Higher education outcomes, graduate employment and university performance indicators

Summary.  Official employment-related performance indicators in UK higher education are based on the population of students responding to the 'First destination supplement' (FDS). This generates potentially biased performance indicators as this population of students is not necessarily representative of the full population of leavers from each institution. University leavers who do not obtain qualifications and those who do not respond to the FDS are not included within the official analysis. We compare an employment-related performance indicator based on those students who responded to the FDS with alternative approaches which address the potential non-random nature of this subgroup of university leavers.     

Tasmania Together? A disability critique of a social plan

The 'Tasmania Together' social futures plan for Tasmania is critically examined. Authored by a Tasmanian Government appointed Community Leaders Group, on behalf of the people of Tasmania, the plan is supposed to deliver a better Tasmanian society by 2020, based upon community consultation. Rather than a step-forward in democracy, the process serves to remove the democratic rights of people, especially those who are disadvantaged. A critique from a disability perspective is offered, which suggests that this social plan constitutes a form of institutionalised disablism.     

Valuation of childhood risk reduction: the importance of age, risk preferences, and perspective.

This article explores two problems analysts face in determining how to estimate values for children's health and safety risk reductions. The first addresses the question: Do willingness‐to‐pay estimates for health risk changes differ across children and adults and, if so, how? To answer this question, the article first examines the potential effects of age and risk preferences on willingness to pay. A summary of the literature reporting empirical evidence of differences between willingness to pay for adult health and safety risk reductions and willingness to pay for health and safety risk reductions in children is also provided. The second dimension of the problem is a more fundamental issue: Whose perspective is relevant when valuing children's health effects—society's, children's, adults‐as‐children, or parents'? Each perspective is considered, followed ultimately by the conclusion that adopting a parental perspective through an intrahousehold allocation model seems closest to meeting the needs of the estimation problem at hand. A policy example in which the choice of perspective affects the outcome of a regulatory benefit‐cost analysis rounds out the article and emphasizes the importance of perspective.     

An individual measure of relative survival

Summary.  Relative survival techniques are used to compare survival experience in a study cohort with that expected if background population rates apply. The techniques are especially useful when cause-specific death information is not accurate or not available as they provide a measure of excess mortality in a group of patients with a certain disease. Whereas these methods are based on group comparisons, we present here a transformation approach which instead gives for each individual an outcome measure relative to the appropriate background population. The new outcome measure is easily interpreted and can be analysed by using standard survival analysis techniques. It provides additional information on relative survival and gives new options in regression analysis. For example, one can estimate the proportion of patients who survived longer than a given percentile of the respective general population or compare survival experience of individuals while accounting for the population differences. The regression models for the new outcome measure are different from existing models, thus providing new possibilities in analysing relative survival data. One distinctive feature of our approach is that we adjust for expected survival before modelling. The paper is motivated by a study into the survival of patients after acute myocardial infarction.     

A Sparse Implementation of the Average Information Algorithm for Factor Analytic and Reduced Rank Variance Models

Factor analytic variance models have been widely considered for the analysis of multivariate data particularly in the psychometrics area. Recently Smith, Cullis & Thompson (2001) have considered their use in the analysis of multi‐environment data arising from plant improvement programs. For these data, the size of the problem and the complexity of the variance models chosen to account for spatial heterogeneity within trials implies that standard algorithms for fitting factor analytic models can be computationally expensive. This paper presents a sparse implementation of the average information algorithm (Gilmour, Thompson & Cullis, 1995) for fitting factor analytic and reduced rank variance models.     

Violations of dominance in pricing judgments

The dominance principle states that the judged price of gamble A should be equal to or greater than the judged price of gamble B whenever A's outcomes are equal to or better than the corresponding outcomes of B, holding everything else constant. Subjects often violate the dominance principle by assigning a higher price to a gamble with some probability of winning a positive amount, Y, otherwise zero, than to a superior gamble with the same chances of winning Y, otherwise winning X. Violations also occur with losses. Results are consistent with a configural-weight theory in which the decision weight for each outcome depends on the rank of the outcome with respect to the other outcomes in the lottery and the value of the outcome (zero vs. nonzero).The authors thank Shi-jie Chang, Duncan Luce, and Lisa Ordóñez for comments on an earlier draft. This research was supported by a National Science Foundation grant to the first author (BNS-8451368). Requests for reprints should be sent to Barbara Mellers, Dept. of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.     

First Nations and community economic development: a case study

A training project in a northern Canadian community providedan opportunity to examine participatory planning approachesand the meaning of work in First Nations communities. Focusgroups conducted three years after the unsuccessful interventionof a community economic development (CED) project suggest thatcomplex factors such as lack of support from community leadersand rate of pay for workers determine whether CED is alwaysappropriate in northern, First Nations contexts.     

The humorous construction of disability: 'stand-up' comedians in the United States

We examine how stand-up [sic] comedy constructs, circulates, perpetuates and/or disrupts stereotypical images of disabled persons in the United States. We use disabled people, rather than people-first language, to remind readers that disability is an ill-defined, culturally imposed attribute. Although humor is culturally specific, we draw on works of an international cadre of humanities scholars and social scientists to ground our analyses. We conclude that disability humor constitutes an emerging, liberatory art form. Disabled and non-disabled comedians elicit thought-provoking laughter and present disability as an interesting way to live. However, disabling humor still perpetuates stereotyping and isolation.     

Four‐Month‐Olds' Discrimination of Voice Changes in Multimodal Displays as a Function of Discrimination Protocol

Past studies have found equivocal support for the ability of young infants to discriminate infant‐directed (ID) speech information in the presence of auditory‐only versus auditory + visual displays (faces + voices). Generally, younger infants appear to have more difficulty discriminating a change in the vocal properties of ID speech when they are accompanied by faces. Forty 4‐month‐old infants were tested using either an infant‐controlled habituation procedure (Experiment 1) or a fixed‐trial habituation procedure (Experiment 2). The prediction was that the infant‐controlled habituation procedure would be a more sensitive measure of infant attention to complex displays. The results indicated that 4‐month‐old infants discriminated voice changes in dynamic face + voice displays depending on the order in which they were viewed during the infant‐controlled habituation procedure. In contrast, no evidence of discrimination was found in the fixed‐trial procedure. The findings suggest that the selection of experimental methodology plays a significant role in the empirical observations of infant perceptual abilities.