Community Service Orders in Hong Kong, England, and Wales: twins or cousins

Hong Kong's Community Service Order (CSO) is anchored in the probation service and has not had to face problems related to the cultural divide and professional rivalry between community service and probation staff similar to England and Wales. CSOs in both jurisdictions differ in offenders' minimum age and in seeking offenders' consent and have been rarely used for young offenders. They have widened the net of social control, and there have been difficulties in positioning them in the sentencing tariff. Although retributive penal practices might have crept into Hong Kong after China's takeover in 1997, its CSO has retained rehabilitative elements. In England and Wales, the renaming of CSO as the Community Punishment Order reaffirmed its retributive nature, however the Pathfinder projects have taken it back to its origins as a rehabilitative measure. We suggest that CSOs should move further toward restorative justice by the involvement of victims in the choice of community services.     

Jurors' Perceptions of Adolescent Sexual Assault Victims Who Have Intellectual Disabilities

Children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities are especially likely to be sexually abused. Even so, their claims are not likely to be heard in court, possibly because people assume that jurors will not believe them. We tested this assumption in a mock-trial study in which 160 men and women watched videotaped excerpts from an actual trial. As predicted, when the 16-year-old sexual assault victim was portrayed as mildly mentally retarded instead of as having average intelligence, jurors were more likely to vote guilty and had more confidence in the defendant's guilt; considered the victim to be more credible and the defendant to be less credible as witnesses; and rated the victim as more honest, less capable of fabricating the sexual abuse accusation, and less likely to have fabricated the sexual abuse accusation. Men and women were affected similarly by the disability manipulation, but women were generally more pro-prosecution in their case judgments and perceptions than were men. Finally, jurors who had more liberal views toward persons with disabilities were more likely than other jurors to make pro-prosecution judgments on measures of guilt. Implications for psychological theory and the law are discussed.     

Comparing Effect Sizes in Follow-Up Studies: ROC Area,Cohen's <Emphasis Type="Italic">d</Emphasis>, and <Emphasis Type="Italic">r</Emphasis>

In order to facilitate comparisons across follow-up studies that have used different measures of effect size, we provide a table of effect size equivalencies for the three most common measures: ROC area (AUC), Cohen's d, and r. We outline why AUC is the preferred measure of predictive or diagnostic accuracy in forensic psychology or psychiatry, and we urge researchers and practitioners to use numbers rather than verbal labels to characterize effect sizes. Strictly speaking, d values pertain only to variables scored on an interval scale. When the nondichotomous variable is ordinally scaled, r or AUC should be used. Nevertheless, the values in Table 1 allow one to compare the relative magnitudes across studies that have reported any of the three effect size measures.     

Social Security,Student Loans and Access to Education

The issue of student loans has been under public discussion for some time, but another change in their finances which affects many of them has not been debated so much in public — and that is the removal of their housing benefit … It is very unfortunate that, just as the wish of students to participate in higher education is growing, they should be discouraged in this particular way.     

Sampling People or People in Places? The BES as an Election Study

Electoral surveys conducted as part of the regular series of British Election Studies have used a stratified, clustered sampling design. This is constructed to ensure a nationally representative sample of voters (after weighting) but does not necessarily ensure a representative sample of the different social areas within the country. Much recent work has indicated the important role of local social and electoral milieux in the structuring of electoral behaviour but these are not reflected in the sampling design. An analysis of the geography of the face-to-face pre-election component of the 2005 BES shows not only that it was unrepresentative of certain types of area (defined using bespoke neighbourhood data) but also that it was less representative of such areas than the two (larger) internet samples (pre- and post-election) also undertaken as part of the 2005 BES. This suggests the need to reconsider the nature of the sample designs (even the entire survey methodology) to be deployed at future election studies in Great Britain.