Academic economists behaving badly? A survey on three areas of unethical behavior

This article measures the degree to which academic economists have engaged in unethical behavior and the degree to which academic economists believe the profession as a whole engages in unethical behavior. Three main types of unethical behavior are examined: (1) falsification of research; (2) expropriation of graduate student research or including an undeserving co-author on a research paper; and (3) exchange of grades for gifts, money, or sex. Using a unique data set gathered at the 1998 American Economic Association (AEA) meetings, we find that there is a significant amount of misconduct, particularly in the second category.     

Social Support Networks and School Outcomes: The Centrality of the Teacher

This investigation compares school outcomes for students who differ in the extent to which they perceive their parents, friends, and teachers—each alone and in combination—as important sources of social support. Findings indicate that middle and high school students who perceive high supportiveness from all three sources of support, as opposed to none, one, or two, have better attendance; spend more hours studying; avoid problem behavior more; have higher school satisfaction, engagement, and self-efficacy; and obtain better grades. Positive school outcomes are promoted when teacher support is perceived in combination with perceived support from parents and friends. Implications of the results for human service providers are presented.     

The Place and Relevancy of Practice with Couples in Graduate Social Work Education

Social workers often provide services and therapy for couples; however, little literature has been published that suggests models for teaching—from a social work perspective—marriage counseling or social work with couples. This article reports the results of a survey that examined how faculty in graduate schools of social work are teaching practice content in marriage counseling and their perceptions of its relevancy to social work practice. Findings indicated that some content on social work practice with couples is evident in most master of social work programs. Moreover, faculty perceived social work practice with couples as moderately relevant to all practice settings listed in the survey.     

Social Welfare Policy as a Specialization in the Graduate Social Work Curriculum

This paper describes a new student/teacher evaluation system that helps students monitor and evaluate their progress in each course or unit of instruction. Because it produces a learning curve for each student and for the class as a whole, it is useful to both students and teachers in the assessment and evaluation of joint learning-teaching activities and achievements. Its major purpose is to help maximize learning gains.     

The role of psychotherapy and humor for death anxiety, death wishes, and aging

This article is part of a series of humor on social attitudes (Richmen, 1977), humor by the elderly (Richman, 1989), assessment (Richman, 1996a), and psychotherapy (Richman, 1996b). The present study is based on the topics of humor related to death anxiety and wishes, and aging that emerged during psychotherapy with elderly patients. The healing qualities of laughter and humor have been observed since Biblical times to the present, however the applications of humor to professional psychotherapy is still in its infancy. The examples in this study spell out how humor in therapy can bring people together, and help them affirm life and laugh at anxiety, depression, and their problems in living.     

Cost/effectiveness analysis of alcoholism and drug abuse treatment programs: the relevance of recidivism and resource absorption.

Cost/effectiveness measures are increasingly being applied to alcoholism and drug abuse treatment programs. Program evaluators usually regard readmissions as inadequate for assessing outcome, and resource absorption is rarely examined; this paper presents the argument that increased attention to recidivism and resource absorption is integral to the program evaluation process. Readmissions formed 53% of admissions to U.S. drug abuse programs, and in alcoholism treatment centers, 4% of the patients accounted for 24% of the detoxications. Problems with assessing cost/effectiveness are associated with duration of treatment, average cost, time span of analyses, quasi-experimental designs, multiple episodes of treatment, "silting up", and extrapolation. Five approaches to dealing with these problems are suggested: analyzing existing program data bases for recidivism and resource absorption, considering recidivism when evaluating programs, tempering clinical enthusiasm with skepticism, matching patients with levels of care appropriate to previous treatment history, and assessing additional benefit derived from increasing amounts of care per patient as part of cost/effectiveness analysis.     

The impact of collectivism on savings behavior: a case study of Mexican-Americans and non-Mexican Latinos

This interdisciplinary study combines anthropological and economic theories and methods to understand how Mexican-Americans’ collectivist cultural values affect their savings behavior and their preparation for retirement. Mexican-Americans are the fastest growing immigrant group in the United States and they are both younger and expected to live longer than other groups. Yet they are the most insecure in relation to funding retirement. Even when Mexican-American workers are eligible to participate in retirement savings plans at work, they have low participation rates. We analyze data from a Chicago area survey in light of broader anthropological and economic scholarship to argue that Mexican-Americans’ collectivist values influence the choices they make about how to build assets and resources differently from other Latino groups. Latinos are a diverse group by national origin, citizenship and immigration status, characteristics that strongly influence their employment prospects, asset building and retirement savings and security. Financial policy makers need to understand the heterogeneity of financial behavior within the Hispanic community. The collectivist informal economy of Mexican immigrants and their children is at odds with the formal defined contribution retirement savings system, which is geared toward both autonomous individuals and higher-income workers who benefit from the program’s tax deductions. Since these plans penalize participants who withdraw funds before retirement age, they can be deleterious to those who expect both to loan funds to and to borrow money from members of their collectivist social networks.     

Developing expert systems for management applications

The Alvey Report has resulted in a growing interest in the UK in ‘expert systems’. It is fairly generally accepted, at least in the UK, that such systems function in a particular type of way, i.e. they arrive at decisions through a process of rule based inference. It is suggested that it may be more fruitful to regard rule based inference as one approach to the construction of expert systems, and that proven techniques of operational research may well be more useful in constructing other types of expert system. Alternative applications of expert systems are derived on the basis of a broader definition of an expert system in terms of what it does rather than how it does it. A parallel is drawn between these applications and some typical concerns of business research. It is suggested that a useful aid in identifying promising business applications of expert systems is to set up four ‘dimensions’ along which different types of system differ. Examples are given of where other techniques might conceivably be useful in applications of expert systems.