Group Benefit and Protection of Pediatric Research Subjects: Grimes v. Kennedy Krieger and the Lead Abatement Study

The Maryland Court of Appeals in Grimes v. Kennedy Krieger Institute was sharply critical of the lead abatement study conducted by this Institute, an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University. Grimes ruled that investigators might, given the facts of the case, have a special relationship with subjects, thereby creating a duty of care that could, if breached, give rise to an action in negligence. This ruling has implications for pediatric research practices and long-standing disputes among informed people of good will about what pediatric studies should be permitted.     

论《墨子》经济思想中的生态因子及对当代的启迪

墨家的经济思想蕴涵着丰富的生态因子,这一点在其生产观、消费观、赋税观及分配观中这几个领域得到了充分的体现.墨家的这种思想给身处生态困境中的当代人类以深刻的启迪.     

Because they were there: Access,deliberation, and the mobilization of networks for support

When people need help, what is the process through which they decide whom in their network to turn to? Research on social support has described a process that is deliberative in nature: people determine their needs, assess who in their network has the needed attributes—such as skill, trustworthiness, intimacy, and accessibility—and then activate that tie. Nevertheless, research in behavioral economics and other fields has shown that people make many decisions not deliberatively but intuitively. We examine this possibility in the context of social support by focusing on one factor: accessibility. Although researchers have argued that people weigh the accessibility of potential helpers as they do any other attribute, accessibility may be not only an attribute of the helper but also a condition of the situation. We develop a framework to make this question tractable for survey research and evaluate competing hypotheses using original data on an analytically strategic sample of ∼2000 college students, probing concrete instances of social support. We identify and document not one but three decision processes, reflective, incidental, and spontaneous activation, which differ in the extent to which actors had deliberated on whether to seek help and on whom to approach before activating the tie. We find that while the process was reflective (consistent with existing theory) when skill or trustworthiness played a role, it was significantly less so (consistent with the alternative) when accessibility did. Findings suggest that actors decide whom in their network to mobilize through at least three systematically different processes, two of which are consistent less with either active “mobilization” or explicit “help seeking” than with responsiveness to opportunity and context.     

Demand for gambling: development and assessment of a gambling purchase task

Self-report purchase tasks are a novel approach examining the reinforcing value of addictive behaviour relative to increasing monetary costs required to access the addictive behaviour (i.e. demand). These measures reveal a positive relationship between the indices of demand and addiction problem severity and can elucidate factors associated with motivation for substance use. Gambling is an addictive behaviour that has not been examined using this paradigm. This study seeks to adapt and examine the purchase task for gambling behaviour. A gambling purchase task was devised that asked individuals how often per month they would gamble at various cover charges. Participants were 73 adults from the community with either gambling disorder (n = 28) or alcohol use disorder (n = 24) or were a healthy control (n = 21). Both the alcohol and gambling purchase tasks were administered. Results demonstrate discriminant validity of the gambling purchase task, as individuals with gambling disorder have significantly greater demand for accessing gambling than other groups. The alcohol purchase task also evidenced discriminant validity in that individuals with alcohol use disorder have significantly greater demand for alcohol than other groups. These findings support the use of the gambling purchase task to assess the demand for gambling.     

Strategic Framing of Adat in Land-Acquisition Politics in East Sumba

This article is about the strategic use of adat arguments in the politics of large-scale land acquisition. While customary (adat) communities are commonly depicted as small local minorities living in the forests and being guardians of the environment, in many situations such communities occupy a majority position within the district. Majority adat communities are internally differentiated into categories of actors with varying and conflicting interests. This article focuses on Sumba in eastern Indonesia, where state and adat powers are not opposed but historically aligned. We analyse how five common ways of framing adat in Sumba are currently being deployed in land-acquisition politics, in situations supporting plantation land acquisition or protesting against farmers’ land dispossession. We draw attention to what we call ‘strategic adat framing’ as a political activity. The article calls for analysing the historical and social context of local deployments of adat for understanding the impact of current government pro-adat policies.     

Economics,psychotherapy and politics

The paper explores the application of ideas derived from psychotherapy to questions of economic and social policy. It is argued that disputes concerning human nature underlie many debates on economic theory. Class is reviewed from internal and emotional perspectives. Psychological obstacles to the achievement of economic inequality are explored and ways of overcoming them critically discussed. Particular attention is paid to the operation of economic sadism in the behaviour of individuals and societies. A range of possible gender differences in relation to money is reviewed. Inherited wealth is explored from the perspective of ‘therapy thinking’. The paper proposes that we reconsider what is deemed to be realistic and what is deemed to be (hopelessly) idealistic in thinking about economics. The paper concludes by proposing a deeper discussion of the problematic of sacrifice in connection with sustainable economics.     

Global standards for social work education and training

This paper explores the ways in which social workers can be helped to acquire the wider understanding of relevant legal frameworks which is currently necessary for child-centred practice, given the influence of an ecological perspective on such practice. It arises from the development of a module on child care social work and the community for the Post Qualifying Child Care Award by members of the Law and Social Work Departments at Brunel University. The authors believe that to reach beyond a tokenistic acknowledgement of the ecological perspective requires an understanding and experience of the complex layers which make up the widening and complex social worlds of the child. The paper explains how social workers were encouraged to appreciate both the ever-widening circles of potentially relevant law and the different roles through which law operates. It concludes that a deeper engagement with the legal implications of an ecological dimension to practice would make such practice more effective and would also help combat social exclusion and discrimination.     

Pro-social behavior in the TV show “Come Dine With Me”: An empirical investigation

We investigate the influence of social approval, reputation, and individual characteristics on voting behavior in the German version of the TV show “Come Dine With Me”. Five contestants prepare a dinner for each other during the course of a week and evaluate each other’s performance. The winner receives a monetary prize. Evaluations remain concealed until the show is broadcast. Because actual voting behavior remains concealed during the show, a contestant could evaluate his/her opponents as zero in an effort to increase his/her own chances of winning, without risking later punishment in the form of low scores. However, this behavior is not observed in our dataset, which runs from 2006 to 2011. We find that all of the following have a significant influence on the evaluating behavior: the objective sophistication of a meal; the order of cooking; whether a person has already cooked; and the social similarity between contestant and evaluator. These findings help to improve understanding of the impact that reputation and social approval have on economic decision making.     

Predictors of General Well-Being Among Female Single Parent College Students

The purpose of Ulis study was to investigate whether socioeconomic status, social support systems, self-esteem, family envi- ronment, and length of Lime as a single parent were associated with the general well-being of female single parent college shidents (n = 51). Statistically sigruficant relationships were found between social support systcms, self-esteem, family environment, and the general well-being of the subjects.