Service Efforts and Accomplishments Reporting: Has Its Time Really Come?

In April 1994 GASB released Concepts Statement No. 2, Service Efforts and Accomplishments Reporting , bringing required SEA external financial reporting a very large step closer to reality. Before long, public financial officials may be required to annually report measures of performance. We are now about halfway through the experimentation phase established in Statement 2. This article summarizes the status of GASB's SEA experimentation process. It then suggests important behavioral, auditing, and other issues which GASB ought to address before proceeding with any formal pronouncements regarding SEA reporting requirements.     

The Effects of Capital Mobility, Trade Openness, and Democracy on Social Spending in Latin America, 1980–1999

Empirical studies measuring the impact of globalization on social spending have appeared recently in leading journals. This study seeks to improve upon previous work by (1) employing a more sophisticated and comprehensive measure of financial openness; (2) using a more accurate measure of trade openness based on purchasing power parities; and (3) relying on social spending data that are more complete than those used by previous studies on Latin America. Our estimates suggest that several empirical patterns reported in previous work deserve a second look. We find that trade openness has a positive association with education and social security expenditures, that financial openness does not constrain government outlays for social programs, and that democracy has a strong positive association with social spending, particularly on items that bolster human capital formation.     

When does the Gender Difference in Rumination Begin? Gender and Age Differences in the Use of Rumination by Adolescents

A cross-sectional non-clinical sample of 1,218 adolescents, aged 10–17 years, completed measures of stress, rumination, and depression to allow tests of the response style theory of S. Nolen-Hoeksema [J Res Adolesc 4:519–534, 1994] in adolescents, in particular whether increasing levels of stress and rumination in early adolescence are predictive of the onset of the gender difference in depression. Overall, females reported higher levels of stress, rumination, and depression than males. The onset of the gender differences in stress and depression occurred at age 13 years, and for rumination one year earlier at 12 years. Significantly, also from 13 years, rumination explained the gender difference in depression by showing that it significantly mediated the effect of gender on depression. Gender moderated the rumination to depression relationship; specifically the association was stronger for females than males. Developmental differences were noted in that rumination significantly mediated between stress and depression earlier in the age range for females than males. Results supported many of the predictions of Nolen-Hoeksema’s model of the emergence of a gender difference in adolescent depression.

The Prospective Impact of Family Functioning and Parenting Practices on Court-Involved Youth’s Substance Use and Delinquent Behavior

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Court-involved youth exhibit high rates of psychiatric symptoms, substance use, and delinquency, yet little is known about the contributing roles of caregiver and...     

Development of a Validity Scale for the Dissociative Experience Scale-Revised: Atypicality,Structure, and Inconsistency

Psychological Injury and Law - The Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES), the most commonly used scale for assessing dissociation across settings, lacks a validity scale. In this study, six methods...     

Complex Trauma: Missed and Misdiagnosis in Forensic Evaluations

Psychological Injury and Law - Forensic evaluators frequently utilize diagnoses as a way to document the nature and severity of impairment and/or injury in civil and criminal cases despite...     

中西文化对话与新的精神秩序

中美分歧反映出更深层的结构失调,即全球将迎来一个与其他大型经济体奉行不同体制与价值观的最大经济体。中国的独特性挑战了它的自我身份认同,也挑战了世界的原有认知。但这一特性是与中国传统共同发展的,中国文化具有与西方同等的正统性。与西方热衷于建构普世秩序不同,中国文化更为灵活、包容。在后现代,东西方有可能"思想解放",展开富有成果的对话,并能够相互平衡。尽管很少有人精通两大知识传统,尤其欧美对中国和其他亚洲国家了解不够,但我们必须找到交流的方式,寻求新的精神秩序。     

Why do Legislators Skip Votes? Position Taking Versus Policy Influence

A legislator’s duty is to vote on legislation, yet legislators routinely miss votes. Existing studies of absenteeism have focused on the US Congress, producing useful but partial explanations. We provide added insight by examining absenteeism in American state legislatures. Our data include 2,916,471 individual votes cast by 4392 legislators from 64 legislative chambers. This rich, multistate dataset produces insights that build on and sometimes conflict with Congressional research. We use a multilevel logistic model with nested and crossed random effects to estimate the influence of variables at five different levels. In particular, we investigate whether state legislators miss unimportant votes or important votes. Contrary to what Congressional studies have found, we find that state legislators avoid participating in close or major votes, favoring reelection concerns over policy influence. We also find that state-to-state variations in legislative professionalism—in particular, the length of the session—affect absenteeism, with shorter sessions leading to higher absenteeism.