Aid,growth and peace: a comparative analysis

This article disaggregates aid data to enrich our understanding of the patterns of post-conflict aid. We find that the front-loading of aid after a peace agreement, detected by previous research, has not been the general pattern. To begin with, relief and aid need separating out, commitments and disbursement distinguished, and four-year averages replaced by annual figures. Detailed analysis of seven post-conflict cases confirms that the political contexts of donation and implementation, including political assessments of peace agreements, have considerable influence on aid patterns. Finally, high levels of aid and rapid economic growth are not essential preconditions for sustaining peace. More significant are the short-term stabilisation strategies adopted and the distributive effects of structural adjustment.     

A Call for Help?: How Public School Principals’ Subjective Report of Institutional Weakness Relates to Disciplinary Incidents

ABSTRACT

Disciplinary incidents at U.S. public middle- and high-schools are a public policy concern. Although businesses popularly give credence to leaders’ subjective intelligence, principals’ reports of their schools’ strengths and weaknesses are questioned. To determine whether principals’ reports carry legitimacy as indicators of student offenses, the current study utilized a nationally representative survey of principals who reported on their sense of the institution and the number of disciplinary incidents in the past year (N = 1,872; replication cohort, N = 1,833). Findings showed that the more institutional shortcomings a principal endorsed, the higher total number of incidents occurred, even after controlling for institutional strength and several indicators of school crime. These findings have policy and intervention implications for improving student outcomes, and so would be of interest to funding agencies, school administrators, teachers, and parents.     

School climate and delinquency – on the significance of the perceived social and learning climate in school for refraining from offending

School is regarded as a central arena for crime prevention. This study analyses the effects of student perceptions of school contextual aspects on self-reported offending, using logistic regression with control for clustering effects. The data comprise a census of pupils in year nine in comprehensive school (15 year olds) and in year two of upper secondary school (17 year olds) in the City of Stockholm in 2006, 2008 and 2010 (n = 25,850 of which 47% are boys and 53% are girls). Besides showing that several aspects of students’ perceptions of the school setting have direct protective effects on offending, the study shows that perceiving schoolwork as meaningful appears to moderate the effect of adverse home conditions on delinquency for boys. The only aspect of school investigated in this study that was not significantly related to offending was the perception of classroom order, indicating that emotional support from teachers is more important for crime preventive implications than maintaining order in the classroom. Controlling for clustering effects shows differences in offending between classes and schools that are not produced by differences between the students.     

Severity of neurocognitive impairment in women who have experienced intimate partner violence in Spain

This study examines neuropsychological impairment in women who have experienced intimate partner violence using DSM 5 criteria for mild and severe cognitive impairment. A total of 108 females in Spain were included in one of three groups: psychological abuse (n = 24), physical and psychological abuse (n = 45), and no-abuse (n = 39). There were differences between the control and IPV groups in attention and executive functioning. Furthermore, approximately 25% of women experiencing IPV suffer mild neuropsychological alterations and 5% severe, mostly in memory and executive function domains. This evidence supports the growth in research that suggests psychological violence on its own to be as strongly related to poor health outcomes as physical violence in intimate partner relationships.     

The Development of Criminal Style in Adolescence and Young Adulthood: Separating the Lemmings from the Loners

Despite broad consensus that most juvenile crimes are committed with peers, many questions regarding developmental and individual differences in criminal style (i.e., co-offending vs. solo offending) remain unanswered. Using prospective 3-year longitudinal data from 937 14- to 17-year-old serious male offenders, the present study investigates whether youths tend to offend alone, in groups, or a combination of the two; whether these patterns change with age; and whether youths who engage in a particular style share distinguishing characteristics. Trajectory analyses examining criminal styles over age revealed that, while most youth evinced both types of offending, two distinct groups emerged: an increasingly solo offender trajectory (83%); and a mixed style offender trajectory (17%). Alternate analyses revealed (5.5%) exclusively solo offenders (i.e., only committed solo offenses over 3 years). There were no significant differences between groups in individuals?? reported number of friends, quality of friendships, or extraversion. However, the increasingly solo and exclusively solo offenders reported more psychosocial maturity, lower rates of anxiety, fewer psychopathic traits, less gang involvement and less self reported offending than mixed style offenders. Findings suggest that increasingly and exclusively solo offenders are not loners, as they are sometimes portrayed, and that exclusively solo offending during adolescence, while rare and previously misunderstood, may not be a risk factor in and of itself.