Alcohol Problems,Marriage, and Treatment: Developing a Theoretical Timeline

SUMMARY

While research findings over the past twenty years have consistently supported the efficacy of couples work with people experiencing alcohol related problems, in the field of practice in Ireland there is little evidence of the development of interventions based on a couples/marital perspective. This paper examines the place of marital work in the alcohol field through a review of the literature from 1950s to the present in order to discover the limitations in theory and research that might explain the reluctance of practitioners to adopt this method of intervention.     

A Critical Appraisal of the 1998 Meta-Analytic Review of Child Sexual Abuse Outcomes Reported by Rind,Tromovitch, and Bauserman

SUMMARY

The goal of this article is to present a methodological critique of the 1998 meta-analysis of child sexual abuse outcomes by Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman. Seven major concerns are addressed. Rind et al.'s view is, at best, extremely limited. By restricting a supposedly broad meta-analysis to only some of the population in question, the conclusions they drew regarding this complex topic, primarily that adult-child sex is not necessarily harmful, are invalid.     

Social work supervision of young people

This paper summarizes findings on 50 teenagers supervised by local authority social services (work) departments. Interviews were held with social workers, young people and parents at the start of intervention and about a year later. Pre-tests and post-tests were also used to complement other statistical and qualitative data. After identifying the main reasons for the teenagers being on formal or informal supervision, the paper moves on to discuss the process, content and outcome of supervision as perceived by each of the three key actors. It also outlines what the young people and their parents found positive and helpful about supervision. Finally the paper demonstrates that forms of help and control need not be opposites and that social workers can help some very troubled teenagers. However, in order for services to have an impact, they have to be deployed as part of a package rather than as alternatives.     

Black Teenage Mothers' Understandings of the Effects of Maltreatment on their Coping Style and Parenting Practice: A Pilot Study

This article discusses a qualitative pilot study conducted with Black teenage mothers affected by maltreatment histories, exploring the feasibility of researching how they develop insights into the effects on their parenting skills. The results indicate key impact areas, including their relationships with their carers, perceptions of significant relationships and increased vulnerability to relationship abuse. As the young mothers resisted seeing themselves as victims and utilised an avoidance‐centred coping strategy, their ability to recognise the impact of harmful childhood experiences was limited. The article concludes with reflections on the pilot study's implications and limitations.     

A temporal correlation function for the association between patient‐reported outcome and clinical endpoints

For clinical trials with multiple endpoints, the primary interest is usually to evaluate the relationship of these endpoints and treatment interventions. Studying the correlation of two clinical trial endpoints can also be of interests. For example, the association between patient‐reported outcome and clinically assessed endpoint could answer important research questions and also generate interesting hypothesis for future research. However, it is not straightforward to quantify such association. In this article, we proposed a multiple event approach to profile such association with a temporal correlation function, visualized by a correlation function plot over time with a confidence band. We developed this approach by extending the existing methodology in recurrent event literature. This approach was shown to be generally unbiased and could be a useful tool for data visualization and inference. We demonstrated the use of this method with data from a real clinical trial. Although this approach was developed to evaluate the association between patient‐reported outcome and adverse events, it can also be used to evaluate the association of any two endpoints that can be translated to time‐to‐event endpoints. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bayesian and Dominant‐Strategy Implementation in the Independent Private‐Values Model

We prove—in the standard independent private‐values model—that the outcome, in terms of interim expected probabilities of trade and interim expected transfers, of any Bayesian mechanism can also be obtained with a dominant‐strategy mechanism.     

医疗安全不良事件预警系统的应用探讨

借助医疗质量安全监控系统构建医疗安全不良事件预警模式,在医疗安全不良事件信息收集的基础上,通过系统进行自动定量分析和典型案例定性分析,发布预警信息,从根源上减少医疗安全不良事件的发生,保障医疗质量安全.     

Parental Divorce and Child Mental Health Trajectories

A process‐oriented approach to parental divorce locates the experience within the social and developmental context of children's lives, providing greater insight into how parental divorce produces vulnerability in some children and resiliency in others. The current study involves prospectively tracking a nationally representative sample of Canadian children of ages 4–7 and living with two biological parents at initial interview in 1994 (N = 2,819), and comparing the mental health trajectories of children whose parents remain married with those whose parents divorce by 1998. Results from growth curve models confirm that, even before marital breakup, children whose parents later divorce exhibit higher levels of anxiety/depression and antisocial behavior than children whose parents remain married. There is a further increase in child anxiety/depression but not antisocial behavior associated with the event of parental divorce itself. Controlling for predivorce parental socioeconomic and psychosocial resources fully accounts for poorer child mental health at initial interview among children whose parents later divorce, but does not explain the divorce‐specific increase in anxiety/depression. Finally, a significant interaction between parental divorce and predivorce levels of family dysfunction suggests that child antisocial behavior decreases when marriages in highly dysfunctional families are dissolved.     

Measuring effectiveness of production in the public sector

Key concepts in efficiency analyses are efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency is popularly connected to ‘doing the things right’ and effectiveness to ‘doing the right things’. The paper elaborates upon the latter concept within a setting where resources are transformed into outputs under the control of a public provider, while outcomes with outputs as inputs represent higher social goals, but this production is outside the public provider׳s direct control. A new measure of overall preference effectiveness is introduced and its decomposition into output-oriented efficiency and output-mix efficiency is shown. The monumental task of getting the necessary information for calculating effectiveness is highlighted.