Parenting fostered adolescents: skills and strategies

This paper discusses findings from a recently completed study of adolescent foster care, which included a detailed assessment of the parenting approaches and strategies used by the foster carers of adolescents in long‐term placements. Sixty‐eight foster carers were interviewed at two points in time. The first interview was conducted two months after the start of a new adolescent placement and the second after the placement had been continuing for a year, or at the point of disruption if this occurred earlier. The interview schedules were designed specifically for this study and were based upon well‐established techniques developed in other studies of parenting. They enabled the researchers to make summary ratings for each carer on established dimensions of parenting such as control and discipline, responsiveness and the level of engagement with the child. The researchers assessed how these strategies changed and developed in relation to the young person's behaviour and whether these approaches influenced either the likelihood of placement disruption or the quality of the placement for the child. This paper describes the parenting strategies used by the foster carers, highlighting the areas of parenting that significantly affected the placement outcomes and the corresponding implications for policy and practice.     

Parental mental health: disruptions to parenting and outcomes for children

The association between parental mental health problems and negative outcomes for children has been long known. This paper addresses three issues in relation to this. First, the scale of the problem is outlined, in terms of both the prevalence of mental health problems in parents and the likelihood of children exhibiting negative outcomes in these circumstances. Secondly, the specificity, or lack of it, of particular outcomes in the child in relation to different parental mental health problems is explored. Thirdly, the paper focuses on the importance of disruptions to parenting as a mechanism in the transmission of mental health problems to negative impacts on the child. Examples are given of how parenting is disrupted in non‐clinical community populations, and the subsequent impacts on the child. The case is made for the preventative importance of parenting and family support in mediating between parental mental health problems and negative impacts on the child.     

基于双方不确定性的逆向选择问题

在逆向选择经典模型及其改进模型、尤其是在具有私人信息委托人模型的基础上,提出并建立了一种具有现实背景的双方同时面临不确定性的逆向选择模型.通过对模型的求解与分析,将得出的基于双方不确定性的逆向选择的最优契约与完全信息和对称信息下的最优契约进行比较,发现不确定性与信息的不对称性都带来效率或产出水平的扭曲,并且这种扭曲混合在一起,或者相互加剧,或者相互抵消.     

Relationships between leadership and professionals' job attitudes and perceptions: Comparison of two leadership models

The aim of this study was to investigate the power of the Average Leadership Style (ALS) and Vertical Dyad Linkage (VDL) models of leadership in explaining relationships between leader's initiating structure behaviour and consideration behaviour, and subordinates' attitudes and perceptions. The considered dependent variables were five facets of job satisfaction, two role stress variables (role conflict and ambiguity), one role strain indicator (job tension), and four dimensions of workteam climate. The relationships were investigated in two occupational samples comprising 127 family physicians and 155 nurses working in 28 Primary Health Care Teams. Within and between analysis (WABA) and contextual analysis were applied in order to determine the appropriate level of analysis (group as expected from ALS or individual as expected from VDL) for studying the relationships between leader consideration and initiating structure behaviours and the dependent variables. The results obtained showed the prevalence of the VDL model in most of the cases, although two of the relationships studied fitted the ALS model.     

Optimal Mandates and the Welfare Cost of Asymmetric Information: Evidence From the U.K. Annuity Market

Much of the extensive empirical literature on insurance markets has focused on whether adverse selection can be detected. Once detected, however, there has been little attempt to quantify its welfare cost or to assess whether and what potential government interventions may reduce these costs. To do so, we develop a model of annuity contract choice and estimate it using data from the U.K. annuity market. The model allows for private information about mortality risk as well as heterogeneity in preferences over different contract options. We focus on the choice of length of guarantee among individuals who are required to buy annuities. The results suggest that asymmetric information along the guarantee margin reduces welfare relative to a first‐best symmetric information benchmark by about £127 million per year or about 2 percent of annuitized wealth. We also find that by requiring that individuals choose the longest guarantee period allowed, mandates could achieve the first‐best allocation. However, we estimate that other mandated guarantee lengths would have detrimental effects on welfare. Since determining the optimal mandate is empirically difficult, our findings suggest that achieving welfare gains through mandatory social insurance may be harder in practice than simple theory may suggest.     

新型农村社会养老保险收入再分配效应研究

政府财政补贴是新农保试点模式最为突出的特征,但目前试点县市却普遍出现了老年农民投保积极,年轻农民不愿参保的保险逆向选择问题,对新农保的可持续性提出了挑战。通过构建精算模型对新农保收入再分配效应进行仿真模拟,结果显示：现行新农保试点模式具有对老年农民和高档次缴费人员更为有利的收入再分配效应,是引致新农保出现逆向选择问题的制度设计原因。提高基础养老金和农民个人缴费年增长率、增加对农民个人缴费补贴均能有效提高年轻一代参保农民的相对纯受益水平。但是,新农保制度设计本身已经对高标准缴费农民更为有利,部分试点地区推行多缴多补政策并不适宜。     

基层公务员职业“逆选择”问题的机理分析及对策研究

近几年来我国基层公务员职业倦怠甚至是辞职行为层出不穷,对此现象的探讨已逐渐被学术界所重视。基于此,以基层公务员职业"逆选择"问题为背景,以政府部门及其内部的基层公务员为博弈双方,利用博弈论方法建立相应的利益双方多阶段动态利益博弈模型,从而揭示公务员管理模式的必然走向,以及基层公务员"逆选择"行为的博弈心理,为解决基层公务员不断发生职业"逆选择"行为的问题提供了新的分析工具。同时,提出了降低基层公务员"逆选择"行为发生率和发生程度的相应措施。     

Job satisfaction and mental health of temporary agency workers in Europe: a systematic review and research agenda

ABSTRACT

The current systematic literature review aimed to analyse the associations between temporary agency work (TAW), job satisfaction, and mental health in Europe, as well as to outline a future research agenda. Twenty-eight scientific articles were identified by searching different data bases (i.e. PSYNDEX, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Web of Science) for the time span from January 2000 to December 2016. Our review reveals first that TAW is not consistently negatively related to job satisfaction. However, job insecurity and working conditions are important mediators in the relation of TAW and lowered job satisfaction. Second, TAW is not consistently related to all investigated types of mental health impairments. However, when focusing on specific outcomes and comparing temporary agency workers to permanent employees, we still find consistent evidence regarding higher levels of depression and fatigue among temporary agency workers. Inconsistent associations between TAW, job satisfaction and mental health can partly be attributed to unfavourable methodological aspects of the included primary studies. To address these aspects, future research should consider applying a standard measurement of TAW, including a minimum of meaningful confounding variables, improving the operationalisation of outcome variables and the study design.     

Harmful care. To what extent is terminology from medicine and clinical psychology applicable to out‐of‐home care?

Research concerning outcomes for children who have been placed in out‐of‐home care has indicated that the care may have unwanted consequences. However, there has been no coherent terminology for differentiating between different types of such unwanted consequences. In this article therefore, we attempt to disentangle different aspects of potentially harmful care for looked after children, as well as to discuss potential pathways to more systematically approach and report adverse events for this group. In this endeavour, we turn to two adjacent disciplines, medicine and psychology, where these issues have received more interest. The applicability of the concepts used in these fields is discussed, and it is concluded that although they provide some help in categorizing different aspects of harmful care, the complexity of out‐of‐home care makes existing models difficult to adopt without adjustments. This has consequences for the possibility of evaluating care in research, as well as for monitoring adverse events in practice. Importantly, the causality will often be unknown. We therefore suggest that it is essential to shed more light on how decisions should be made about when to intervene or not in out‐of‐home care, despite limited information.     

‘One MBA?’ How context impacts the development of post-MBA career outcomes

Using survey data from alumni of one of the UK's earliest and largest MBA programmes we explore how career capital, career outcomes and career satisfaction are impacted by learner context. We adopt comparative capitalisms theory to investigate whether graduates from a standardised programme marketed as ‘One MBA’ report broadly similar career outcomes irrespective of their work and study location. We find that despite the rhetoric around globalisation in management education there are differences that fit the theories of comparative capitalisms literature; thus supporting the view that, despite the global nature of MBA branding, context still plays a role in shaping learning and career outcomes as evidenced by differences reported here. Significant findings are reported in terms of the reported development of career capital ‘knowing how’; career satisfaction and perceived organisational support, however differences in terms of the achievement of objective career success (promotion and career mobility) were less pronounced.