Attributing Outcomes to Social Policy Interventions – ‘Gold Standard’ or ‘Fool's Gold’ in Public Policy and Management?

In recent years there has been increased interest in outcome‐based social policy‐making and management. The UK has been in the forefront of this movement but similar movements have been identified internationally. This interest in outcome‐based decision‐making has been given particular impetus through the ‘results’‐based movement in evaluation and performance management since the 1980s, which has increased in scope over time, slowly changing its emphasis from cost reduction and measuring outputs to measuring outcomes. This change has been widely welcomed by policymakers, practitioners and academics. However, there is evidence that the reality is often rather less than the rhetoric. Moreover, the ‘attribution problem’ of attributing changes in outcomes to specific social policies has remained a major issue. The conceptual solution of constructing ‘cause‐and‐effect’ models, imported from the policy evaluation field, has only recently become common for operationalising these models. This article outlines the evolution of interest in outcome‐based social policy‐making up to recent times and the growing realization of the importance of the attribution problem. It then outlines both how the ‘cause‐and‐effect’ policy modelling approach can partially tackle the attribution problem, but also its inherent limitations. Lastly, the article uses several case studies in current UK social policy‐making to demonstrate the potential importance of the reasoning embedded within cause‐and‐effect models but also the dangers in policy‐making which adopts this approach without understanding its conceptual basis or in fields where it is inappropriate, given the current state of our knowledge of social policy systems.     

Differential customer racial attitudes toward scandal and patriotism: The Mitchell Report,the Olympics,race, and baseball memorabilia

This paper investigates differential customer racial reaction to negative and positive publicity related to professional athletes. In terms of negative publicity, it analyzes the effect of mention in the Mitchell Report on the price of baseball cards. In regards to positive publicity, it considers the impact of having been identified as a member of the United States Olympic or national team. After controlling for player productivity with performance statistics, the effects of being mentioned in the Mitchell Report are isolated within regression analysis to draw conclusions concerning customer racial attitudes toward the steroids scandal. Similar analysis is conducted to see the impact of being seen as a baseball representative of the United States. Regression results are consistent with the conclusion that negative publicity devalues the cards of nonWhite players but not of White players. Positive publicity, however, increases the value of a player's card regardless of ethnicity.     

Selecting the normal population with the smallest variance: A restricted subset selection rule

Consider k( ? 2) normal populations whose means are all known or unknown and whose variances are unknown. Let σ²_[1] ? ??? ? σ_[k]² denote the ordered variances. Our goal is to select a non empty subset of the k populations whose size is at most m(1 ? m ? k ? 1) so that the population associated with the smallest variance (called the best population) is included in the selected subset with a guaranteed minimum probability P* whenever σ²_[2]/σ_[1]² ? δ* > 1, where P* and δ* are specified in advance of the experiment. Based on samples of size n from each of the populations, we propose and investigate a procedure called R_BCP. We also derive some asymptotic results for our procedure. Some comparisons with an earlier available procedure are presented in terms of the average subset sizes for selected slippage configurations based on simulations. The results are illustrated by an example.     

学分绩点制在武汉七所部属高校的实践与探索

学分绩点制是一种能客观衡量学生学习质量的教学管理制度。学分绩点制在武汉地区七校联合办学实践中的应用,为联合办学的可持续发展提供了有益的探索。     

校企合作构建第二课堂的实施效果分析及评价——基于圣奥班(家具设计专业)毕业生跟踪问卷的调查

南京林业大学与浙江圣奥(木业)集团联合创建的“圣奥班”是校企合作联合培养创新型家具设计工程专业人才的成功平台之一.基于圣奥班毕业生的问卷调查,对学生进班动机与目标定位、比较优势、获得的帮助、专业能力提升,以及今后办班建议等方面内容进行了分析.统计结果表明,学校和企业共同搭建的圣奥班平台对学生创新意识,专业能力、就业竞争力等诸多方面都有显著的提升.     

小学校长服务型领导对教师知识分享行为的影响研究

以山东省248名小学教师为有效样本，探讨了服务型领导、教师同事信任、情感承诺和教师知识分享行为之间的关系。研究结果显示：服务型领导与教师知识分享行为显著相关；教师同事信任部分居间联系了服务型领导与知识分享行为之间的关系；教师同事信任部分居间联系了服务型领导与情感承诺之间的关系；情感承诺对服务型领导与知识分享行为关系的中介作用不显著。     

Heterogeneity in treatment effects across diverse populations

Differences in patient characteristics, including age, sex, and race influence the safety and effectiveness of drugs, biologic products, and medical devices. Here we provide a summary of the topics discussed during the opening panel at the 2018 Johns Hopkins Center for Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation symposium on Assessing and Communicating Heterogeneity of Treatment Effects for Patient Subpopulations: Challenges and Opportunities. The goal of this session was to provide a brief overview of FDA-regulated therapeutics, including drugs, biologics and medical devices, and some of the major sources of heterogeneity of treatment effects (HTE) related to patient demographics, such as age, sex and race. The panel discussed the US Food and Drug Administration's role in reviewing and regulating drugs, devices, and biologic products and the challenges associated with ensuring that diverse patient populations benefit from these therapeutics. Ultimately, ensuring diverse demographic inclusion in clinical trials, and designing basic and clinical research studies to account for the intended patient population's age, sex, race, and genetic factors among other characteristics, will lead to better, safer therapies for diverse patient populations.     

A new confidence interval in errors-in-variables model with known error variance

This paper considers constructing a new confidence interval for the slope parameter in the structural errors-in-variables model with known error variance associated with the regressors. Existing confidence intervals are so severely affected by Gleser–Hwang effect that they are subject to have poor empirical coverage probabilities and unsatisfactory lengths. Moreover, these problems get worse with decreasing reliability ratio which also result in more frequent absence of some existing intervals. To ease these issues, this paper presents a fiducial generalized confidence interval which maintains the correct asymptotic coverage. Simulation results show that this fiducial interval is slightly conservative while often having average length comparable or shorter than the other methods. Finally, we illustrate these confidence intervals with two real data examples, and in the second example some existing intervals do not exist.     

探析“隧道效应”在社会治理中的应用

当前在我国经济社会发展不平衡的背景下,社会治理已经并将长期面临新的形势和新的挑战。在这些挑战和问题面前,我们如何通过对我国社会治理状况的深入分析,深化对社会管理规律和特点的认识,不断地进行理论创新,找到建设中国特色社会治理体系应遵循的基本原则,探索适合我国国情的社会治理体制机制,提高社会治理的能力和水平。本文从一个经济学的概念——"隧道效应"出发,将其引入到社会治理的研究中来,分析"隧道效应"发生背后的文化逻辑,并从社会的角度来分析这种正的隧道效应是否可以持续及其政策建议。     

Effects of the social dominance orientation on environmental attitudes of Chilean university students / Efectos de la orientación a la dominancia social sobre las actitudes ambientales de universitarios chilenos

By adopting a multidimensional approach to environmental attitudes (apathy, anthropocentrism, connectedness and emotional affinity with nature), this study explores the relationships between these dimensions, social dominance orientation (SDO) and political orientation. Two hundred and sixty-two Chilean university students filled out an ad hoc online questionnaire. Two confirmatory factorial analyses showed the four typologies of environmental attitudes and the two factors for SDO, which are labelled group dominance and opposition to equality. Through hierarchical regressions, group dominance showed higher explanatory power of environmental attitudes than political orientation. Furthermore, using the bootstrap procedure we showed that group dominance mediated between political orientation and attitudes of apathy, anthropocentrism and connectedness, while opposition to equality mediated between apathy and emotional affinity. We conclude that SDO is an important variable for measuring political ideology while also providing new nuances when analysing the relationships with environmental attitudes.