Using Adjusted Performance Measures for Evaluating Resource Use

Public service organizations are looking for ways to improve the evaluation of performance and resource allocation. One of the approaches is to use adjusted performance measures, which attempt to capture factors that affect the organizational performance but are outside of the organization's control. This article illustrates the construction and use of adjusted performance measures to assess the performance of public schools, and reports findings from a study of school-based budgeting in Chicago that relates adjusted performance measures and patterns of budget allocations.     

亚洲多边主义的进程与外交艺术:美国、日本、中国之比较

东亚合作更多地表现为一种地区多边合作的过程。作为东亚的一个成员,和平发展的中国无疑是东亚区域合作最重要的动力源之一。从地缘上看,美国不属于东亚范畴。但基于历史原因和美国独特的地位,东亚合作进程又不可能排除美国的影响,甚至需要美国建设性的参与。因此,东亚合作一方面是一个内部一体化的过程,另一方面也涉及到一个对外部开放的问题。如何评估东亚合作进程中的中国的作用、美国对东亚合作进程的影响以及东亚合作背景下中美关系的前景等已经成为学界研究的一个热点。为此,中国国际关系学会、外交学院、美国乔治.华盛顿大学联合举办了“东亚地区合作与中美关系”国际研讨会(2005年11月),中美双方学者就此展开坦诚的对话交流。在会议讨论的基础上,我刊以笔谈形式整理刊发部分学者的观点,以飨读者。     

Somebody’s Gotta Be There for These Kids: Importance of Service Orientation for Sustaining Public Child Welfare Workers

Research has long indicated that both employees’ perceptions of external support and their own dispositional factors tend to predict satisfaction, intent to stay, and retention. However, the dispositional factor of service orientation has received minimal attention in child welfare or social work research. This article furthers the research on service orientation by utilizing quantitative surveys to test relationships between service orientation and key organizational variables and then exploring qualitative results to gain a more nuanced perspective on how service orientation inhabits the work-related experiences of study participants and its relation to worker retention projections in the field of child welfare.     

A statistical approach to aid examiners in the forensic analysis of handwriting

We develop a statistical approach to model handwriting that accommodates all styles of writing (cursive, print, connected print). The goal is to compute a posterior probability of writership of a questioned document given a closed set of candidate writers. Such probabilistic statements can support examiner conclusions and enable a quantitative forensic evaluation of handwritten documents. Writing is treated as a sequence of disjoint graphical structures, which are extracted using an automated and open-source process. The graphs are grouped based on the similarity of their shapes through a K-means clustering template. A person's writing pattern can be characterized by the rate at which graphs are emitted to each cluster. The cluster memberships serve as data for a Bayesian hierarchical model with a mixture component. The rate of mixing between two parameters in the hierarchy indicates writing style.     

The effectiveness of various strategies to improve DNA analysis of formaldehyde-damaged tissues from embalmed cadavers for human identification purposes

Formalin-fixed tissues provide the medical and forensic communities with alternative and often last resort sources of DNA for identification or diagnostic purposes. The DNA in these samples can be highly degraded and chemically damaged, making downstream genotyping using short tandem repeats (STRs) challenging. Therefore, the use of alternative genetic markers, methods that pre-amplify the low amount of good quality DNA present, or methods that repair the damaged DNA template may provide more probative genetic information. This study investigated whether whole genome amplification (WGA) and DNA repair could improve STR typing of formaldehyde-damaged (FD) tissues from embalmed cadavers. Additionally, comparative genotyping success using bi-allelic markers, including INDELs and SNPs, was explored. Calculated random match probabilities (RMPs) using traditional STRs, INDEL markers, and two next generation sequencing (NGS) panels were compared across all samples. Overall, results showed that neither WGA nor DNA repair substantially improved STR success rates from formalin-fixed tissue samples. However, when DNA from FD samples was genotyped using INDEL and SNP-based panels, the RMP of each sample was markedly lower than the RMPs calculated from partial STR profiles. Therefore, the results of this study suggest that rather than attempting to improve the quantity and quality of severely damaged and degraded DNA prior to STR typing, a more productive approach may be to target smaller amplicons to provide more discriminatory DNA identifications. Furthermore, an NGS panel with less loci may yield better results when examining FD samples, due to more optimized chemistries that result in greater allelic balance and amplicon coverage.     

Policy influences on community trail development

This study explores processes and policies that facilitate the development of community trails. With funding from Active Living Research and the research framework of the Physical Activity Policy Research Network (PAPRN), we conducted a multiple-site case study. A total of six trails in Hawaii, Massachusetts, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Washington were chosen for study. The goals of this case study were to identify the policy influences on trail development, explore the roles of key players in trail development, and compare and contrast findings from the different trails. Trail development can be a long process. Some of the trails took over a decade to complete because of funding, opposition, and roadblocks in the form of design standard policies. Work in trail development requires a team of many players, and it is necessary to balance their varied motives to accomplish a shared overall goal. Foresight through the master planning process is also a vital component of successful trail development. Finally, community involvement is key. Communities contemplating trail development should explore the effects of policy on the trail projects reported here to proactively identify potential influence.     

Substance use and PTSD symptoms impact the likelihood of rape and revictimization in college women

The present study utilized a mixed retrospective and prospective design with an 8-month follow-up period to test a model of revictimization that included multiple childhood (i.e., child sexual, physical, and emotional abuse) and situational variables (i.e., substance use, sexual behavior) for predicting rape among 276 college women. It was of particular interest to determine whether traumatic responses (e.g., posttraumatic symptomatology or risky behavior) increased vulnerability for revictimization. During the 8-month follow-up period, 9% of participants were raped; 88% of assaults involved substance use by the victim. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomatology predicted rape, substance use, and sexual behavior. Substance use, but not sexual behavior, mediated the relation between PTSD symptomatology and rape during the follow-up period. Sexual behavior indirectly impacted risk for rape via substance use. Results suggest that college women with PTSD symptomatology may be at greater risk for rape if they use substances to reduce distress.     

The Impact of the Boston Marathon Bombings on Public Willingness to Cooperate with Police

While a key to law enforcement success is the willingness of the public to cooperate with police, we have limited understanding of how terrorist attacks affect this public readiness. Prior research suggests that terrorist attacks might increase citizen cooperation with police through both prevention efforts and rally effects. We test these assertions with three nationally representative surveys on respondents’ willingness to help police combat terrorism: one before the Boston Marathon bombings and two after. As predicted, public willingness to report suspicious behavior to police increases significantly following the bombings and there is evidence that these increases generalize to ordinary crime. We also find that knowledge of key counter terrorism programs increases after the bombings, effects are somewhat stronger for the New England area than other regions, and the strength of the results are greatly diminished 16 months after the attacks. Conclusions are similar for both panel and cross-sectional analyses.     

Ensuring the validity of police use of force training

This research examined the skills and abilities required of officers to effectively manage situations where the use of force may be required. The research also considered the nature of training required to facilitate the development of these skills/abilities. Seventy Western Australia Police officers participated in focus groups. Identified skills/abilities fell into seven categories: Aware, Assess, Approach, Act, Automatic, Appraise and Adapt. With regard to developing proficiency in these skills, officers emphasised the importance of relevant, applied and dynamic training, debriefing and the use of scenarios/role plays. The research highlights the need to change the scope of annual refresher training from the appropriate and effective application of force to the effective management of situations in which the use of force may be required, in their entirety. Findings also highlight the need to change the focus of training from performance and assessment to continued skill development (i.e. practice and learning).     

Memory, History, and Nostalgia in Berlin’s Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is devoted to telling the 2,000-year history of Jews in Germany in a stunning building designed by Daniel Libeskind. It is Germany’s premier museum devoted to Jewish history and memory, but it is expressly not a Holocaust museum and most reference to the Holocaust is architectural. In its interactive and sophisticated exhibitions, the Jewish Museum represents contemporary international trends in museology and in many ways resembles the many Holocaust and other memorial museums around the world, one of the most prominent and striking international museological trends. However, in rejecting the categorization as a memorial museum and in focusing on a celebration of German–Jewish culture and history rather than the tragedy of the Holocaust, the Jewish Museum is what we might call a countermemorial museum. As such, it challenges the new norms around the creation of memorial museums and other sites of memory to be self-reflexive meditations on the negative past and its trauma. If memorial museums emerge from a particular orientation toward the past that Jeffrey Olick calls the “politics of regret” and claims is a major characteristic of our age, then the Jewish Museum might represent a parallel trend that we can call a “politics of nostalgia.” The museum serves, in many ways, as a screen upon which present-day Germany can project an idealized image of its past, masking some of the present tensions around German national identity and ideas of German multiculturalism. At the same time, the museum often seems to be in conflict with Libeskind’s building, which is infused with Holocaust symbolism and meaning.