MALTREATED CHILDREN'S ABILITY TO ESTIMATE TEMPORAL LOCATION AND NUMEROSITY OF PLACEMENT CHANGES AND COURT VISITS

Research examining children's temporal knowledge has tended to utilize brief temporal intervals and singular, neutral events, and is not readily generalizable to legal settings in which maltreated children are asked temporal questions about salient, repeated abuse that often occurred in the distant past. To understand how well maltreated children can describe temporal location and numerosity of documented, personal experiences, we assessed 167 6- to 10-year-old maltreated children's temporal memory for changes in their living arrangements and prior visits to court. Small percentages of children were capable of providing exact temporal location information (age, month, or season) regarding their first or last placement or court experience, or numerosities for placements or court visits. Greater knowledge of current temporal locations did not predict better performance. However, older children's performance for several temporal judgments was better than chance, and their reports were not largely discrepant from the truth. Findings suggest caution when questioning maltreated children about when and how many times prior events occurred.     

Negotiating the Marcellus: The Role of Information in Building Trust in Extractive Deals

New technology has expanded the opportunities for energy companies within the United States, often bringing them into populated communities and requiring them to negotiate deals with landowners. This case study focuses on how one group of landowners in northeastern Pennsylvania creatively reimagined the process of negotiating in a natural gas deal. They used collective bargaining for leverage, and the Internet and social media to level the informational playing field. These techniques allowed them to develop trust within the group and ultimately with one company, as they sought to protect their environment and enhance their financial gain.     

A Comparison of Invalidating Family Environment Characteristics Between University Students Engaging in Self-Injurious Thoughts &; Actions and Non-Self-Injuring University Students

Individuals experiencing non-suicidal self-injurious (NSSI) thoughts only are greatly overlooked by current research. This investigation aimed at determining how three groups of university students differed in their reported quality of childhood relationships with parents, and histories of physical and sexual abuses. These groups included students experiencing only NSSI thoughts (n = 126), students engaging in NSSI actions (n = 90), and students exhibiting neither (n = 1,080). Results showed that individuals experiencing NSSI thoughts only, and those engaging in NSSI actions reported poorer relationships with parents and more physical abuse than the No NSSI group; however, NSSI thoughts and NSSI action groups had similar outcomes to one another for most variables. These findings suggest that individuals experiencing only NSSI thoughts share similar negative childhood environments associated with engagement in NSSI action and that they should be included in future research, particularly investigations aimed at identifying protective factors that could prevent them from engaging in NSSI.     

The place of public fear in sentencing and correctional policy

Public opinion about sentencing and correctional issues has emerged in recent decades as a salient topic in criminology. Empirical studies have suggested that the public has dynamic perceptions about these criminal justice issues. Sentencing and correctional policy have become key issues confronting legislators and policymakers, as correctional budgets and public interest in these areas have increased. Despite the focus on public opinion about sentencing and corrections, previous research has largely ignored how the public feels about the role of policymakers regarding these issues, and what influences opinions about whether public fear should be an important consideration in policy decisions. The current study partly replicated the work of Cullen and colleagues by examining perceptions of crime salience, crime causation, goals of the criminal justice system, and attitudes towards imprisonment and rehabilitation. It uniquely examined perceptions about the importance of legislator consideration of a specific determinant, namely, public fear, in decision making about sentencing and correctional policy.     

The Use of the MacCAT-CA with Adolescents: An Item Response Theory Investigation of Age-Related Measurement Bias

Despite the application of the MacCAT-CA to juveniles, questions been raised regarding the appropriateness of this tool for adolescents. The current study tested for age-related measurement bias using data from the MacArthur Juvenile Adjudicative Competence Study (n = 1393). Five of the MacCAT-CA items showed age-related measurement bias (i.e., DIF) for adolescents aged 11–15, and three items showed DIF for adolescents aged 16–17. Several items (e.g., understanding of juries) were more difficult for adolescents than adults matched at the same latent level of capacity, suggesting that these items might underestimate adolescents’ legal capacities. Contrary to expectations, there was little evidence of age-related measurement bias on the Appreciation scale. The use of the MacCAT-CA in research and clinical settings is discussed.

The politics of regulatory enforcement and compliance: Theorizing and operationalizing political influences

There is broad consensus in the literature on regulatory enforcement and compliance that politics matters. However, there is little scholarly convergence on what politics is or rigorous theorization and empirical testing of how politics matters. Many enforcement and compliance studies omit political variables altogether. Among those that address political influences on regulatory outcomes, politics has been defined in myriad ways and, too often, left undefined. Even when political constructs are explicitly operationalized, the mechanisms by which they influence regulatory outcomes are thinly hypothesized or simply ignored. If politics is truly as important to enforcement and compliance outcomes as everyone in the field seems to agree, regulatory scholarship must make a more sustained and systematic effort to understand their relationship, because overlooking this connection risks missing what is actually driving regulatory outcomes. This article examines how the construct of “politics” has been conceptualized in regulatory theory and analyzes how it has been operationalized in empirical studies of regulatory enforcement and compliance outcomes. It brings together scholarship across disciplines that rarely speak but have much to say to one another on this subject in order to constitute a field around the politics of regulation. The goal is to sharpen theoretical and empirical understandings of when and how regulation works by better accounting for the role politics plays in its enforcement.     

A Review of: “Exploring Positive Identities and Organizations: Building a Theoretical and Research Foundation edited by Laura Morgan Roberts and Jane E. Dutton”

ABSTRACT

Public service motivation (PSM) has been shown to be positively related to job satisfaction in the public sector, but there are two gaps in the literature. First, not only PSM but also pro-social motivation directed towards helping specific others (called user orientation) may affect job satisfaction. Second, the relationship between job satisfaction and these two types of pro-social motivation, PSM and user orientation, may also be found in the private sector. This study tests whether job satisfaction is associated with PSM and user orientation, and whether these associations differ between public and private employees. Using data from a survey of Danish employees (n = 2,811), we generally find positive relationships between the two types of pro-social motivation and job satisfaction, but the strength of the associations vary between occupations. The PSM–job satisfaction association does not differ significantly between the private and public sector, while the user orientation–job satisfaction association is strongest for private employees. This suggests that to understand the relationships between pro-social motivation, employment sector, and job satisfaction, future studies could fruitfully consider incorporating other types of pro-social motivation such as user orientation.     

Prediction of adolescent sexual reoffending: A meta-analysis of the J-SOAP-II, ERASOR, J-SORRAT-II, and Static-99

Several risk assessment tools, including the Juvenile Sex Offender Assessment Protocol-II (Prentky & Righthand, 2003), the Estimate of Risk of Adolescent Sexual Offense Recidivism (Worling & Curwen, 2001), the Juvenile Sexual Offense Recidivism Risk Assessment Tool-II (Epperson, Ralston, Fowers, DeWitt, & Gore, 2006), and the Static-99 (Hanson & Thornton, 1999), have been used to assess reoffense risk among adolescents who have committed sexual offenses. Given that research on these tools has yielded somewhat mixed results, we empirically synthesized 33 published and unpublished studies involving 6,196 male adolescents who had committed a sexual offense. We conducted two separate meta-analyses, first with correlations and then with areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCs). Total scores on each of the tools significantly predicted sexual reoffending, with aggregated correlations ranging from .12 to .20 and aggregated AUC scores ranging from .64 to .67. However, in many cases heterogeneity across studies was moderate to high. There were no significant differences between tools, and although the Static-99 was developed for adults, it achieved similar results as the adolescent tools. Results are compared to other meta-analyses of risk tools used in the area of violence risk assessment and in other fields. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Competence to Waive Interrogation Rights and Adjudicative Competence in Adolescent Defendants: Cognitive Development,Attorney Contact,and Psychological Symptoms

Although there is growing evidence of developmental differences in competency to waive interrogation rights and adjudicative competence, the correlates of adolescents' legal capacities remain unclear. This study examined the relationship of legal capacities to cognitive development, legal learning opportunities, and psychological symptoms. Participants were 152 male and female defendants aged 11–17, who completed Grisso's Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights, the Fitness Interview Test (Revised Edition), the Woodcock-Johnson III Cognitive Assessment Battery, and the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale for Children. Legal capacities relevant to interrogation and adjudication increased with age. These developmental differences were partially mediated or explained by cognitive development. Of the specific cognitive ilities examined (general intellectual ability, verbal ability, reasoning, long-term retrieval, attention, and executive functioning), verbal ability was a particularly strong predictor of performance on competency measures. Also, defendants obtained lower scores on competency measures if they showed evidence of attention deficits or hyperactivity, had spent limited time with their attorneys, and/or were from low socioeconomic backgrounds.