From child rescue to family protection: The evolution of the child protective movement in the United States

The child protective movement, an offshoot of animal protective work, initially adopted a punitive, law enforcement emphasis. Under the leadership of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, anti-cruelty work took on a broader focus based on prevention rather than punishment. The new approach stressed the need to maintain and enrich family life through broad social supports, relying on family casework and social reform. “Normal family life,” a vaguely denned but firmly middle-class notion, was established as the ideal to which social agencies should subscribe in their drive to protect children and insure an orderly society. Child protection, formerly isolated from the child welfare movement, gradually became a part of it.     

Personnel policies and the age structure of an occupation: the case of the academic labor market

Population projection techniques are used to project the size and age structure of the academic labor force. Age specific coverage data from Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association are used to proxy academic employment. Hiring, quit, retirement and death rates are calculated for 1981 and 1982. Projections of the future academic labor force are made holding these rates constant. The results show the importance of these entry and exit rates and also indicate how these rates can fluctuate from year to year.Estimates of the future demand for teachers are used to determine a target rate of growth of the academic labor force. Alternative personnel policies are incorporated into the projections. This analysis indicates that the personnel policies chosen to meet the desired labor force size have substantially different effects on the age structure of the labor force.The authors wish to acknowledge the cooperation of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association in providing the data used in this study and specifically Francis King for his assistance and encouragement. Helpful comments on this paper were provided by John Dutton, Ronald Schrimper, Jack Wilson, and Bryan Boulier.     

Community: Toward an integration of research,theory, evaluation,and public policy considerations

This article presents a paradigm for the analysis of communities and investments designed to improve them. Its fundamental objective is to provide the researcher, the theoretician, the evaluator, and the public policymaker with a common analytic framework. Direct and indirect effects of investment programs (e.g., in education, economic development, and health) can be documented longitudinally, and the community analyzed as an independent, dependent or mediating variable. The roots of this approach in social science and policy theory are explored. Five concepts (Status, Change, Interaction, Duality of Interaction and Change, and Viability) are incorporated. Community is operationally defined to include fifteen sectors whose interactions and changes can be studied systematically over time. This approach can help to clarify how a community, its people, culture, and institutions, and the outside world both influence and are influenced by investment programs.     

Looking Forward Not Looking Back: The Evaluation of Community Living

This article outlines the development of evaluative methods within the field of mental handicap services. It suggests that evaluators have too often taken for granted the tacit assumptions underlying service models, using these to determine the criteria for evaluating success. It argues that evaluators should be more explicit about the values they adopt, and what patterns of life services should be enabling people to achieve. By more closely linking evaluation criteria to what people with a mental handicap should achieve, evaluation can become more effective in promoting positive change in service models. The article describes an approach developed by the authors for the evaluation of the 'All-Wales Strategy for the Development of Services for Mentally Handicapped People'.     

Parallel process and the forced termination of a milieu group

Parallel process has been observed in the social work and psychiatric literature as an element in the psychodynamics of individual treatment and supervisory relationships. This paper suggests that it is present during group treatment as well and examines its emergence during the termination phase of a milieu group. A review of the literature on both parallel process and termination with groups is presented. It is noted that the conditions necessary for the emergence of parallel process are exactly those found during the termination period of group treatment. Clinical illustrations from the forced termination of a milieu group are presented, documenting a variety of parallel processes which were observed. The dynamics of these processes are examined. Potential indicators of parallel process are discussed, as well as implications for both treatment and supervision.     

ANALYSIS OF DOUBLY CENSORED DATA AND THE HIV INCUBATION PERIOD DISTRIBUTION IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

The paper analyses the distribution of times from HIV seroconversion to the first AIDS defining illness for a subcohort of the Western Australian HIV Cohort Study for whom the seroconversion date is known to fall within a calendar time window. The analysis is based on a generalised gamma model for the incubation times and a piecewise constant distribution for the conditional times of seroconversion given the seroconversion windows. This allows flexible hazard shapes and also allows comparison of goodness of fit of the gamma and Weibull distributions which are often used for modelling incubation times. Computational issues are discussed. In these data, neither age at seroconversion, nor calendar time of seroconversion, nor the identification of a seroconversion illness appears to afFect incubation distributions. The Weibull distribution appears to provide a reasonable fit. The distribution of times from seroconversion to an HIV-related death is also briefly considered.     

Longitudinal measurement models in evaluation research: Examining stability and change

This article provides an introduction to the use of Confirmatory Factor Analysis to test measurement invariance and stability in longitudinal research. The approach is illustrated through examples representing: (a) one construct, two measurement waves; (b) one construct, three waves; (c) two constructs, two waves; and (d) comparison of treatment and control groups in pre-post designs. Basic issues in establishing measurement invariance over time, across treatment groups, and within measurement waves are discussed. Estimates of the stability coefficients that are corrected for measurement error and method variance associated with each specific measured variable are provided. Establishing measurement invariance is a critical requirement for making inferences about treatment effects and changes in constructs over time.     

Political assessment by international firms: Models or methodologies?

Political risk is defined in terms of managerial contingencies arising from political events and processes. A number of “first-generation” assessment methodologies are reviewed and compared in terms of their degree of structure (explicit model of process) and systemization (formalization of methodology). The paper concludes that, at this point, effective political assessment is more likely to result from explicit specification of causal relationships and implementation of systematic analytical procedures than from development of increased methodological sophistication or elegance.     

The influence of contextual variables on interpersonal spacing

Four studies examined the effects of contextual variables on interpersonal spacing. Contextual variables were defined as transitory factors that involved the setting in which an interaction occurs; these variables were delineated from personal and interpersonal characteristics. In each experimental setting, white male subjects were allowed to choose the distance at which they interacted with a stranger. The first study found that subjects who had experienced social isolation prior to the interaction chose greater distances than subjects who had not been isolated. The second study found that subjects chose greater distances when they believed their interaction would be observed by others than when the interaction was private. Results from the third study yielded an interaction between topic of conversation and expected length of conversation with greatest distance being chosen when subjects expected a long conversation to focus on a personal topic. In the final study, room size and shape influenced interpersonal distance; the interaction indicated that room size affected distance only in rectangular rooms. The results are discussed in terms of equilibrium model (Argyle & Dean, 1965). It is argued that contextual variables affect intimacy, and that the equilibrium model can explicate the effects of contextual as well as personal and interpersonal variables.The help of the following people in conducting the research and analyzing the data is gratefully acknowledged: Elizabeth Brown, Brad Reeves, Michael Satir, Sheryl Vaughn, Mary Holland, Quig Lawrence, William Webb, and Kerry Marsh. Thanks are also in order for an unusually thorough reviewer who raised a number of important issues.