Court improvement of foster care and adoption projects:Ncjfcj Survey Report

Officials from 48 states and the District of Columbia in 1994 accepted federal funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to help improve courts' handling of cases involving child abuse, neglect, foster care and adoption. Through a survey of participating states, members of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges have been analyzing common themes found in state Court Improvement of Foster Care and Adoption Projects. This article examines key survey results.     

The vice-presidential succession effect: Individual or situational basis?

Simonton (1981) found that accidental presidents do not perform as well as duly elected chief executives. Though this vice-presidential succession effect may be due to individual factors, such as some deficiency in personality or political experience, it might be due instead to situational factors, most notably the failure to be perceived as having legitimate power by those already in power positions. Three studies investigated the relative plausibility of individual and situational explanations. Study 1 examined 49 president-vice-president teams to determine the criteria by which running mates are selected. Study 2 looked at 69 leaders who served as either president, vice-president, or both, in order to discover if accidental presidents can be differentiated on biographical and political background variables. Study 3 scrutinized 100 congressional units in a time-series design to gauge the impact of serving an unelected term as president. The results most support a situational interpretation based on the attribution of legitimate power.     

Growth curves of deviant behavior in early adolescence: A multilevel analysis

Multilevel growth curve models provide a means of analyzing individual differences in the growth of deviance, allow a number of theories to be integrated in a single model, and can help to unify research on deviant/delinquent/criminal careers at different stages of the life cycle. Building on the distinction between population heterogeneity and state dependence as alternative explanations of persistent individual differences in deviance (Heckman, 1981; Nagin and Paternoster, 1991), we show that models with two levels can be used to represent and analyze a variety of criminological theories. The first level (level 1) uses repeated measurements on individuals to estimate individual-level growth curves. The second level treats the level 1 growth curve parameters (e.g., slope, intercept) as outcome variables and uses time-invariant factors to explain variation in these parameters across individuals. We illustrate this approach by estimating a model of growth in deviance drawn from Gottfredson and Hirschi's deviant propensity theory. An innovative feature is the assumption that adolescents' expected growth curves of deviance follow a classical Pearl-Verhulst logistic growth model (Pearl, 1930). The results suggest that five risk factors—parental psychiatric problems, lack of parental support, living arrangements with zero or one parent in residence, low family income, and male gender—have strongly positive effects on deviant propensity. For example, adolescents with no supportive parents, and no other risk factors, have expected asymptotic levels of deviance (peak levels attained at about age 18) that are about twice as high as those of adolescents with no risk factors. Yet more than two-thirds of the individual-level variability in growth curves is unexplained by the five risk factors. This unobserved heterogeneity would remain hidden in analyses using conventional structural equations models and the same explanatory variables.     

重修丝绸之路:迈向亚洲一体化

丝绸之路是指将东亚、中亚、南亚与地中海沿岸国家(包括北非和欧洲)连接在一起的、纵横交错的泛亚贸易交通网络。在过去的几十年中,随着全球化的不断深入,亚洲再度成为世界经济的重心。许多亚洲经济体成为了国际生产网络中不可分割的一部分,他们自身也从不断扩大的国际贸易、投资以及加速的经济增长中获益良多。然而,由于缺乏区域性连接,亚洲巨大的发展潜力尚未发挥出来。本文认为,缺乏全面的区域性连接是影响地区增长、阻碍亚洲乃至世界一体化进程的重要因素之一。鉴于此,亚洲应该加强地区通道建设,使之成为国际通道的一部分。本文还讨论了在通过泛亚运输基础设施建设实现地区连接的过程中,可能遇到的一系列问题和挑战。     

中国流动人口中民间组织的建设问题

当前,中国流动人口中正式的民间组织发展极为有限,服务和组织流动人口的民间组织的作用和功能也十分有限。随着改革开放的深入发展,流动人口中的民间组织可以起到重要的服务功能、协调功能和政治社会化功能。就当前中国的具体情况而言,应通过促进民间组织的健康发展,增强流动人口的社会化程度,提升流动人口的社会行为能力。