D. Hovell,The Power of Process: The Value of Due Process in Security Council Decision-Making

Netherlands International Law Review -     

Psychological Boundaries and Ethnic Conflict: How Identity Constrained Choice and Worked to Turn Ordinary People into Perpetrators of Ethnic Violence During the Lebanese Civil War

Why do ordinary people commit ethnic atrocities? To understand the psychology of ethnic violence we constructed a pilot project based on narrative interviews with five ordinary people who participated in acts of ethnic violence during the Lebanese Civil War. The interviews present striking evidence that identity constrains choice for all individuals, regardless of their particular ideological or socioeconomic demographic background. Our findings challenge both the rationalist approaches of realistic conflict theory and rational choice and the institutional claims of consociational democracy and suggest the tremendous power of identity and perceptions of self in relation to others to constrain political actions.     

The Promise and Pitfalls of Consensus Decision Making in School Management

School/Community‐Based Management (SCBM) advocates insisted that changing the bureaucratic structure of governance, moving from top‐down decision making to a shared decision making at the local level, would revolutionize schools and result in higher student achievement. Many schools have struggled with shared decision‐making processes. This article examines one high school's attempt to implement a dress code using consensus‐based decision‐making. Organizations that strive to make decisions by consensus should be aware of the pitfalls that may occur and work to address them if they arise.     

Big Brother as a Contract Monitor: An Assessment of the Use of Contract Staff to Monitor Offender Communications

The privatization of prison services is a growing trend in the field of corrections; however, this growth has not been matched by evaluative research. This study examines the use of contract staff to supplement state intelligence investigators’ efforts to monitor outgoing offender telephone communications for evidence of illicit activity at 18 adult institutions in a Midwestern department of corrections. Percent-change models and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) modeling are used to examine aggregates of intelligence reports documenting drug, expressive, instrumental, and administrative violations. Our findings indicate that the introduction of contract services was associated with substantial increases in the number of intelligence reports filed within each of these categories. Furthermore, these results suggest that the use of privatized services that supplement rather than replace public efforts appear to be an ethical, efficient, and cost-effective alternative to comprehensive privatization.     

Attitudes on the Responsibility for Child Safety: Key Child Protection Worker Characteristics

The child protection workers’ attitude toward responsibility for child safety is complex and requires further examination. Using the Quality Improvement Project on Differential Response data from Illinois we examined the characteristics that influence worker attitude towards child safety. The attitude variable measures workers’ belief in family responsibility for child safety compared to state responsibility for child safety. Regression analyses suggest that self-perception of skills, confidence in community resources, confidence in the child protection system, and worker age significantly predict worker attitude. Findings support organizations to direct resources towards shifting attitudes in the direction that favors agency mandate and needs.     

Cues to Deception and Ability to Detect Lies as a Function of Police Interview Styles

In Experiment 1, we examined whether three interview styles used by the police, accusatory, information-gathering and behaviour analysis, reveal verbal cues to deceit, measured with the Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) and Reality Monitoring (RM) methods. A total of 120 mock suspects told the truth or lied about a staged event and were interviewed by a police officer employing one of these three interview styles. The results showed that accusatory interviews, which typically result in suspects making short denials, contained the fewest verbal cues to deceit. Moreover, RM distinguished between truth tellers and liars better than CBCA. Finally, manual RM coding resulted in more verbal cues to deception than automatic coding of the RM criteria utilising the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software programme.In Experiment 2, we examined the effects of the three police interview styles on the ability to detect deception. Sixty-eight police officers watched some of the videotaped interviews of Experiment 1 and made veracity and confidence judgements. Accuracy scores did not differ between the three interview styles; however, watching accusatory interviews resulted in more false accusations (accusing truth tellers of lying) than watching information-gathering interviews. Furthermore, only in accusatory interviews, judgements of mendacity were associated with higher confidence. We discuss the possible danger of conducting accusatory interviews.     

Using Administrative Data to Monitor Racial/Ethnic Disparities and Disproportionality Within Child Welfare Agencies: Process and Preliminary Outcomes

Child welfare administrative data are increasingly used to identify racial/ethnic disproportionality and disparities at various levels of aggregation. However, child welfare agencies typically face challenges in harnessing administrative data to examine racial/ethnic disproportionality and disparities at meaningful levels of analysis due to limited resources and/or tools for reporting. This article describes the process through which a multi-state workgroup designed and developed management reports to monitor racial/ethnic disparities and disproportionality using a web-based child welfare administrative data reporting system. The article provides an overview of the process, outcome, and challenges of the group’s work with the goal of offering a starting point for discussion to others who may be seeking to monitor racial/ethnic disparities and disproportionality, regardless of their reporting system.     

Economic Burden of Child Exposure to Intimate Partner Violence in the United States

Because the effects of children’s exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) carry long lasting consequences for the affected children, IPV exposure may impose a significant economic burden to localities, states, and society at large, made explicit over the victim’s lifetime and over a wide range of behaviors and outcomes, including use of social services, health and healthcare utilization, educational outcomes, workforce productivity, and criminal behavior. While much research has been conducted on the effect of IPV exposure on multiple short- and long-term outcomes, no research to date has examined the economic burden associated with IPV exposure. Using an incidence-based approach, we estimated the aggregate discounted costs associated with healthcare spending, criminal behavior, and labor market productivity accrued by a 20-year-old victim in 2016 projected to the age of 65, applying a 3% discount rate. The average lifetime costs derived from childhood IPV exposure are estimated to be over $50,000 per victim (2016 U.S. dollars) due to increased healthcare costs ($11,000), increased crime costs ($14,000), and productivity losses ($26,000). Over an annual birth cohort of young adults, these costs amount to over $55 billion nationwide. IPV exposure imposes a substantial economic burden to society at large in the form of increased healthcare costs, increased crime costs, and reduced productivity. This study offers an explicit quantification of substantial lifetime costs, which should encourage policy makers to redouble efforts to reduce the incidence of IPV and successfully ameliorate its effects on IPV-exposed children.     

Social analytic investigation of hostile work environments

This paper presents a brief psycholegal analysis of hostile work environment sexual harassment law especially as it distinguishes between the reasonable person and reasonable woman tests of severity and pervasiveness. We tested two hypotheses: (1) women (but not men) would show stronger judgments of harassment when using the reasonable woman standard, and (2) this relationship would be strongest for women who identified with harassed victims and men who did not. We presented to a sample of undergraduates an in-group identification measurement task followed by the fact patterns in two cases and asked them to make legally relevant decisions under either the reasonable woman or person standard. Although we found gender and in-group identification effects, we found no legal standard effects. The results are discussed from the perspectives of law and psychology.