Evaluation and assessment

The current debate about the balance between child protection and family support, informed by the publication of a sequence of government sponsored research studies, tends to focus on the investigative stage of child protection relating to Section 47 of the Children Act 1989 and contrasts this with the less stigmatising approach of assessment and support to the families of children in need under Section 17 of the Act. Little attention has so far been paid in Government documents and guidance to the child protection process after the initial investigative stage. The work of the core group, set up by the child protection conference when a child's name is placed on the register, is, however, the main vehicle for the implementation of the plan to protect the child(ren) at risk in a family and marries the twin strands of protection and support.

Because of the pressures on training and staff development sections of Social Services Departments, as well as on academic institutions offering social work courses to meet the mandatory requirements of CCETSW and of the Training Support Programme, training and education relating to core groups have been afforded low priority in most authorities and universities.

Research suggests that there is great potential for prevention, for family support and for positive work with children and their families in this area of work. A recent national conference suggested models for progressing good practice. A pre-conference questionnaire was completed by conference participants and is to be extended to all local authority Social Services Departments to collect information on current practice and procedures.

Training Issues include the following:

• 1. partnership practice with both family members and professionals;

• 2. communication with children and young people and other family members;

• 3. power and issues of difference;

• 4. clear and detailed planning, monitoring and review;

• 5. user perspectives.

Some examples of professionals' and service users' views will be given as well as suggestions for a framework and strategy for training in this area.     

Dynamic stochastic block models: parameter estimation and detection of changes in community structure

The stochastic block model (SBM) is widely used for modelling network data by assigning individuals (nodes) to communities (blocks) with the probability of an edge existing between individuals depending upon community membership. In this paper, we introduce an autoregressive extension of the SBM, based on continuous-time Markovian edge dynamics. The model is appropriate for networks evolving over time and allows for edges to turn on and off. Moreover, we allow for the movement of individuals between communities. An effective reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is introduced for sampling jointly from the posterior distribution of the community parameters and the number and location of changes in community membership. The algorithm is successfully applied to a network of mice.     

Day Labourers' Work Related Injuries: An Assessment of Risks,Choices, and Policies

Literature and theory surrounding the informal economy in international contexts suggest that informal work arrangements may entail assuming various levels of risk, and that the higher the level of risk in an employment arrangement, the higher the premium paid to the worker. This study is designed to assess if a wage compensation for risk exists within the United States' day labour job market ‐ the most visible sector of the United States' informal economy. Using data from the 2005 National Day Labour Survey we find a statistically significant wage premium indicating that a risk‐wage tradeoff within the day labour informal economy exists. Ultimately, we argue that current policy interventions facilitated through day labour centres into the day labour market appear to be effective in mitigating the risks associated with this type of employment.

• Evidence of a risk‐wage premium in the day labour market suggests there is an incentive to assume higher levels of risk in work arrangements which presents significant concerns for worker safety.
• Higher levels of work related risks assumed by day labourers, may be minimized if they receive proper safety training through a formal venue such as a worker centre.
• Worker centres only serve 20 per cent of all day labourers in the United States, suggesting a need for the establishment of additional worker centres in other connected or industry based work sites, to help mitigate potential work related risks and injuries in the day labour market.

     

A computationally efficient nonparametric approach for changepoint detection

In this paper we build on an approach proposed by Zou et al. (2014) for nonparametric changepoint detection. This approach defines the best segmentation for a data set as the one which minimises a penalised cost function, with the cost function defined in term of minus a non-parametric log-likelihood for data within each segment. Minimising this cost function is possible using dynamic programming, but their algorithm had a computational cost that is cubic in the length of the data set. To speed up computation, Zou et al. (2014) resorted to a screening procedure which means that the estimated segmentation is no longer guaranteed to be the global minimum of the cost function. We show that the screening procedure adversely affects the accuracy of the changepoint detection method, and show how a faster dynamic programming algorithm, pruned exact linear time (PELT) (Killick et al. 2012), can be used to find the optimal segmentation with a computational cost that can be close to linear in the amount of data. PELT requires a penalty to avoid under/over-fitting the model which can have a detrimental effect on the quality of the detected changepoints. To overcome this issue we use a relatively new method, changepoints over a range of penalties (Haynes et al. 2016), which finds all of the optimal segmentations for multiple penalty values over a continuous range. We apply our method to detect changes in heart-rate during physical activity.     

A Note on the Effect of Wavelet Choice on the Estimation of the Evolutionary Wavelet Spectrum

The locally stationary wavelet process model assumes some underlying wavelet family in order to generate the process. Analyses of such processes also assume that the same wavelet family is used to obtain unbiased estimates of the wavelet spectrum. In practice this would not typically be possible since, a priori, the underlying wavelet family is not known. This article considers the effect of wavelet choice within this setting. A particular focus is given to the estimation of the evolutionary wavelet spectrum due to its importance in many reported applications.     

Supervisory coaching and performance feedback as mediators of the relationships between leadership styles,work engagement,and turnover intention

Human resource development (HRD) is key to organizational success. With some HRD roles devolving to leaders in recent years, a gap in understanding is now evident in how leaders’ leadership styles shape development-oriented behaviours that may effectively assist them in fulfilling their HRD roles, and the corresponding effects that this has on employee work engagement and turnover intention. This study compared the effects of transformational and transactional leadership styles on employee attitudes (i.e. work engagement and turnover intention) through leaders’ behaviours (i.e. supervisory coaching and performance feedback). This study used a multilevel approach (i.e. matching leaders to multiple subordinates) with 500 employees, nested in 65 workgroups from private organizations in Malaysia. As hypothesized, we found a link between transformational (but not transactional) leadership and higher levels of supervisory coaching and performance feedback, and that these job resources mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and work engagement. Furthermore, we found that work engagement mediates the relationships of both supervisory coaching and performance feedback to turnover intention. Overall, the study results reveal one way in which Asian leaders can effectively facilitate some aspects of HRD through development-focused behaviours which serve as job resources to boost work engagement and reduce turnover intention.