Problem Drinking, Jealousy, and Anger Control: Variables Predicting Physical Aggression Against a Partner

Alcohol use and intimate partner violence (IPV) are significantly related, but only a subset of individuals who drink are aggressive and relatively little is known about what moderates this relationship in community samples. Two risk factors, anger control and jealousy, were hypothesized to moderate the relationship between IPV and problem drinking in a sample of 453 community couples. A significant three-way interaction indicated that men with jealousy problems, but not anger control problems, were most likely to show the strongest association between problem drinking and IPV. In accord with the multiple threshold model of IPV, specific combinations of risk factors appeared to represent different thresholds in which problem drinking influenced the likelihood of IPV.     

Marriage patterns among unwed mothers: Before and after PRWORA

The promotion of marriage and two‐parent families became an explicit public policy goal with the passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill. Marriage has the putative effect of reducing welfare dependency among single mothers, but only if they marry men with earnings sufficient to lift them and their children out of poverty. Newly released data from the 2002 cycle of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), along with data from the 1995 cycle, allow us to compare pre‐ and post‐PRWORA differences in (1) cumulative marriage rates among unwed mothers, and (2) patterns of marital choice (that is, differences in characteristics of the men these mothers marry, such as their education and employment status). Overall, our results show that unwed childbearing is associated with lower marriage rates and marital quality. Difference‐in‐difference models show that welfare reform was not strongly associated with pre‐ and post‐welfare reform changes in marriage among nonmarital birth mothers, even among the most disadvantaged mothers. Compared with other women, nonmarital birth mothers also were less likely than other women to marry “economically attractive” men in the post‐welfare reform period. The success of marriage promotion initiatives may depend heavily on whether women themselves are “marriageable” and whether potential spouses have the ability to support a stable family life. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Horizontal mergers and efficiencies; theory and anti trust practice

Horizontal mergers can be challenged by anti trust authorities under both the US and EU Horizontal Merger Guidelines. More horizontal mergers are unconditionally approved in the US than in the EU. EU merger policy toughened after 1998 but became more in line with US practices after 2004. Differences in merger policies between the US and the EU can be explained by a greater scope of the efficiency argument in the US. The paper argues that firms only want to merge in oligopoly, if they expect to realize substantial merger specific efficiency gains, which counterbalances the price increasing effect of merger.      

Profiles of Victimized Women Among the Child Welfare Population: Implications for Targeted Child Welfare Policy and Practices

Despite the call to address domestic violence along with child maltreatment, little information exists to guide services for victimized women involved with child welfare. Research shows that victimized women contend with multiple problems stemming from violent victimization. Unfortunately less is known about combinations of needs and resources among victimized women, especially for those involved with child welfare. Through an examination of needs and resources among families with child maltreatment and domestic violence, we aimed to help address this knowledge gap. Needs and resources among 1,229 victimized caregivers were examined using the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-being (NSCAW). Using latent class analysis, four distinct multivariate profiles of needs and resources among victimized caregivers were identified. Significant differences were found among the profile groups in the family violence they experienced in the 18 months following child welfare investigations. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for tailored practices to enhance the safety of victimized caregivers involved with child welfare. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 9th Annual Conference of the Society for Social Work and Research, Miami, Florida in January 2005.     

Youth justice conferencing and indigenous over-representation in the Queensland juvenile justice system: a micro-simulation case study

Restorative justice conferencing for young offenders is firmly established in Australian juvenile justice, and legislated conferencing schemes are operating in all Australian states and territories. While there is some variation in the terms used to describe restorative justice conferences (e.g., family group conferencing, family conferencing, or youth justice conferencing), there is much more consistency in how the conferencing process is managed across Australian jurisdictions. In Queensland youth justice conferencing is a process that brings together an offender, the victim and their supporters to discuss the harm caused by the offending behaviour and provide the young person with an opportunity to take responsibility for his or her behaviour and make amends. This paper begins by briefly sketching the development of restorative justice conferencing in Queensland and describes the Juvenile Justice Simulation Model (JJSM), a micro-simulation model developed for criminal justice policy analysis in Queensland, Australia. We use this micro-simulation model to conduct an experimental exploration of the effects that youth justice conferencing has on system-wide outcomes for indigenous young people. The model simulates the impact of interventions up until 2011 on the number of finalised youth justice court appearances. Our results indicate that youth justice conferencing is unlikely to reduce the over-representation of indigenous young people in the juvenile justice system. The simulations demonstrated that, by the 2011, youth justice conferencing would result in a 12.5% decrease in finalised court appearances. Unfortunately, this decrease was more apparent for non-indigenous young people (13.7% decrease in court appearances) than for indigenous young people, who had a 10.5% decrease in court appearances. This differential impact of conferencing is due to the different court appearance profiles between indigenous and non-indigenous young offenders, with indigenous young people initiating offending at an earlier age and offending more frequently than non-indigenous young offenders.     

The Effect of Distributive Justice on Willingness to Pay for Municipality Child Care: An Extension of the GEF Hypothesis

Public-goods dilemmas are characterized by conflicts between self-interest and the welfare of a group or society at large. Research has identified several factors that enhance cooperation in such dilemmas. However, less is known about how concern for distributive justice affects willingness to contribute in asymmetric public-goods dilemmas. To test the hypothesis that contributions to a common resource is related to perceived fairness, experiments were performed to investigate willingness to pay to the social service of child care in hypothetical societies. Experiment 1 aimed at replicating a previous survey study (Biel et al., 1997). Experiments 2 and 3 were extensions. In all three experiments subjects were asked to indicate how fair they considered different distributions of the quality of child care provided by their municipality. These distributions corresponded to the principles of equality, equity, and need. University students (32, 48, and 32 in the three experiments, respectively) served as subjects. Ratings of perceived fairness were positively related to willingness to pay. Other factors also positively related to willingness to pay included ability to pay, personal need, expected payment from others, and the number of households who had to contribute in order to maintain the quality. Furthermore, decreasing municipality size increased willingness to pay.