secondly, to shed light on three different ways of making the transition from care; transition through a break with the past after moving out, transition through continuing change and transition as a way of dealing with the risk of further problems in their lives. The study is qualitative and includes 27 young women and men recruited from three child welfare institutions in the Oslo region of Norway. A multi-method approach including interviews, observations and documents has been used. The analytical framework is inspired by poststructuralist theory.¹