PRO SE DIVORCE LITIGANTS

With the increased number of divorce litigants appearing pro se in the past century, trial court judges and court personnel are forced to deal with their conflicting obligations with more frequency. It is virtually impossible for a trial court judge to ensure all litigants have a fair and meaningful trial without compromising their neutrality. Likewise, court personnel are allowed to give out legal information but not legal advice, with the definition of legal information and advice not neatly packaged into two separate and distinct categories. Consequently, changes must be made. This note suggests various solutions that can be imposed to either reevaluate the role of trial court judges and court personnel so that they no longer have conflicting obligations and are able to accommodate the needs of the pro se litigants or implement services that can provide pro se litigants with other avenues of obtaining information and assistance.     

President Clinton's Fiscal 1998 Budget: Political and Constitutional Paths to Balance

This article examines President Clinton's FY 98 budget proposals and the political and economic factors that led to the balanced budget agreement. Also explored are the constitutional approaches to fiscal discipline: the balanced budget amendment, the tax supermajority amendment, and the line item veto that was used 80 times by President Clinton to delete over a billion dollars. The analysis reveals that budget bargaining was continuous before and after the budget agreement was reached, moving downward from decisions on macro-budgetary totals to micro-budgetary choices on tax cuts and appropriations. The study concludes that President Clinton was relatively successful in achieving budgetary goals under divided government, that the agreement was significant despite the economic growth that made it easier, and that constitutional remedies will continue to be important in the coming years.     

Conflict Avoidance and Political Participation

Previous explanations of mass participation have often focused on sociodemographic characteristics to the neglect of social psychological factors. This study takes a new path in thinking about the role of psychological factors in participation. Specifically, we hypothesize that individual propensities regarding conflict will influence the likelihood of participating in political affairs. We develop more specific expectations for how the avenue of participation interacts with individual propensities toward conflict to influence participation. Using secondary analysis of the Citizen Participation Study (CPS), we show that conflict avoidance is significantly and inversely related to participation in some kinds of activities, consistent with our expectations. Thus, both individual propensities and the political context influence participation. This study provides a new understanding of which individuals participate in political affairs and which avenues they choose. This suggests a need to reconsider the role of psychological factors in models of participation.     

Linking program implementation and effectiveness: Lessons from a pooled sample of welfare‐to‐work experiments

This paper addresses the question: How does implementation influence the effectiveness of mandatory welfare‐to‐work programs? Data from three large‐scale, multi‐site random assignment experiments were pooled; quantitative measures of program implementation were constructed; and multilevel statistical modeling was used to examine the relationship between program implementation and effects on short‐term client earnings. Individual‐level data were analyzed for 69,399 sample members and group‐level implementation data were analyzed for 59 local programs. Findings indicate that, other things being equal, earnings effects are increased by: an emphasis on quick client employment, an emphasis on personalized client attention, staff caseloads that do not get too large, and limited use of basic education. Findings also show that mandatory welfare‐to‐work programs can be effective for many types of people, and that focusing on clients who are especially job‐ready (or not) does not have a consistent influence on a program's effectiveness. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

‘Peace with the earth:’ Women and the environmental movement in Sweden

Women active in the contemporary Swedish environmental movement draw much of their inspiration from twentieth century feminist Elin Wägner (1882–1949) who in the 1930s saw connections between environmental issues, feminism, and matriarchal cultures of the past. Contemporary women writers, poets, and artists celebrate periods in which both women and nature seemed to be more powerful than they are today. Contemporary women are most active in environmental issues that involve the reproduction of the human species (such as nuclear issues) and their own reproductive labor as it affects themselves, the family, and the state (such as pesticides, food quality and distribution, and work environments). These issues are analysed as a ‘politics of reproduction’ that leads to conflicting strategies of equality politics, women's culture politics, and alternative ‘green’ politics. These conflicting strategies exemplify contradictions inherent in both the wider women's movement and the ‘women and environment’ movements throughout the world today.     

Digital Britain interim report: A step in the right direction?

The Digital Britain interim report was published on 29 January 2009 by the DCMS and BERR with the final report being due out in June. The Report divides itself into four areas for ‘action’; namely Digital Networks, Digital Content, Universal Connectivity and Equipping Everyone to Benefit from Digital Britain. The level of action proposed in each case varies widely and the Report has come under criticism for delivering little in the way of concrete promises or clearly defined strategy. This article summarises and analyses a number of the key purported actions from the Report in order to consider whether it is indeed an appropriate step towards an action plan that would secure the Britain's place at the forefront of the new media age.     

Stress Appraisal and Attitudes Towards Corporal Punishment as Intervening Processes Between Corporal Punishment and Subsequent Mental Health

The purpose of this research was to examine the role of within-person processes in determining the impact of parental corporal punishment on mental health in older adolescents. A stress appraisal scale specific to corporal punishment and an attitudes towards corporal punishment scale were developed for this study and examined as determinants of the impact of corporal punishment on psychological and parent-child relationship outcomes. Results of this research indicated that participants’ evaluations of their parents’ corporal punishment as threatening was more important than the actual frequency of corporal punishment in determining adolescent mental health, and were significantly associated with the mental health measures after controlling for other elements of parenting. In addition, the mother-child relationship was more adversely impacted by mothers’ corporal punishment when adolescents evaluated that punishment negatively. These results enhance theoretical models describing intrapersonal processes through which subabusive parental violence affects children and can help to improve intervention efforts aimed at reducing negative outcomes associated with corporal punishment.     

Examination of the stability and consistency of investigative interviewer performance across similar mock interview contexts

Purpose. Three studies examined the degree to which investigative interviewers' adherence to best‐practice guidelines is consistent across similar mock interviews. Method. In each study, two interviews were administered within a period of several hours. Further, group and individual stability of interviewer performance was analysed, and performance was measured by calculating the proportion of open‐ended and leading questions as well as the presence of predetermined problem behaviours. The studies varied depending on the type of interview paradigm employed. Interviewer performance in Study 1was measured in a group context where participants rotated between the role of interviewer, child respondent, and observer. In Study 2, an adult played the role of a child recalling abuse but this occurred in isolation (participants did not observe others or play the child). Study 3 was similar to Study 2 except that in each interview an unfamiliar child aged 5–7 years recalled an innocuous event. Results. Interviewer performance was relatively stable across tasks, although the strength of the relationship between measures varied across analyses. Improvement in open‐ended question usage occurred in Study 1 but not Studies 2 and 3. Irrespective of the assessment context, the dichotomous rating scale yielded greater consistency than when questions were tallied. Further, group stability overestimated individual stability. The practical implications of these findings for trainers and researchers are discussed.