Financial support of children involved in special needs adoption: A policy evaluation

This article represents one of the first systematic analyses of state subsidy payments to families adopting children with special needs (children with physical and/or mental disabilities and children who are classified as hard-to-place). The analysis focuses on the monetary subsidies provided to adoptive parents of special needs children. It attempts to characterize variation in subsidy levels between counties and the impact of subsidy levels on a child's length of time until adoptive placement. The data set employed in the analysis was collected from primary sources and is one ofthe first available depositories of information on subsidy payments for special needs adoption. Results indicate that child and case characteristics explain a significant proportion of the variation in state adoption subsidy levels, but that a substantial proportion of between-county variation in subsidy levels remains unexplained. Subsidy level was not found to affect the adoption placement rate at the margin, except for children with mental disabilities. The policy implications of these results are discussed.     

The scissors crisis in public finance

The late 1970s saw the beginnings of a “scissors crisis” in public finance, i.e., a growing divergence between the expansion of government revenues and the increase in government expenditures. Unless strong measures are taken, the 1980s threaten to become the age of mega-deficits. The sluggish growth of public receipts and the buoyant development of public outlays are linked to a number of structural tendencies in the economies of the industrialized world. Efforts to close the gap have included both tax increases and expenditure cuts, but as more and more governments gain experience with the phenomenon of “fiscal cannibalism,” i.e., that taxes eat up each other, the main thrust of the counter-offensive has come to be directed against the growth of public spending. Current strategies to reinforce expenditures control include such elements as global norms, new indexing techniques, new methods of decentralizing hard choices, better methods of cash management, well-balanced policy packages, and incentives especially designed to stimulate cutbacks and policy termination.     

The Attitudes Towards Dating Violence Scales: Development and Initial Validation

This study describes the development and validation of three Attitudes Towards Male Dating Violence (AMDV) Scales and three Attitudes Towards Female Dating Violence (AFDV) Scales. These scales measure attitudes toward use of psychological, physical, and sexual dating violence, respectively, by boys and by girls. Eight hundred twenty-three students from grades 7, 9, and 11 participated in the validation study. All six scales have good internal consistencies. As predicted, students were more accepting of girls' use of violence than of boys' use of violence, and boys were more accepting of violence than were girls. The six scales were positively correlated with traditional attitudes toward gender roles and with each other, providing evidence for their construct validity. Higher scores on the AMDV Scales were related to boys' past use of violence in dating relationships and to their having aggressive friends, supporting their criterion-related validity. Higher scores on the AFDV Scales were associated with girls' past use of dating violence but not with their having aggressive friends, providing partial support for their criterion-related validity. Singly or in combination, the Attitudes Towards Dating Violence Scales can be used to increase our understanding of the development and maintenance of violence-supportive attitudes in adolescents of all ages.