Public Administration Scholarship and the Politics of Coproducing Academic–Practitioner Research

Developing greater cooperation between researchers and practitioners is a long‐standing concern in social science. Academics and practitioners working together to coproduce research offers a number of potential gains for public administration scholarship, but it also raises some dilemmas. The benefits include bringing local knowledge to bear on the field, making better informed policy, and putting research to better use. However, coproduction of research also involves managing ambiguous loyalties, reconciling different interests, and negotiating competing goals. The authors reflect on their experience of coproducing a research project in the United Kingdom and discuss the challenges that coproducers of research confront. They situate the discussion within a consideration of traditions of public administration scholarship and debates about the role of the academy to understand better the politics of their joint practice. Thinking about the politics of coproduction is timely and enables the authors to become more attuned to the benefits and constraints of this mode of research..     

How the pace of change affects the scope of reform: pharmaceutical insurance in Canada, australia, and the United kingdom

When policy change is considered, what determines its success or failure? Why do plans for broad reforms often fall short, and why do certain types of change become more difficult over time? This article addresses these questions by examining health policy development in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom - specifically, why Canada alone failed to adopt nationwide, public pharmaceutical insurance. It demonstrates that the pace of change has significant implications for the scope of policy development. It provides new mechanisms to explain why incremental reforms stall based on the reciprocal relationship between elite ideas and public expectations and suggests that similar factors can explain how barriers to policy change develop and the conditions under which those barriers may be overcome.     

Detecting Feigned PTSD Using the Personality Assessment Inventory

Research generally supports the use of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey 1991) to detect feigned PTSD, although this support has been somewhat mixed. There is also evidence that coaching individuals on the presence of PAI validity indicators may not affect their ability to avoid detection as feigners (Bagby et al. in Journal of Personality Assessment 78:69–86, 2002), although this question has not been specifically addressed with regard to PTSD. Additionally, a new PAI validity indicator, the Negative Distortion Scale (NDS), was developed that may have utility in detecting feigned PTSD, but this has not been tested. The purpose of this study was to further test the operating characteristics of the PAI validity indicators to detect feigned PTSD among naïve and coached respondents and to examine the newly developed NDS for this purpose. Individuals with genuine PTSD were compared to individuals instructed to feign PTSD on PAI validity indicators. Results suggest that: (a) coaching had minimal influence on the ability of the PAI to detect feigned PTSD, (b) the PAI validity indicators all significantly differentiated genuine from feigned PTSD, and (c) the NIM and NDS indicators were particularly effective for detecting feigned PTSD.     

Offending and Early Death in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development

Criminal offending has many negative outcomes. Researchers have recently begun to consider the impact offending has on offenders' health, with a few studies focusing on differential mortality risk. Yet, prior research has been limited due to selective samples, restricted range of follow-up time period, limited set of explanatory variables, and lack of theoretical guidance. This paper examines the risk of early death among 411 South London males in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development followed into their late 50s. Attention is paid not only to differential risk of death between nonoffenders and offenders, but also to the risk within the population of offenders and through consideration of theoretical frameworks and associated predictor variables. Results show that high-rate chronic offenders evince the highest risk of death, an effect that continues even after controlling for childhood individual and environmental risk factors as well as participation in a range of analogous behaviors.     

Ballistic impact of hollow-point ammunition on porcine bone

Identifying failure mechanisms in skeletal tissue allows a deeper understanding of the effects of specific projectile impacts on bone. While ballistic trauma in flat bones is largely researched, knowledge of how long bones react to gunshot impacts is limited in the literature. The impacts of deforming ammunition appear to produce higher levels of fragmentation; however, these have not been studied in depth. This study compares the damage to femora bone by HP 0.357 and 9 mm projectiles constructed with both full and semi-metal jackets. Impact experiments were undertaken on a single-stage light gas gun involving the use of a high-speed video camera and full reconstruction of the bones to ascertain fracture patterns occurring in the femora. Higher degrees of fragmentation are likened to the presence of semi-jacketed HP projectiles than jacketed HP projectiles. The observations of external facing beveled edges are believed to be associated with the increased separation of the jacket and lead core of projectiles. Additionally, experimentation has shown that the amount of kinetic energy lost postimpact is likely related to the presence or the absence of a metal jacket on an HP projectile. The observed data, therefore, suggest that the composition, rather than the configuration, of a projectile affects the type and extent of the damage.     

Acknowledging the Suffering Caused by State-Mandated Sexual Violence and Crimes: An Assessment of the Iraqi High Tribunal

The Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT), as a mechanism of transitional justice, took upon it a pioneering role within the Middle Eastern Region by prosecuting and convicting several high-ranking members of the former suppressive regime in Iraq. As part of this work, the IHT confronted the widespread impunity for and disregard of gender-based crimes, such as rape and other sexual violence, and took steps towards reforming the sector through its progressive statute and the specific acknowledgment of gender crimes within its judgments. It will be the aim of the following article to extend academic writings on Iraq, the IHT and gender, by providing insights into how the tribunal dealt with the issues of rape and sexual violence, the surrounding circumstances and how successful the IHT's recognition of these crimes proved for transitional justice in Iraq.