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.     

Doctors under the knife

With Bill Clinton's new reforms only a month away, the health-care system is on the operating table--and the doctors are under the knife. Americans have a love-hate relationship with physicians: they like the care that doctors provide but hold them to blame for the nation's health-care mess. NEWSWEEK looks at how the culture of medicine may change, assesses doctors' fears--and examines the brave new world of HMOs.     

Measuring School-Related Stressors in Adolescents

Some 1620 high school students responded to 68 items that measure adolescent stressors. Thirty-five of the items were based on J. P. Kohn and G. H. Frazer's Academic Stress Scale [1(1986) An Academic Stress Scale: Identification and Rated Importance of Academic Stressors, Psychological Reports, Vol. 59, pp. 415–426] developed in the United States, while the remaining 33 items were developed from P. Strutynski's [(1985) A Survey of Queensland Year 10, 11 and 12 Student Attitudes to Schools and Schooling, State Planning Committee, International Youth Year, Brisbane] lists of the most frequently named problems of 2336 Australian high school students. Confirmatory Factor Analysis was used to test and develop a measurement model developed from an extensive review of previous scales. The High School Stressors Scale emerged from the analytic process and measures nine school-related stressors. For researchers focusing on school-related problems and stressors among adolescents, the HSSS promises to be a very useful instrument. It has sound construct and predictive validity and adequate reliability, as demonstrated by the goodness-of-fit indices the squared multiple correlations.     

“Comorbidity” of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive problems in adolescence

The purpose of this study was to examine in a sample of 11,516 secondary school students the extent to which different behavioral, emotional and cognitive problems (a) reflected one or more underlying common factors; (b) actually cooccurred; and (c) were single problems. Principal Component Analyses were performed and percentagewise techniques were used. PCA demonstrated that one or more general syndromes could not by far account for all of the variance of the variables. The results suggest the existence of adolescent subgroups with divergent comorbidity patterns: those who primarily report one single symptom; those who report concurrent symptoms either exclusively in the category of behavioral problems or exclusively in the category of emotional and cognitive problems; and those who report concurrent symptoms in both categories. This distinction between different subgroups has important theoretical, diagnostic, and treatment implications.     

Immigration as a source of political discontent and frustration in Western democracies

"This article describes the migration context of three sets of Western democracies and then explores plausible linkages between the scale, timing, and characteristics of migration, and the substance and process of migration policies, on the one hand, and support for government, on the other. Trying to move beyond plausibility, I discuss indirect indicators of the impact of immigration on Western publics: attitudes toward immigration policy and immigrants, support for extremist parties, and acts of violence and disorder linked to anti-immigrant or racist motives."