We Know Some Things: Parent–Adolescent Relationships in Retrospect and Prospect

This article examines the most important ideas to have emerged from the last 25 years of research on adolescent development in the family context and suggests some directions for the future. Two major sets of questions organize the review. First, how can we best characterize normative family relationships during adolescence, and, more specifically, is adolescence a time of parent à child conflict? Second, how do variations in parent – child relationships affect the developing adolescent? The answer to the first question depends on what is meant by conflict and, more importantly, from whom one gathers data. There is a need for a new perspective on the family, one that emphasizes the different viewpoints and stakes that parents and adolescents bring to their relationship with each other. Special attention should be paid to studies of the mental health of parents of adolescents. With regard to the second question, it is argued that there is enough evidence to conclude that adolescents benefit from having parents who are authoritative: warm, firm, and accepting of their needs for psychological autonomy. Therefore, it would seem most beneficial to institute a systematic, large‐scale, multifaceted, and ongoing public health campaign to educate parents about adolescence, one that draws on the collective resources and expertise of health‐care professionals, scientists, governmental agencies, community organizations, schools, religious institutions, and the mass media.     

Overcoming the zero interest-rate bound: A quantitative prescription

Using a macro-econometric model we provide a quantitative estimate of the cash transfer or tax cut that would achieve recovery from a severe recession when the central bank is unable to achieve full recovery because of the zero bound. We introduce an automatic transfer and simulate its triggering in the severe recession. We find that an automatic transfer that averages 3% of quarterly GDP repeated four times (quarterly) reduces the unemployment rate an additional full percentage point and thereby completes the recovery. We recommend that legislatures enact an automatic counter-cyclical fiscal policy that will assure adequate stimulus without generating a long-term debt problem.     

An alternative sampling strategy for obtaining child health data in a reproductive health survey

Retrospective demographic surveys typically collect substantial information about child health. This information is often collected for all children born during a specified period. For women with several young children, the interview can become quite long. To shorten the interview, some surveys have asked child health questions only for the last child born. However, data on the last birth may be biased because last children have a younger age distribution and have longer subsequent birth intervals than does the average child. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to collecting child health data - that child health questions be asked only for a child chosen randomly from among the respondent's children younger than age five. This alternative has the advantage of keeping the interview shorter but does not lead to biased information.Abbreviations DHS Demographic and Health Surveys     

VoiceYourView: anytime, anyplace, anywhere user participation

Citizens are increasingly called upon to comment on issues that directly concern them. However, such consultations may be tokenistic [1] as they occur with limited respondents, or may be at a time, or in a format which is inconvenient to the user. To encourage wider participation, the VoiceYourView project (vYv) has developed a system allowing people to make comments in a manner, time and place convenient to them. A real world trial of the prototype system was conducted at Coventry University campus to explore issues related to the system's usability and usage, as a means of enabling campus users to comment on their environment. Members of the university population were invited to comment on the university estate using one of five technologies (e-mail, online form, iPhone app, SMS message, or electronic kiosk). Although the immediate application area in this case was the design of public spaces, the approach can be transferred to other domains and thus provide a new way of gathering user information. Submitted comments were automatically analysed in terms of theme, sentiment, location and actionability and displayed online in a 2D visualisation. It is argued that that online data collection (crowd sourcing and skimming social networks) may provide a rich source of information for future ergonomists.     

The Systems Psychodynamics of a Joint Venture: Anxiety, Social Defenses, and the Management of Mutual Dependence

Joint ventures, mergers and other forms oforganizational alliances are rapidly becoming a businessnecessity. However, on an almost daily basis, experiencesuggests that such alliances often pose critical dilemmas for those entering into them. Centralamong these are collaborating across differences inorganizational cultures and forging a new organizationalidentity. At a deeper level, there are also often paranoid concerns and fantasies about thelong-term lack of equity in the transfer of knowledgeand capability. This paper, therefore, outlines asystems psychodynamic perspective on intergroup andinterorganizational relationships for developing an in-depthunderstanding of some common irrational and emotionaldifficulties alliance relationships face. It then goeson to describe an illustrative case and concludes with an appraisal of the advantages of a systemspsychodynamic conceptual perspective — taking bothstructure and process into account — which hasbeen neglected or minimized in the literature onorganizational alliances.     

A phased increase in the U.S. investment rate: Sacrifice times, T-year gains, and investment rate returns

We simulate a phased increase in the U.S. investment rate using a translog production function with technical progress (disembodied and/or embodied). We assume there will be an absorption lag implying that factors are underutilized during the transition to a higher investment rate. We find that the “sacrifice time” (the time that elapses until consumption surpasses the value it would have had under the initial investment rate) is roughly nine years. Across alternative specifications, phase-in periods, and absorption lags, the sacrifice time varies from seven to 13 years, and is insensitive to the percentage increase in the investment rate. With a three-year phase-in of a 20 percent increase in the investment rate with a one-year absorption lag, the average “ecade gain” in output (the percentage gain at the end of a decade) is roughly 4 percent; the decade gain in consumption, 0 percent; the five-decade gain, 10 percent in output and 6 percent in consumption; and the “investment rate return” (the internal rate of return on a permanent increase in the investment rate), 13 percent.     

La crise du recrutement des lads-jockeys : l’essoufflement d’un système d’emploi corporatiste

How is the French labor market for lads organized (recruitment, careers, personnel management, retraining)? What changes are under way? A recent phenomenon - the vanishing of young lads with diplomas - helps answer these questions. Can this be explained other than by the discrepancy between dreams about this job and on-the-job reality? The latter can be understood only in relation to the economic and social changes in this working environment that have, in particular, threatened trainers’ positions. This happened during a period when the schooling of youth lasts longer and ends with a diploma even though this sector cannot absorb these young people. This difficult situation has several explanations. Working conditions have worsened (increasing precariousness, more stress, career obstructions) while young people have become more demanding, more critical and more qualified. Meanwhile, the old paternalistic system for managing personnel is falling apart.     

Becoming an Ally: Breaking the Cycle of Oppression (2nd edn)

Abstract

In the present context of “get tough on crime” and “back to criminal justice” campaigns that continue to dominate political agendas throughout Australia, critics point to the inadequacy of “welfarist” or reformist criminological and sociological theories that have informed interventions in the past and reinforce the need for “retributive justice” models of penal policy. The present paper examines historical evidence on the role of the human sciences in juvenile justice administration during the 1940s, a formative time when psychiatric, psychological, and social work expertise came together in the form of the Children's Court Clinic in Victoria. It suggests that contemporary critiques about the failure of the welfare model of juvenile justice inadequately capture the historical functioning of expertise in justice administration and the real extent to which the welfare model as “actual rehabilitative intervention” was ever implemented.