The ADA on the Road: Disability Rights in Germany

This paper examines the impact of a "disability rights model" on the emerging disability rights movement in Germany. Traditional German disability politics and activism are based on the expansion of welfare and special needs provisions rather than on equal rights and integration. Inspired by the 1990 Americans with Disability Act, German activists adopted a disability rights model and successfully worked toward the passage of a constitutional equality amendment in 1994 and ant-discrimination legislation in 2002. Using the literature on rights mobilization, this paper argues that German disability activists use rights talk to both support and contest culturally specific approaches to disability rights, equal treatment, and the role of the state in guaranteeing welfare rights. The globalization of disability rights should not be viewed as an imposition of American norms but as a more complex process of adaptation and cultural transformation that involves constructing locally legitimate approaches to disability rights with an American import.     

Should Abused Women's Reports of Partner Substance Abuse Be Accepted as Valid?

Current research suggests that a husband's substance abuse is correlated with severity of physical abuse and the woman's decision to leave a violent situation. Often, only the battered woman's report of abuse is available. This study compares women's reports of their partners' substance use/abuse with their partners' report using a brief measure of polydrug and alcohol abuse, the Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory (SASSI) and the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS). Data were analyzed for 25 recovery couples and 25 nonrecovery couples. The correlations for all 50 couples between the male's reported use and the female's report of her partner's use on the SASSI and the CTS were significant on all but one of the CTS scales. They ranged on SASSI from .73 to .33 and from .31 to .06 on the CTS. This suggests that the SASSI and possibly the CTS could be used as valuable tools for assessing women's reports of their partner's substance use/abuse.     

Identification based on medical findings

1. The indications such as the place of finding, the identification of clothes or other personal items, represent only the first step towards the identification of a corpse. 2. An identification based on medical data, other than dental, is often possible, more often than it is believed. 3. The forensic pathologist plays a double role in the case of such an identification: a) in the phase of the inquiry, he must contact the investigators and the families to explain his wishes and the different possibilities of identification. b) he must use the gathered information in the appropriate way. 4. It would be desirable to compose some statistical tables of the various medical elements useful for the identification (mutilations, surgical operations, etc...). We present six cases of identification in our practice.     

Predicting patrol officer performance from a psychological assessment battery: A predictive validity study

The psychological assessment battery is an integral part of the selection process used to select patrol officer applicants. Unlike all other procedures used in the selection process, the psychological assessment has not been adequately validated. The purpose of this study was an attempt to provide validation data for a psychological assessment battery. The battery consisted of the Nelson-Denny, Shipley-Hartford, MMPI, and the Motivational Analysis Test (MAT). Performance measures included various measures of training academy performance and field training performance. A stepwise regression and MANOVA/Discriminant Analysis indicated that the psychological tests did predict performance, although an exact predictive equation could not be developed due to the high intercorrelations between predictor variables. This research was sponsored in part by a grant from the School of Applied Arts and Technology, Southwest Texas State University.     

Federal labor protetons and the privatization of public transit

Federal transportation officials assert that labor protections in the Urban Mass Transportation Act inhibit the propensity of local transit agencies to contract with private firms for services. The authors present results from a survey of a large sample of transit managers and econometric analysis to support their conclusion that labor protections do not appear to reduce the incidence of contracting. The labor protections, however, may be costly to transit management in other ways. The authors recommend actions, aside from repeal of labor protections, to increase contracting by local transit agencies.