PROGRAMS FOR PROMOTING PARENTING OF RESIDENTIAL PARENTS: Moving From Efficacy to Effectiveness

This article reviews prevention programs that target primary residential parents as change agents for improving children's postdivorce adjustment. First, we review parental risk and protective factors for children from divorced families, including parenting quality, parental mental health problems, interparental conflict, and contact with the nonresidential parent. Following a discussion of brief informational interventions, we describe the findings of evaluations of three multisession, skill-building interventions for divorced parents. Impressive evidence is presented that parenting is a modifiable protective factor and that improving parenting leads to improvements in children's postdivorce adjustment. We then discuss, in greater detail, the New Beginnings Program, which we highlight because it has shown repeated, immediate effects on children's mental health outcomes as well as long-term effects on a wide array of other meaningful outcomes, such as diagnosis of mental disorder in the past year, externalizing problems, alcohol and drug use, and academic performance. Also, mediational analyses have shown that program-induced changes in parenting accounted for changes in mental health outcomes. The remainder of the article describes a research and action agenda that is needed to successfully implement the New Beginnings Program in domestic relations courts.     

Personal Control and Inmate Adjustment to Prison

Although this concept has rarely been investigated systematically, the prison is an environment that severely limits inmates'personal control. This article applies theoretical and empirical advances in the area of personal control to the issue of inmate adjustment to prison. Personal control has three components: outcome control, choice, and predictability of future events. Research findings suggesting adverse impacts of limited control are discussed in light of their implications for prisoner adjustment. Several models of personal control, including the environmental/learned helplessness, individual difference/self-efficacy, and incongruency/reactance models, are applied to the process of prisoner adjustment. Using these models, a conceptual framework for integrating past research in the sociology and social psychology of corrections is proposed, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Violence and trauma: the past 20 and next 10 years

The issues of violence and trauma over the past 20 years have generated a significant amount of research. However, the development of each field has remained, for the most part, exclusive from the other. Therefore, the goal of this article is to address this shortcoming within the literature by responding to three important questions: (a) What is the most important thing we have learned about violence and trauma in the past 20 years? (b) What is the most important thing we need to learn in the next 10 years? and (c) What is the most promising methodological innovation in the past 20 years for the study or treatment of trauma or interpersonal violence? This article concludes that by increasing the discourse between the two fields, both research fields may be better able to develop conceptually, methodologically, and empirically.     

Beyond "safe and effective": the role of the federal government in supporting and disseminating comparative-effectiveness research

Over the past century, medical advancements have resulted in tremendous health gains for Americans. Although the federal government has played a prominent role in ensuring that new treatments are safe and effective, questions about which medical treatments work best under which circumstances have largely remained unanswered. Thus, the federal government's recent major investments in comparative-effectiveness research have potential to play a significant role in helping both patients and health care providers navigate the vast array of available treatment options, as well as in improving the quality, efficiency, and delivery of health care system-wide. Yet, the controversial nature of the government's foray into comparative-effectiveness research also suggests that the path toward realizing these goals may be treacherous. This Article describes the rationales for federal support of comparative-effectiveness research and potential models for that involvement, analyzes the federal government's recent investments in the research, and concludes with predictions about the probable outcomes of these investments. While increased federal support for comparative-effectiveness research is unlikely to achieve all of the benefits anticipated by its supporters, it is a crucial step toward ensuring that Americans are able to take full advantage of the benefits of medical innovation     

Trends in Childhood Obesity Research: A Brief Analysis of NIH-Supported Efforts

Childhood obesity is an increasing health threat. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary funding agency for research into the causes, mechanisms, consequences, and prevention and treatment of childhood obesity. Using the NIH Strategic Plan for Obesity Research as the framework, this article summarizes the research that has been funded in the past five years as well as new research areas with great potential.     

Public health law in the new century

Public health law is a broad and sometimes nebulous field which has undergone extensive reform and rethinking over the past decade. This article provides a survey of current issues in public health law, highlighting these reforms and the potential for public health legislation to deal with upcoming threats, notably bioterrorism. While recognising the anxieties bioterrorism brings, public health responses must be grounded in a coherent philosophy of risk management. Its administrators must also be aware that large-scale threats to public health are not unprecedented and that past experience can provide an important guide for future strategies.     

Constitutional Review in the Member States of the EU-28: A Political Analysis of Institutional Choices

Literature in law and political science has suggested a number of factors explaining choices on the implementation of constitutional review. However, so far little is known about how such factors combine in order to lead to different models of review. With the aid of configurational research, this article sheds light on that question for all countries of the current EU-28. In this region, the Kelsenian model of specialized courts, the system of review by the judicial branch, and the model of parliamentary sovereignty still currently coexist. This article shows that phenomena such as the type of legal family of the country, an authoritarian past, or political fragmentation play a major role in choices of models of constitutional review. However, it is only when they combine that they are capable of leading to particular outcomes.     

The role of the psychiatrist in evaluating a prison mental health system in litigation

Federal courts during the past 14 years have recognized that many prisons in the United States have provided constitutionally inadequate medical and psychiatric services. Our recent national survey indicates that at least 20 states have had at least one part of their correctional system included in a certified class action suit that alleged insufficient mental health services for inmates. This article reviews the role of the expert psychiatric witness during the phases of litigation that involve proposed remedial plans and compliance in implementing remedial plans. Available epidemiologic data about psychiatric disorders among prison inmates, standards for correctional mental health care, and various mental health system models are briefly reviewed. A comprehensive approach to evaluating proposed remedial plans and assessing issues of compliance with accepted plans is described. Special attention is directed toward psychiatric issues unique to a correctional system.     

Policy change and health care research

Explaining policy change is one of the most central tasks of contemporary policy analysis. Reacting to overly rigid institutionalist frameworks that emphasize stability rather than change, a growing number of scholars have formulated new theoretical models to shed light on policy change. Focusing on health care reform but drawing on the broader social science literature on policy and politics, this article offers critical perspectives on the institutionalist and ideational literatures on policy change while assessing their relevance for analyzing change in contemporary health care systems. The last section sketches a research agenda for studying policy change in health care.     

The leap of faith from disease treatment to lifestyle prevention: the genealogy of a policy idea

Since the 1970s public health policy has attempted to counter the rise of chronic diseases by getting individuals to make healthy choices about smoking, alcohol, diet, and physical exercise. Inspired by the so-called new perspective of the 1974 Lalonde report, this shift from disease treatment to prevention has been a key focus of public health policy to this day. Every generation of public health reports presents prevention as the answer to past failures, but the continuous experience of failure is strangely coexistent with a fundamental belief in the ability of lifestyle prevention to produce large health improvements. The article tracks the genealogy of lifestyle prevention as policy idea across three generations of U.S. and Danish public health reports and finds a systematic interpretation of lifestyle prevention as being more successful and promising than acute medical treatment.     

Possibilities of the positive following violence and trauma: informing the coming decade of research

The effects of trauma and violence may be better understood by taking a broader perspective that includes resilience and recovery as well as damage and symptomatology. Based on this broader view, this article describes three interrelated, cutting-edge trends in mental health research: (a) the positive psychology movement, (b) the recognition of the role of spirituality and religion in health and well-being, and (c) stress-related growth. The integration of these trends into mainstream studies of trauma and violence will provide a counterbalance to the predominant orientation of victimization and pathology currently evidenced in the literature. All three have important implications for survivors of violence and trauma.     

Dissemination of health technology assessments: identifying the visions guiding an evolving policy innovation in Canada

Health technology assessment (HTA) has received increasing support over the past twenty years in both North America and Europe. The justification for this field of policy-oriented research is that evidence about the efficacy, safety, and cost-effectiveness of technology should contribute to decision and policy making. However, concerns about the ability of HTA producers to increase the use of their findings by decision makers have been expressed. Although HTA practitioners have recognized that dissemination activities need to be intensified, why and how particular approaches should be adopted is still under debate. Using an institutional theory perspective, this article examines HTA as a means of implementing knowledge-based change within health care systems. It presents the results of a case study on the dissemination strategies of six Canadian HTA agencies. Chief executive officers and executives (n = 11), evaluators (n = 19), and communications staff (n = 10) from these agencies were interviewed. Our results indicate that the target audience of HTA is frequently limited to policy makers, that three conflicting visions of HTA dissemination coexist, that active dissemination strategies have only occasionally been applied, and that little attention has been paid to the management of diverging views about the value of health technology. Our discussion explores the strengths, limitations, and trade-offs associated with the three visions. Further efforts should be deployed within agencies to better articulate a shared vision and to devise dissemination strategies that are consistent with this vision.     

Lessons learned from the last twenty years of sexual violence research

The present article attempts to answer important questions about the most important thing learned from the past 20 years of research on sexual violence, the most important thing to be learned about sexual violence over the next 10 years, and the most promising methodological innovation in the study of sexual violence from the last 20 years. It is hoped that discussion of such important questions might further stimulate researchers and mental health professionals to continue making progress in our understanding of, as well as the struggle against, sexual violence.     

Back for the future: a client centred analysis of social welfare and family law provision

The landscape of legal advice provision is entering a period of significant change in England and Wales. Whilst there is a great deal of uncertainty about how the future landscape of advice service provision will evolve, there are lessons to be drawn from past delivery models.

This article first looks back at the period following the Access to Justice Act 1999, setting out a range of delivery models initiated following the Act, as well as research and evaluation conducted in the millennium decade. Findings are then presented from a comprehensive qualitative study on how people experience and deal with social welfare and family problems, and on facilitators and barriers to integrated advice provision, including inter-organisational working. This is explored through the lens of a delivery model which emphasised partnership and the pooling of resources and specialisms to meet client needs: the Community Legal Advice Centre model.     

Making sense of referral fee statutes

State and federal prohibitions of referral fees have long plagued the health care sector because their broadly worded provisions threaten established and socially valuable business arrangements. Congress has recently instructed the Department of Health and Human Services to issue regulations that clarify the scope of the most threatening of these prohibitions, the Medicare and Medicaid felony referral fee statute. This article examines three possible analytical models for imposing a limiting construction on referral fee statutes by testing the models against three beneficial practices that the statute jeopardizes: physician recruitment, fee discounting, and efficiency bonuses. The article recommends primary reliance on an earned/unearned analysis that detects a prohibited referral fee by asking whether the fee is fully earned by legitimate, nonreferral services.     

Studying the Past: the Nature and Development of Legal History as an Academic Discipline

This article pursues two themes. First, it argues that there is a commonality between the general interest in the past, the interest of historians, and the interest of legal historians. Second, it shows that several ideas about the past commonly appear in all three contexts. In pursuing these themes, the article begins by reviewing the initial study of the past and the emergence of history and legal history in academia. It explores the various reasons why the early historians and later academic historians and legal historians studied the past and the different ways in which they used it. The article then pursues in more detail the development of Anglo-American legal history as a scholarly tradition. It identifies three types of academic legal history: classical, liberal, and critical, and discusses their natures and different uses of the past. Finally, the article explores the substantial legal history scholarship and its relevance to scholars who are not legal historians. The article concludes by stressing the importance of studying the legal past.     

公共卫生框架下的卫生监督及其法制工作内涵简

卫生监督工作是公共卫生事业的一个组成部分,在实现公共卫生目标的同时,应当具备＂自我进化＂的能力。这种能力是公共卫生事业不断向高水平发展的重要因素,其动力来源在很大程度上依赖于卫生监督法制工作在正确的方向上有效运转。传统视角下对卫生监督法制工作内涵的解读有其局限性,本文在把握卫生监督与公共卫生之间的关系,以及重述、分析卫生监督过程的基础上,从解读立法、审视立法、反馈立法三个新的视角尝试探讨卫生监督法制工作的内涵。     

Latest Trends in French Policy on Drugs

Present French policy with respect to drugs was defined in a government programme ratified at a meeting of the Inter-Ministerial Committee for the Control of Drugs and Drug Abuse, held on September 14, 1995 and headed by the Prime Minister. The present government plan rests on three main lines of action, which will be examined here in their historical context. They are: reinforced control of drug trafficking, expansion of the existing health care and of prevention-related action, plus specific measures aimed at abusers under court supervision. This article draws the picture of past and current drug policy and legislation in France.     

Public health and the development of infant mortality in Germany, 1875–1930

The substantial increase in life expectancy over the past 150 years can largely be attributed to a drastic decline in infant mortality. In the continuing debate about the reasons for this development, recent research has focused attention on the role of public health. Since the 1870s in Germany, municipal and national public health strategies were launched. One major element of this policy was the fight against high infant mortality rates in urban areas. The establishment of municipal milk supplies and the creation of infant welfare centers attacked gastrointestinal disorders, the predominant cause of death among infants. This article investigates these developments in the largest German cities, particularly Düsseldorf, which is located in one of the most industrialized regions.     

Understanding the new context of the male sex work industry

The article reviews past and recent research on male sex work to offer a context to understand violence in the industry. It provides a critical review of research to show, first, the assumptions made about male sex workers and violence and, second, how such discourses have shaped thinking on the topic. The article presents a case study and original findings from two studies conducted by the authors in Australia and Argentina on violence in the male sex industry. Finally, the article reviews examples of legislative reforms to show how the sex industry is being regulated.