Open Dialogue: Frequently Asked Questions

Open Dialogue is an approach to working with people and their families experiencing psychosocial distress. Interest in Open Dialogue in Australia has been growing recently, raising questions about its adaption and implementation to local contexts. This article is an attempt to answer some of the frequently asked questions we have encountered in training and discussions about Open Dialogue. We attempt to provide responses to questions of how Open Dialogue is different to what is done already, how it fits with current approaches, how you know if you are doing it, whether it is passive or just about doing reflections, issues about including the social network, and concerns about the evidence base. This article aims to present a variety of viewpoints in relation to these questions and to hopefully further discussions on how Open Dialogue can be implemented and adapted to Australian health care and social care contexts.     

Can cities be held responsible for early school leaving? Evidence from the Netherlands

This paper examines if ‘naming and shaming’ is an effective tool to increase accountability in school dropout for cities with disadvantaged student populations. It argues that a comparison with other cities might be unfair if regional and population characteristics differ. It discusses the example of two Dutch new towns. The new town policy deliberately attracted low- and medium-income households in the past, such that today the population of those cities differs from other cities. We use a matching analysis to account for observed differences in population and regional characteristics. The results point out that ‘naming and shaming’ may be a dangerous policy to increase accountability: early school leaving differences are driven, to a large extent, by observed differences in population and regional characteristics.     

What's in a name? Current effects of family politicization on legislative candidates’ career start in Belgium

In this article we measure the effect of inherited political capital in the form of family politicization on legislative candidates’ recruitment age and early careers. We differentiate the concept of family politicization between a narrow (i.e., party political) and a broad (i.e., non-party-political) interpretation. Results indicate that narrow family politicization is the only type that plays a role in speeding up political recruitment. However, only the route to candidacy is affected by family politicization, whereas for the route to power other factors absorb this effect, mainly the candidates’ pre-electoral party engagement. This implies that candidates from narrowly politicized families do not merely rely on inherited political capital to get elected, which rejects a popular opinion. On the other hand, the result that parental talking and brokerage professions speed up the candidates’ election, indicate that the home environment does not play a neutral role in the early career path either.     

New perspectives on a more-or-less familiar poverty index

In this article, we examine some properties and extensions of a particular poverty index, which is already passingly familiar to poverty analysts. Our investigation leads to a new perspective on the family of additively decomposable and scale-invariant poverty indices and provides new insights into the class of poverty measures proposed by Foster et al. (Econometrica 52:761–766, 1984). Finally, our work leads to a clarification of the different roles of transfer properties and distribution sensitivity in poverty measurement.     

Comparing degrees of inequality aversion

We propose a straightforward dominance procedure for comparing social welfare orderings (SWOs) with respect to the degree of inequality aversion they express. Three versions of the procedure are considered, each of which uses a different underlying criterion of inequality comparisons: (i) a concept based on the Lorenz quasi-ordering, which we argue to be the ideal version, (ii) a concept based on a minimalist criterion of inequality, and (iii) a concept based on the relative differentials quasi-ordering. It turns out that the traditional Arrow–Pratt approach is equivalent to the latter two concepts for important classes of SWOs, but that it is profoundly inconsistent with the Lorenz-based concept. With respect to the problem of combining extreme inequality aversion and monotonicity, concepts (ii) and (iii) identify as extremely inequality averse a class of SWOs that includes leximin as a special case, whereas the Lorenz-based concept (i) concludes that extreme inequality aversion and monotonicity are incompatible.     

Reflective Practice: An Exercise in Exploring Inner Dialogue and Vertical Polyphony

The dialogical notion of vertical polyphony, referring to multiple internal voices, is explored in relation to clinicians’ professional and personal selves. We describe an experiential training exercise developed to enhance clinicians’ awareness and understanding of their inner dialogue, and create space to practice what Schön terms ‘reflecting‐in‐action’ and ‘knowing‐in‐action.’ The exercise involves stages of personal reflection, discussion in groups of two or three, and shared learning by the group. A number of variations of the exercise are described. The invited commentaries following the article provide a sense of participants’ reactions to the exercises. Readers are invited to adapt the exercise to suit their own setting and to enhance reflective practice.