Are left-handers less violent?

Previous work has shown that left-handers are overrepresented among juvenile offenders. The present study was designed to test whether left-handers are also overrepresented among violent juvenile offenders. However, opposite to expectation, the results showed that left-handed offenders scored lower than right-handed offenders on the Violence Scale, a measure of the violence potential of offenses read from the legal record. The unexpected effect was consistent over four sex-ethnicity subgroups. Possible explanations concerned sex-handedness interactions and hemisphericity effects.Received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from University of California, Los Angeles. Major research interests are delinquency, violence, and coping under stress.     

Service Delivery: The Audit Dimension

Reporting of performance information on public sector services has increased substantially in recent years. The audit of such information, however, is still relatively uncommon. In 1989 the Audit Office in New Zealand was confronted with a legislative requirement to audit Statements of Service Performance (SSPs). This paper backgrounds New Zealand's shift in emphasis from program effectiveness audits to the audit of non-financial performance information, describes the development of audit methodology in this area and identifies lessons learned.     

Has welfare reform changed teenage behaviors?

Data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1979 and 1997 cohorts were used to compare welfare use, fertility, educational attainment, and marriage among teenage women in the years before and immediately following welfare reform. The first objective was to document differences between these cohorts in welfare use and outcomes and behavior correlated with entry into welfare and with future economic and social well‐being. The second objective was to investigate the causal role of welfare reform in behavioral change. Significant differences were found between cohorts in welfare use and in outcomes related to welfare use. Furthermore, difference‐in‐differences estimates suggest that welfare reform has been associated with reduced welfare receipt, reduced fertility, and reduced marriage among young women who, because of a disadvantaged family background, are at high risk of welfare receipt. Finally, in the post‐welfare reform era, teenage mothers are less likely to receive welfare and are more likely to live with at least one parent than in the pre‐reform era. Establishing more definitively that welfare reform is responsible for these changes will require further investigation. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Emmeline pankhurst: a biographical interpretation [1]

This article examines a dominant narrative about, Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), the most notorious of the groupings campaigning for the parliamentary vote for women in Edwardian Britain. It is claimed that this narrative is to be found in the influential book, The Suffragette Movement (1931), written by one of Emmeline's daughters, Sylvia. In this book, Sylvia portrays her mother as a traitor to the socialist cause, a leader who deliberately encouraged wealthy Conservative women to join the WSPU and who failed to mobilise the working classes, a misguided autocrat who supported a single-issue campaign, a weak woman easily swayed by her eldest daughter, Christabel, and a failed mother who neglected her less favoured children, Harry, Adela and Sylvia.     

Linking strategy and performance: Developments in the New Zealand public sector

In recent decades, many governments have sought to improve their systems of strategic management and priority setting. Few of these attempts have met with unequivocal success. In particular, the systems for “whole-of-government strategizing” have not been well integrated into the ongoing budgetary processes and departmental performance management systems. In 1993—1994, as part of its comprehensive reforms of the public sector, the New Zealand government instituted a new system of strategic management. The new approach—which in part grew out of the National government's attempt to outline its long-term vision in a document titled Path to 2010—involves the ministers specifying a series of medium-term policy goals, referred to as “strategic result areas” (SRAs), and then translating these into more detailed departmental objectives, known as “key result areas” (KRAs). More specific “milestones” are subsequently identified to serve as benchmarks against which the achievement of departmental KRAs can be assessed. This article describes and evaluates this new approach and considers its possible application in other countries.     

Xiaobing Li,A History of the Modern Chinese Army

Journal of Chinese Political Science -