Violence and the perception of risk associated with hosting refugees

Public Choice - How do individuals’ experiences with political violence affect their perceptions regarding the risk associated with hosting refugees? This is an important question given that...     

Children's experiences of domestic violence: developing an integrated response from police and child protection services

Police notifications of incidents of domestic violence to child protection services constitute an acknowledgement of the harm that domestic violence inflicts on children. However, these notifications represent a substantial demand on child welfare services and the outcomes for children and victims of domestic violence have been questioned. This paper presents findings from the first UK study to examine these notifications in depth and examines the interface between the police and child protection services in responding to domestic violence incidents. The research reports on police interventions in 251 incidents of domestic violence involving children; the communication of information to child protection services and the subsequent filtering and service response. Social workers found that notifications conveyed little information on children's experiences of domestic violence. Forty per cent of families notified had had no previous contact with child protection services in that area, but those cases most likely to receive social work assessment or intervention were those where the case was already open. Notifications triggered a new social work intervention in only 5% of cases. The study also identified a range of innovative approaches for improving the co-ordination of police and child protective services in relation to children's exposure to domestic violence. Arrangements that maximized opportunities for police and social workers to share agency information appeared to offer the best option for achieving informed decisions about the appropriate level of service response to children and families experiencing domestic violence.     

Social preferences for the inclusion of indirect benefits in the evaluation of publicly funded health services: results from an Australian survey

The inclusion of both monetary and non-monetary indirect benefits in economic evaluations of public health programmes and services can have significant distributive effects between patient groups. As a result, some patients may be advantaged and others disadvantaged for reasons not directly related to health outcomes or (direct) treatment costs. In pluralistic democracies, there is a case for consulting the community on the fairness of policies that have such distributive implications. This paper reports the results of two pilot studies aimed at uncovering the preferences of the Australian public for the inclusion of indirect benefits in the evaluation of services for its national health scheme, Medicare. The initial survey found some support for taking account of non-monetary indirect benefits - for example, the social contribution made by parents of young children and carers of elderly relatives. By contrast, there was little support for giving high taxpayers priority access to general Medicare services, to life-saving organ transplants, or to very costly drugs, despite the indirect social benefits of doing so. However, such support increased significantly in the follow-up study when the outcomes were characterised as certain, identifiable and health related, and the opportunity costs of failing to take account of indirect benefits were made very clear. The follow-up survey provided evidence of public scepticism about the willingness or ability of government to use additional tax receipts for socially beneficial purposes, and/or a preference for programmes and services that focus on health rather than welfare more generally.     

On Formal Theory and Statistical Methods: A Response to Carrubba, Yuen, and Zorn

e-mail: sign{at}mail.rochester.edu The recent article by Carrubba, Yuen, and Zorn (2007) (CYZ)attempts to relate the strategic random utility models in Signorino(1999, 2002, 2003) and in Signorino and Yilmaz (2003) to existinggame theory practice and to existing statistical techniques.It contributes to this literature by reminding us that comparativestatics analysis can be applied to the equilibria of these models.There are a number of claims in CYZ, however, that require clarification.In particular, the article's primary claim is that comparativestatics analysis, in combination with one of three proposedstatistical estimators, provides a simpler alternative to methodspreviously advocated. This claim (or combination of claims)is incorrect. When one examines the procedure CYZ recommends,it is no simpler for substantive researchers than anything previouslyrecommended. Moreover, none of the proposed estimators are new:they are exactly the same methods introduced in Signorino (1999,2003), in Signorino and Yilmaz (2003), in Signorino, Walker,and Bas (2002), and in Bas, Signorino, and Walker (2007).     

Recovery of DNA and fingerprints from touched documents

This study investigated the various factors affecting DNA profiling from DNA recovered from fingerprints deposited on paper before and after fingerprint enhancement treatments. The DNeasy^® plant mini kit (QIAGEN^®) was found to improve DNA recovery from paper by over 150% compared with the QIAamp^® mini kit. A significant decrease in the amount of DNA recovered was observed following treatment with DFO and/or Ninhydrin. This decrease in yield did not have a comparably significant effect on the quality of the SGM Plus™ profiles. Furthermore, this study found that whilst certain paper types, such as newspaper, magazine and filter paper allowed for the good recovery of DNA, common office paper and white card, strongly interfered with the recovery of DNA resulting in poor quality profiles.