Coping with Electronic Data Discovery Issues

This article provides an overview of the steps a company should take if electronic discovery is requested from it during the course of litigation. Either by seeking a protective order or by inducing a motion to compel by objecting to the discovery requests, a ruling should be obtained from the court as to the parameters and limits of the requested discovery and who bears the cost of retrieving and producing the electronic data. If production is ordered by the court, the producing party must ensure through the use of formal review measures that any privileges protecting the data are not waived. While severe sanctions may be imposed on a party who destroys electronic evidence after litigation is initiated or when it is reasonably likely that litigation will ensue, a company may prevent a broad-scale, expensive production of electronic evidence by installing prior to any litigation a system of routine organization and disposal of non-essential electronic data.     

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.     

Generating and using evidence to guide public policy and practice: Lessons from the Campbell Test-bed Project

This paper offers lessons from a three-year Test-bed project that tested systematic review practices developed by the Campbell Collaboration and the Cochrane Collaboration. Under the Test-bed project 14 systematic reviews were completed of interventions in crime prevention, social welfare, and education. (References to the products of these test-bed reviews are included in the reference list, preceded by an asterisk). Building on this experience, the authors recommend structuring future reviews around well-defined review topics more explicitly focused on particular interventions, and constraining literature search to evaluations of relevant interventions. Reviewers should analyze and report findings from RCTs separately from non-RCT studies and report on impact estimates in natural units, instead of relying solely on effect size metrics. Further, reviewers should report intent-to-treat estimates as the causally valid outcomes from RCTs. Analyses of impacts for treated sub-groups should be reported as non-experimental findings. More attention should be given to the minimum detectable effect a study can support, as well as any information on the possible costs and benefits of the intervention. Pooling results from studies of disparate interventions, populations, and contexts is not recommended. Meta-analysis should be reserved for homogeneous clusters of interventions studies. Forest plots are helpful for presenting study findings and confidence limits. However, simple bar charts preserve important information on the base levels for the outcomes. Finally reviewers should define a priori the minimum data set or required elements that allow study inclusion, and use this information systematically in making decisions about what evidence to admit into the review.