Professional attitudes regarding treatment and punishment of incest: Comparing police,child welfare,and community mental health

Brief case histories involving incest were presented to police officers, child welfare workers, and community mental health practitioners in a rural area in Canada. Intervention priorities involving “treatment versus punishment” were assessed across the three professional groups for each specific case vignette. Attitudes were assessed on three factors: perpetrator mentally ill rather than criminal, view regarding treatment of victims and mothers, and support for court mandated treatment. Police and community mental health practitioners had significantly different attitudes as to whether perpetrators of child sexual abuse should be viewed more as criminals or as mentally disturbed. Both mental health and child welfare staff differed significantly from police with a less punitive view towards victims and their mothers. All three profressional groups showed no difference in their modest endorsement of the use of mandated treatment by the courts. Gender was not found to influence response to case vignettes.     

Modeling psychiatric patients' treatment decision making

Decision-making processes of psychiatric inpatients were assessed at admission and prior to discharge, and compared to hospital staff members using a paired comparison paradigm in which subjects chose between hypothetical antipsychotic medications. Multidimensional analyses of binary choice matrices revealed that all subjects based decisions on the risks and benefits of medication, and weighted risks and benefits in roughly equal proportions. Hospital staff demonstrated greater internal consistency in their decisions than the inpatient sample at both time points. For newly admitted inpatients, severity of psychiatric symptoms and nonverbal intelligence were related to internal consistency of decision making, and behavioral indices of medication compliance predicted relative weighting of risks and benefits. For predischarge and comparison samples, verbal intelligence and treatment preferences predicted both outcome measures. Reliance on verbal reports of decision making may be misleading when assessing competence in acutely impaired psychiatric patients.     

STRATEGIC TRANSFORMATIONS AMONG CANADIAN CROWN CORPORATIONS*

Abstract: Among the developed and developing countries, the use of government corporations in business has come under increased scrutiny. Fundamental questions are being asked about the problems of public enterprise management, the roles of corporate executives, and their relationships to the governments and societies which they serve. Sadly, the interpretations of policy-makers often have been derived from cliches or myths, not from systematic appraisals of the phenomena propelling the behaviour of those firms. By reviewing the evolutionary tendencies among Canadian public corporations which are engaged in commercial activities, this paper seeks to clarify aspects of those debates. The suggestion is that, as an analysis steps back from the minutiae of day-to-day management, single decisions, and individual conflicts with government officials, developmental patterns can be identified across corporation histories. Public enterprises, like their counterparts in the private sector, move through phases which have configurations of business strategies and internal administrations, regimes of accountability, and dominant interpretations of organisational performance or "success". On a long-term basis, some corporations have come to compete directly against private firms, and their organisational and competitive practices have been modelled along the lines of those rivals. Others have been differentiated away from the orientations of private firms and niche positions have been adopted within their industries. The choices have reflected the structure of the markets in which the enterprises have operated, their financial status, and the command structures which have surrounded them.