SHORT REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this article: Chris Beyrer, War in the Blood: Sex, Politics and AIDS in Southeast Asia Caroline H. Bledsoe et al. (eds.), Critical Perspectives on Schooling and Fertility in the Developing World Donald J. Hernandez and Evan Charney (eds)., From Generation to Generation: The Health and Well-Being of Children in Immigrant Families Nana Poku and David T. Graham (eds.), Redefining Security: Population Movements and National Security Jyoti Shankar Singh, Creating a New Consensus on Population Jael Silliman and Ynestra King (eds.), Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment, and Development; A Project of the Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment Michael S. Teitelbaum and Jay Winter, A Question of Numbers: High Migration, Low Fertility, and the Politics of National Identity United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Monitoring 1997 Anthony Young, Land Resources: Now and for the Future     

The Ethics of Researching Friends: On Convenience Sampling in Qualitative Management and Organization Studies

Scholarship on the ethical complexities resulting from friendships which develop with respondents during qualitative data collection is well established. There has also been consideration of the ethics of researching existing friends across various disciplines. But, although management and organization scholars use convenience samples of the latter kind in qualitative research, there is virtually no discussion in our field of the ethical implications. In seeking to rectify this, I draw on my experiences of a project where I gathered data from six friends on their experiences of and attitudes towards sexual relationships, motherhood and life–work ‘balance’. I discuss the reportage of what sometimes felt like confidences, the use of ex ante data, the objectification of participants and difficulties relating to respondent validation in order to highlight some of the ethical challenges in qualitative management and organizational research with friends.     

Looking After Children: a case of individualised service delivery

This is a discussion of the debate in the literature on the new Looking After Children system of managing out of home care for children. This is an important program initiative in results‐oriented government that takes an individualised approach to children in care. The literature generally falls into the two categories of either relatively uncritical advocacy of LAC or its wholesale critique. These two camps pass as ships in the night and echo polarised epistemologies within policy analysis. There is very little analytical attention to LAC as an instance of the wider human service trends of individualised planning and case management.     

Gestural development and its relation to cognition during the transition to language

Four Parisian-French infants, two male and two female, were observed bi-weekly at home with their parents or caretakers from 9 or 10 months until approximately 14 months. Their entire repertoire of communicative gestures was coded from videorecordings. Comment gestures, particularly pointing in a book and showing an object, increased after 11 months, and Request gestures involving the adult as an agent increased after 13 months. The appearance of these specific gestures followed the ability to perform object permanence tasks with visible displacements and means-ends tasks involving obtaining an object by pulling a string horizontally. More primitive Reach-request and Emotive gestures declined after 11 months. These findings are compared to those obtained from English-Canadian infants followed over the same age period.Portions of this paper were presented at the Vth European Conference in Developmental Psychology held in Seville in September, 1992. This research was supported by a fellowship to the first author from the Fondation Fyssen, Paris. The filming equipment was supplied by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Blvd. Raspail, Paris. We are very grateful to the French families for their cooperation and to Nurit Nadler and Grace Borzellino for their assistance in the coding of the gestures.     

Subhypergraph counts in extremal and random hypergraphs and the fractional <Emphasis Type="Italic">q</Emphasis>-independence

We study the extremal parameter N(n,m,H) which is the largest number of copies of a hypergraph H that can be formed of at most n vertices and m edges. Generalizing previous work of Alon (Isr. J. Math. 38:116–130, 1981), Friedgut and Kahn (Isr. J. Math. 105:251–256, 1998) and Janson, Oleszkiewicz and the third author (Isr. J. Math. 142:61–92, 2004), we obtain an asymptotic formula for N(n,m,H) which is strongly related to the solution α _q (H) of a linear programming problem, called here the fractional q-independence number of H. We observe that α _q (H) is a piecewise linear function of q and determine it explicitly for some ranges of q and some classes of H. As an application, we derive exponential bounds on the upper tail of the distribution of the number of copies of H in a random hypergraph.     

Simulation Study on Improved Shapiro–Wilk Tests for Normality

The article concerns tests for normality based on the Shapiro–Wilk W statistic. The constants in the test statistic are recalculated as those given in Shapiro and Wilk are incorrect. The empirical significance levels and power of improved tests have been evaluated in simulation study and compared to original ones. The improved tests were also applied to the multivariate case. In this case, we consider two implementations of the W statistic, the first one proposed by Srivastava and Hui and the other by Hanusz and Tarasinska. Empirical size of tests and their power have been compared to the Henze–Zirkler test.     

Financial instruments used by Polish municipalities in response to the first wave of COVID-19

Public Organization Review - Studies on the influence of COVID-19 on municipalities are scarce, although it was precisely municipalities that stood in the first line of combat. It is important to...