Are you ready for the cure?

The Clinton health-care plan will soon be unveiled. Here is an inside look at what it contains so far.     

The satisfaction with life scale: Psychometrics properties in an adolescent sample

The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) was developed in the United States as a multiitem scale for the overall assessment of life satisfaction as cognitive-judgmental process, rather as a measurement of specific satisfaction areas (e.g., health, energy). The present study attempted to extend the applicability of the SWLS by investigating specific aspects of reliability and validity in a different cultural context (Portugal) with adolescents. In line with previous American findings, reliability figures were found to be favourable. SWLS scores were affected by sex and sociocultural level. In addition, SWLS scores showed to be predictably associated with psychological measures: loneliness, social anxiety, shyness, self- concept, and physical attractiveness. The variables that best predicted satisfaction were overall self-concept, loneliness, and physical attractiveness.Received a Ph.D. in normal and abnormal anthropology from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) in 1980 and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Faculty of Psychology (Porto) and an Aggregation in Psychology from Faculty of Psychology (Coimbra) in 1990. Research interests include migration and cross-cultural social migration.The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

The struggle over retiree medical benefits: who's on top?

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of litigation addressing an employer's right to unilaterally amend or terminate medical benefits provided to retirees. The sheer volume of these cases and the variety of facts and legal theories have combined to obscure the patterns and trends that actually are emerging from this litigation. This article will describe the context of the struggle over retiree benefits and discuss those leading decisions in which the federal courts of appeals have established their rules for deciding retiree benefits cases.     

Postmodern policy analysis: Discourse and identity in welfare policy

Postmodern inquiry into the discursive construction of identity has the potential to make a distinctive, democratizing contribution to public policy analysis. More so than conventional approaches, a postmodern policy analysis offers the opportunity to interrogate assumptions about identity embedded in the analysis and making of public policy, thereby enabling us to rethink and resist questionable distinctions that privilege some identities at the expense of others. Public policy analysis can benefit from postmodernism's emphasis on how discourse constructs identity. A review of postmodernism and postmodern approaches to interrogating identity is followed by an exercise in postmodern policy analysis. Social welfare policy in contemporary postindustrial America is shown to participate in the construction and maintenance of identity in ways that affect not just the allocation of public benefits, but also economic opportunities outside of the state. Mired in old, invidious distinctions (e.g., independent/dependent, contract/charity, family/promiscuity), welfare policy discourse today helps to recreate the problems of yesterday, particularly as a critical factor in reproducing women's poverty.