Evaluating partnerships for community health improvement: tracking the footprints

Private-public partnerships are increasingly seen as an important mechanism for improving community health. Despite their popularity, traditional evaluations of these efforts have produced negative or mixed results. This is often attributed to weak interventions or an insufficient period of time to observe an impact. This study examines two additional possibilities--the need for a well-articulated shared vision and the governance and management capabilities of the partnership itself. We conducted a midstream process evaluation of twenty-five community partnerships associated with the Community Care Network (CCN) Demonstration Program. We examined how the roles of a common shared vision, strong governance, and effective management influence a partnership's ability to achieve its objectives. The findings, based on both qualitative and quantitative analyses, underscore the importance of membership organizations' perceived benefits and costs of participation and management capabilities to the partnership's progress toward a vision. Based on the qualitative data, six key governance and management characteristics are identified that separate the top performing partnerships from the lowest performing ones. We explore the implications of this research for future evaluations of public-private community health partnerships.     

When Federal Law Goes Unnoticed: Assessing the CISG's Applicability Across U.S. Courts Based on an Empirical Research of Decisions from 1988 to 2020

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) has reached the level of acceptance that it can be recognized as the face of international sales law. Over a century ago, the late Roscoe Pound drew attention to the dichotomy between the law as written and the law as experienced in practice. The law of the CISG “on the books” is the law of the United States. With the growth of international trade, one might expect its importance to grow in the realm of law “in action.” This article explores the CISG in action in U.S. courts during its almost four decades of being the law on the books in the United States. To this end, the authors built an original dataset based on their Westlaw search of all decisions mentioning the CISG across all U.S. federal and state courts from 1988 (when the CISG entered into force) through 2019. The dataset provides unprecedented insights into: (1) how parties raise the issue of the applicability of the CISG, (2) how courts have ruled on the Convention's applicability, and (3) the provisions of the Convention that appear most frequently in these disputes. This article empirically assesses, through logistic regressions, which factors are statistically significant for predicting if a court will apply (or decline to apply) the Convention to a disputed transaction. Finally, the article highlights many ways in which the law in action may not be as robust or comprehensive as it appears on the books.     

Raising wages in the controlled sector: A comment on Elliott

This case study from Eastern Zambia challenges the thesis that after independence an elite of privileged farmers entrenched itself through domination of the local political arena and a coalition with the civil service. It argues that such a view may be a reification due to misplaced assumptions about historical continuity and the uniformity of social behaviour; a lack of attention to the actual operation of government departments at the lowest levels; and neglect of how people construct ways of life on the basis of different interpretations of the world.     

Biological protective factors for antisocial and criminal behavior

Purpose

Although risk factors are typically the focus of criminological research, increasingly researchers are interested in identifying protective factors that reduce the probability of antisocial behavior, either in the presence or absence of risk factors. Biosocial researchers are in an opportune position to research factors that protect against the development of antisocial behavior in high-risk individuals, given biosocial criminology’s focus on the interaction between biological and social factors. The purpose of this article is to review neuropsychological and psychophysiology research into protective factors.

Results

Of the neuropsychological factors, high IQ has the best-replicated protective effects, though executive functioning is also a promising candidate as a protective factor. High resting heart rate, as well as enhanced autonomic fear conditioning and attentional processing may also have protective effects.

Conclusions

Though research into biological protective factors is currently limited, there is promising evidence that biological factors could help us to better understand why some individuals do not become antisocial or criminal in the presence of high social risk. Neuropsychological and psychophysiological measures are relatively easier and less costly to operationalize than other biological measures, making them promising candidates for criminological researchers who would like to incorporate biological measures into their research designs.     

The Age Structure-Crime Rate Relationship: Solving a Long-Standing Puzzle

Objectives

Develop the concept of differential institutional engagement and test its ability to explain discrepant findings regarding the relationship between the age structure and homicide rates across ecological studies of crime. We hypothesize that differential degrees of institutional engagement—youths with ties to mainstream social institutions such as school, work or the military on one end of the spectrum and youths without such bonds on the other end—account for the direction of the relationship between homicide rates and age structure (high crime prone ages, such as 15–29).

Methods

Cross sectional, Ordinary Least Squares regression analyses using robust standard errors are conducted using large samples of cities characterized by varying degrees of youths’ differential institutional engagement for the years 1980, 1990 and 2000. The concept is operationalized with the percent of the population enrolled in college and the percent of 16–19 year olds who are simultaneously not enrolled in school, not in the labor market (not in the labor force or unemployed), and not in the military.

Results

Consistent and invariant results emerged. Positive effects of age structure on homicide rates are found in cities that have high percentages of disengaged youth and negative effects are found among cities characterized with high percentages of youth participating in mainstream social institutions.

Conclusions

This conceptualization of differential institutional engagement explains the discrepant findings in prior studies, and the findings demonstrate the influence of these contextual effects and the nature of the age structure-crime relationship.     

Engaging With Criminal Prosecution: The Victim's Perspective

Despite more than a decade of policies that encourage prosecutors to proceed without the victim's input or actions in cases of intimate partner violence (IPV), prosecutors still often rely on the victim's participation to move a case forward. The purpose of this study was to identify the barriers and motivators influencing female IPV victims' engagement with the criminal justice system and their preferences regarding prosecution. Findings from focus groups with women who had experienced police response to IPV revealed that women wanted the violence to end but faced numerous barriers to engaging with the criminal prosecution process. The dominant voice favored police and prosecutors taking action toward prosecution without depending solely or heavily on the victim's active participation.     

APPLYING CASE STUDY METHODOLOGY TO CHILD CUSTODY EVALUATIONS

The child custody evaluation (CCE) can play a critical role in the resolution of custody disputes in the Family Court. There have been a number of significant methodological advances made in this field by various researchers over the past 20 years. It is timely that a scientifically‐based, integrative, methodological framework be developed within which existing methods might be situated. In this paper, case study methodology is proposed as an appropriate methodological framework for CCEs. The application of this methodology to CCEs is explicated with particular attention being paid to the methodological tasks of data collection and data interpretation. An orienting model is proposed to guide the collection of data, and strategies are described for applying population level research findings to individual cases in the form of risk and resilience models. Finally, coherence, analogy, and making methodology explicit are proposed as evaluation criteria for the CCE process and reports, and suggestions are made about outcome research.