Lessons from a field experiment involving involuntary subjects 3,000 miles away

Objectives

Describe the challenges involved in conducting field experiments that entail a long distance between the research team and the research site.

Methods

A summary of the lessons learned from the field experiment of Hawaii??s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE).

Results

Pre-trial planning is especially important when the research team is a long distance from the research site. A good communication strategy helps educate practitioners on the merits of conservative design choices, such as intent-to-treat, and helps to signal the importance of the study and therefore of maintaining the condition assignments and delivering the intervention with fidelity.

Conclusions

Distance creates additional challenges for the research team. These challenges make it even more essential to exploit assets at the research site. Distance creates more uncertainty, which makes pre-planning even more important, but it is expensive. Criminal-justice funding agencies?? support for exploratory studies as precursors to full-blown trials would improve the quality of experimental criminal-justice research.     

The relationship among distributive and procedural justice and correctional life satisfaction, burnout, and turnover intent: An exploratory study

Distributive and procedural justice, two dimensions of organizational justice, have been found to be salient antecedents of many correctional staff attitudes, such as job stress, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment; however, little correctional research has examined their relationships with the life satisfaction, burnout, and turnover intent. Multivariate regression equations were estimated to determine the association of personal characteristics, distributive justice, and procedural justice with the life satisfaction, burnout, and turnover intent of correctional employees based on a survey of 160 staff at a private midwestern maximum security institution. Both distributive and procedural justice had a statistically significant inverse association with burnout and turnover intent, while procedural justice had a significant positive relationship with life satisfaction. Additionally, the results indicated that the association of procedural justice was larger than the association for distributive justice. Similar results were obtained using only responses from correctional officers.     

Work-related stress in Australia: The effects of legislative interventions and the cost of treatment

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data published in 2002 shows a continued rise in health care costs to the Australian community due to the growing number of people diagnosed with mental health disorders. Those mental health disorders may originate from a number of sources, including work and non-work-related factors. The so called work-related stress claims in all Australian jurisdictions are the most expensive form of workers compensation claim. In the most part this is due to the lengthy period of absence (duration) and complicated medical care which are characteristic of these claims. In Australia, in the last decade, attempts have been made to reduce the costs of compensable stress-related claims by imposing special legislative thresholds on such claims. This ‘back end’ approach to cost reduction has resulted in an array of legislative formula designed to exclude work-related stress claims. This article surveys the various legislative provisions dealing with work-related stress claims in Australia and provides an analysis of their effectiveness. A range of options are presented as alternatives to the exclusion of particular forms of work-related stress claims. The use of a corporate citizenship approach to the prevention and management of stress claims is also discussed as a proactive alternative to occupational safety and health legislative provisions and the workers compensation legislative exclusions.     

Do Family and Parenting Factors in Adolescence Influence Condom Use in Early Adulthood in a Multiethnic Sample of Young Adults?

Studies show that positive family factors help protect adolescents from engaging in risky sexual activities, but do they continue to protect adolescents as they transition to late adolescence/early adulthood? Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we examined whether family support, parent–child closeness, parental control/monitoring of adolescent behaviors and parent–child communication about sex, assessed in adolescence, were related to condom use in late adolescence/early adulthood among African American (n = 1,986), Chinese American (n = 163), Mexican American (n = 1,011) and White (n = 6,971) youth. Controlling for demographic variables and number of sex partners, the results showed that family support was positively related and parent–child communication was negatively related to condom use for the sample as a whole and for the white sample, but not for the other groups. Parent–child communication about sex and parental control were negatively related to condom use in the Chinese American sample. None of the family factors was related to condom use in the African American or Mexican American samples. Overall, parents talked more with daughters than sons about sexual matters. Condom use was most common among African Americans and among males. Greater attention to cultural expectations regarding sex and gender roles, as well as the causal ordering of effects, are important directions for future research.     

The interrelationship among stress,anxiety, and depression in law enforcement personnel

The current investigation was designed to explore the interrelationships among stress, anxiety, and depression in a population of law enforcement personnel. The Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995) were administered to police officers from a medium sized police department in Massachusetts (N=43). Correlation coefficients were conducted on the data. Additionally,t-tests were performed on demographic data regarding marital status and exercise to examine possible mediating factors in the development of symptoms. Implications for these findings and possibilities for future research are discussed.     

Fatal intravenous injection of potassium in hospitalized patients

We describe 4 cases of fatal intravenous injection of potassium in the hospital setting. These cases illustrate the subtlety of findings in such deaths and remind the forensic pathologist to consider this type of event in sudden, unexpected death of hospitalized patients.     

Administrative Failure and the International NGO Response to Hurricane Katrina

The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent failure of government agencies and public administrators elicited an unprecedented response by international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) to a disaster in the United States. This paper focuses on why so many INGOs were compelled to provide humanitarian assistance and relief in the United States for the first time and the administrative barriers they faced while doing so. What does such a response reveal about administrative failures in the wake of Katrina, and what might the implications be for reconceptualizing roles for nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations in disaster relief? The authors answer these questions using data from interviews with INGO representatives, organizational press releases and Web sites, news articles, and official reports and documentation.     

Toward Participatory and Transparent Governance: Report on the Sixth Global Forum on Reinventing Government:

The Global Forum on Reinventing Government has made government reform and new forms of comparative public administration and politics global issues. Since the forum was initiated in the United States in 1999, it has been held in locations around the world with broad representation. Yet the proceedings of these forums have not been fully reported to the international public administration community. This paper reports on the ideas on reinventing governance that emerged from the Sixth Global Forum. Many of the participants in the forum came from developing countries, so the paper also provides ideas and points of view on governance that are beyond the mainstream literature in this area.     

Coping with Interpersonal Stress and Psychosocial Health Among Children and Adolescents: A Meta-Analysis

This meta-analysis examines the relationship between active coping and psychosocial health among youth. Results from 40 studies of coping with interpersonal stress were synthesized using a random-effects model. Four areas of psychosocial functioning were examined: externalizing and internalizing behavior problems, social competence, and academic performance. The magnitude of the relationship between active coping and psychosocial functioning was small, with correlations ranging from 0.02 for internalizing behavior to 0.12 for academic performance. Mean effects were moderated by stressor controllability: youth who used active coping in response to controllable stressors had fewer externalizing problems and higher social competence, as compared to those who used active coping in response to uncontrollable stressors. Implications for primary prevention programs and directions for future research on child and adolescent coping are discussed.