Boundary Ambiguity and Borderline Personality Traits: Implications for Treatment for Adolescent Girls in Foster Care

This article explores the relationship between boundary ambiguity and borderline personality traits in adolescent girls in foster care. Boundary ambiguity is a family systems concept: family members are uncertain about who is in or out of the family—in either psychological or physical presence or absence. In foster care, it can be assumed that an adolescent girl has experienced trauma significant enough to be removed from her family. The connection between early childhood trauma and attachment disruption in addition to the connection between insecure/disorganized attachment and borderline personality disorder leads to the conclusion that these same adolescents are at high risk for developing borderline personality traits. The sample consists of 40 caseworkers from New England’s child protection departments and therapists from residential programs working with adolescent girls. They completed the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure for Adolescents to determine the presence of personality disruption as well as a variation of Pauline Boss’s Boundary Ambiguity Scale #1, and demographic questionnaires. The results find a significant correlation between boundary ambiguity and borderline personality traits. These findings provide directions for future research in clinical treatment and child welfare policy making.     

Globalizations and the Transformation of Environmental Activism: Turkey since the 1980s

Social scientists have developed two main arguments regarding the impacts of globalization on environmental activism and politics. Environmental activism is thought to be associated with instances of local resistance to transnational corporations, and also with a diffusion of environmentalist ideas, practices, and regulations from global core to periphery. Alternatively, this paper argues that by eroding states' sovereignty and supporting ethnic and religious minority groups within and across nations, globalization processes have fused environmental politics with ethnic and religious identity politics worldwide. The environmentalist discourses and activities of Islamist intellectuals and Alevis (a large religious minority) in Turkey since the 1980s illustrate the limited applicability of center–periphery models of globalization, and the complexity of globalizations' impacts on environmental activism and politics.     

When Are Local Incentive Constraints Sufficient?

We study the question of whether local incentive constraints are sufficient to imply full incentive compatibility in a variety of mechanism design settings, allowing for probabilistic mechanisms. We give a unified approach that covers both continuous and discrete type spaces. On many common preference domains—including any convex domain of cardinal or ordinal preferences, single‐peaked ordinal preferences, and successive single‐crossing ordinal preferences—local incentive compatibility (suitably defined) implies full incentive compatibility. On domains of cardinal preferences that satisfy a strong nonconvexity condition, local incentive compatibility is not sufficient. Our sufficiency results hold for dominant‐strategy and Bayesian Nash solution concepts, and allow for some interdependence in preferences.     

The Unity Council at 40: a pioneering community development and service organization (1967-2007)

The Spanish Speaking Unity Council (Unity Council) is a community development nonprofit organization that was established in 1964, during the civil rights movement, by a group of community members who wanted to ensure the political representation of the Latino community. Over its 45-year history, the Unity Council has grown into a $12 million community development organization that delivers a range of programming, including social services and employment training as well as facilitating the development and support of local businesses, low-income housing, and neighborhood improvement activities. The history of the agency presents the multiple challenges and rewards associated with development in an underserved community and an example of the important role that leadership plays in the growth of a nonprofit.     

ON THE DESIGN OF HIERARCHICAL PRODUCTION PLANNING SYSTEMS

To provide effective managerial support for decisions related to production planning and scheduling processes, it is useful to partition the set of decisions into a hierarchical framework. In the resulting system, higher level decisions impose constraints on lower level actions, and lower level decisions provide the necessary feed-back to reevaluate higher level actions. The purpose of this paper is to suggest optimum procedures to deal with the resulting subproblems and to analyze the interaction mechanisms among the different hierarchical levels. Computational results are given.     

On Causal Inferences for Personalized Medicine: How Hidden Causal Assumptions Led to Erroneous Causal Claims About the D-Value

Abstract

Personalized medicine asks if a new treatment will help a particular patient, rather than if it improves the average response in a population. Without a causal model to distinguish these questions, interpretational mistakes arise. These mistakes are seen in an article by Demidenko that recommends the “D-value,” which is the probability that a randomly chosen person from the new-treatment group has a higher value for the outcome than a randomly chosen person from the control-treatment group. The abstract states “The D-value has a clear interpretation as the proportion of patients who get worse after the treatment” with similar assertions appearing later. We show these statements are incorrect because they require assumptions about the potential outcomes which are neither testable in randomized experiments nor plausible in general. The D-value will not equal the proportion of patients who get worse after treatment if (as expected) those outcomes are correlated. Independence of potential outcomes is unrealistic and eliminates any personalized treatment effects; with dependence, the D-value can even imply treatment is better than control even though most patients are harmed by the treatment. Thus, D-values are misleading for personalized medicine. To prevent misunderstandings, we advise incorporating causal models into basic statistics education.     

Direct Management of COVID-19 at National and Subnational Level: The Case of the Western Amazon Countries

Public Organization Review - This paper analyses direct management of COVID-19 in Brazil, Colombia and Peru, the three largest countries in the Western Amazon region. Using information gathered...     

Linking Ethnic Identification to Organisational Solidarity

Public Organization Review - This paper investigates the process through which ethnic identification (EI) influences employees’ sense of organisational solidarity (OS). A survey of 1525...