Development assistance on the brink

The international aid regime is currently faced with a major paradox. On the one hand, officials in bilateral and multlateral agencies increasingly agree that 'aid matters' and can contribute significantly to development. This confidence has been reinforced by the fact that, after a decade dominated by the objective of structural adjustment, the much less controversial one of sustainable development has taken over as the new mantra of aid policies. On the other hand, development assistance appears to be a declining priority for foreign policy-makers in the developed countries. The generosity of donors has diminished to the point that aid reached an all-time low in 1997. The aim of this article is to make sense of this paradox. After examining the grounds for optimism within the aid community, the article then explains why there is reason to doubt that foreign assistance can effectively foster sustainable development over the course of the next generation.     

Examination of the consistency of interviewer performance across three distinct interview contexts

Abstract

The current study examined the consistency of investigative interviewers' performance (n=31) across three distinct interview paradigms: (a) a mock interview where an adult actor played the role of a child recalling abuse, (b) a mock interview where a school child recalled an innocuous event that was staged at the child's school, and (c) a field interview where the interviewer elicited a statement of abuse from a child. Performance was measured by calculating the proportion of open-ended and leading questions, and by eliciting expert ratings of the presence of a range of problem behaviours commonly exhibited by interviewers. Overall, the performance of individual interviewers was relatively stable across the tasks. Heterogeneity in stability, however, differed according to the type of question and the nature of the event being examined. In particular, the mock interview paradigm where the adult acted the role of an alleged child abuse victim produced a measure of performance that was more similar to the field interview than the interview where a school child recalled an innocuous event. The implications of the findings for trainers, and directions for future research, are discussed.     

Dynamics in Legislative Budgeting in Italy: 1982–2001

For much of the First Republic, the Italian parliament was notorious for its fiscal irresponsibility. However, using data over a 20-year period we note that the performance of the parliament during the passage of the national budget changed over time. During most of the 1980s the parliament always spent more than the final amount specified in the government's Budget Bill. But this trend slowed towards the late 1980s, and of particular interest is that for several years during the 1990s the parliament actually voted to spend less than the government had originally proposed. We explain this anomaly using institutional theories and contextual explanations.     

The New Right and family politics

In all the main industrial countries of the West since the 1970, the family has become in issue which excites media attention and public debate and which has become a prominent item on the agenda of the major political parties. The family has become politicized.

This has been particularly the case in America and Britan where it has been associated to different degress with the electoral successes of a revived conservatism under Thatcher and Reagan which committed itself to policies to strengthen the ‘traditional’ family. This article argues, contray to number of left and politics. A number of reasons are offered for this. It is argued that the sheer weight and momentum of the major demographic economic, social and cultural shifts in the

sub-stratum of the advanced industrialized societies, particularly since the Second World war, have had such enormous impact on women and consequently on the family that they are unlikely to be reversed. it is also suggested that counter campaigns and the role of professional groups in the formulation, implementation and evaluationof public

policy have inhibited attempts to return to ‘Victorian values’, Yet another reason advanced is the difficulty that recent conservative governments have experienced in aligning their economic objecrtives with politicies to strengthen the traditional family.

However, the article argues that an important factor in any explanation of this lack of success lies in the nature of te New Right itself. The revived conservative parties of the 1970s were in fact an amalgam of number of different ideological stands on the right of the political spectrum, for which the family became an important unifying sumbol in its capacity to align radical liberal economic policies with traditionalist conservative concerns, and its rhetorical value in translating these into a popular political discourse. While this enabled them to attract a number of different constituneices and widen thie electoral base, particularly with new voters, this eneasy coaliation was itself a major obstacle to te realization of any consistent and coherent family policy.     

Recall from informed consent counselling for cataract surgery

The authors investigated the effect of giving written material on information recall from informed consent counselling for cataract surgery. Fifty English-speaking patients who underwent non-urgent cataract extraction at Flinders Medical Centre, South Australia, were prospectively enrolled. Systematic counselling for cataract surgery was provided, with a written copy of the content given to a randomly selected group of patients (n = 24). All subjects completed a questionnaire after counselling and again at two weeks after surgery to test their satisfaction with, and recall of, information provided. Patients were found to be satisfied with the amount of information they received and most were able to recall details about the cataract surgery procedure. However, many could not recall success rates or complication rates and only a minority could list any complication. The provision of written information did not significantly alter recall (p>0.05). Recall was significantly better immediately after counselling than two weeks after surgery (p<0.05). Younger patients also had significantly better recall (p<0.05). Patients were happy with the information they had been given but did not remember enough from the informed consent process to satisfy legal requirements.