Tipping the scales: The causes and consequences of administrative spending

The public administration literature once devoted great effort to identify the determinants of administrative intensity in organizations. While this literature has received some renewed attention, there remain questions about what aspects of organizational environments generate growth in administrative intensity, particularly as related to political oversight and external accountability mechanisms. This article aims to expand current theory on the determinants of administrative personnel and costs using data on four‐year public universities in the United States from 1998 to 2011, as this setting has received considerable criticism for perceived administrative bloat. Findings suggest that which political party is in control substantially influences both administrative costs and total personnel. These administrative levels, in turn, have a curvilinear relationship with student outcomes.     

‘A Job That Should Be Respected’: contested visions of motherhood and English Canada's second wave women's movements, 1970–1990

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the forgotten voices of marginalized feminist mothers—those active in welfare rights groups. These activists were primarily poor single mothers who understood motherhood differently from more mainstream feminists. Whilst they echoed mainstream feminist demands for childcare, they also supported women's right to stay at home with their children, emphasizing the role of the state. This presented a serious class-based critique in a society that increasingly saw stay-at-home motherhood as a middle-class option. This article focuses upon working-class mothers' groups, thus problematizing dominant feminist discourses and developing a more diverse history of second wave feminism in Canada.     

Intergenerational Continuity in Depression: The Importance of Time-Varying Effects,Maternal Co-morbid Health Risk Behaviors and Child’s Gender

Intergenerational continuity in depressive symptoms is well established between mother and child, but there are still important facets of this relationship that are underexplored. We examine intergenerational continuity in depressive symptoms between mother–child dyads as a flexible function of child age and account for the potential moderating role of maternal co-morbid health risk behaviors. Using prospective, self-report data collected yearly from 413 mother–child dyads (210 mother–son dyads and 203 mother–daughter dyads) between child ages 12–17, the results indicate that the effect of maternal depressive symptoms on daughters’ depressive symptoms steadily increases throughout adolescence whereas the effect of maternal depressive symptoms on sons’ depressive symptoms is relatively small, stable, and non-significant during mid-adolescence before increasing in effect in later adolescence. A positive interactive effect between maternal depressive symptoms and intimate partner violence is observed for sons and maternal depressive symptoms and substance use for daughters. A negative interactive effect of maternal depressive symptoms and substance use is observed among sons. Overall, this study identifies particular subgroups for whom intervention programming is most beneficial and suggests targeting health risk behaviors of mothers to lessen the impact of maternal depressive symptoms on offspring.     

Maternal Depressive Symptoms and Adolescent Health Risk Problems: The Role of School Engagement

Maternal depressive symptoms disrupt positive youth development, though the pervasiveness of this disruption is understudied. Additionally, it remains unknown whether prosocial factors such as adolescent school engagement may buffer against this risk factor. Using multigenerational, longitudinal data spanning ten years from an ethnically diverse sample of mother-child dyads (66% Black, 17% Hispanic, and 17% White), this study examines the effect of maternal depressive symptoms in late childhood (ages 8–13) on the development and progression of offspring depressive symptoms, substance use, and delinquent behavior during adolescence (ages 14–17). Further, the study examines whether school engagement moderates the ill effects of maternal depressive symptoms. Mother-son (n?=?212) and mother-daughter (n?=?215) dyads are compared to assess for similarities and differences between male and female offspring. The results indicate that offspring of mothers with greater maternal depressive symptoms are more likely to display higher levels of depressive symptoms, substance use, and delinquency throughout adolescence, although important nuances emerge across outcome and child sex. Additionally, while school engagement itself is associated with reduced depressive symptoms, substance use and delinquency among adolescents, it is not profound enough to offset the risk posed by maternal depressive symptoms. The findings of this study reinforce the pervasive, negative, intergenerational impact of maternal depressive symptoms and has implications for prevention and intervention efforts for adolescent health risk problems.

     

Nonmetric Cranial Trait Variation and Ancestry Estimation in Asian and Asian-Derived Groups

Traditionally, precontact Native Americans and Asian groups have been conflated for aspects of the biological profile due to their distantly shared genetic history, although this grouping remains largely unexplored. This study examines craniomorphic variability to ascertain whether Asian groups can be differentiated from each other and from Asian-derived groups using more fine-tuned models. Cranial and mandibular data for 35 nonmetric traits were recorded on precontact Native Americans (n = 150) and modern Japanese (n = 150) and Thai (n = 150) individuals. Chi-square analyses indicate that all groups exhibit statistically significant differences in most traits. Additionally, cross-validated binary logistic regression equations resulted in correct classification rates in the range of 65.0–93.3% and demonstrate that sex does not contribute to statistical models. Therefore, numerous traits provide discriminatory resolution that detects differences between the samples, thus highlighting the potential utility of nonmetric traits in identifying individuals beyond the traditional African, European, and Asian forensic ancestry groupings.     

Longitudinal Analysis of a Very Short Measure of Positive Youth Development

As developmental scientists cease to perceive adolescence as a period of inevitable turmoil and adopt the Positive Youth Development (PYD) perspective, psychometrically sound measurement tools will be needed to assess adolescents’ positive attributes. In this article we examine the longitudinal stability of the very short version of the PYD scale developed as part of the 4-H Study of PYD. Using a sample of 7,071 adolescents (60 % female) followed between Grades 5 and 12, our results suggest general stability of PYD across adolescence, both in terms of mean levels and rank-order stability. We also show that both a global measure of PYD and the individual Five Cs of PYD consistently correlate with important criterion measures (i.e., contribution, depressive symptoms, and problem behaviors) in expected ways. Although our results suggest weak relationships among our three criteria, we especially note that across adolescence PYD becomes more strongly correlated with contribution but less strongly correlated with depressive symptoms, and that confidence becomes more strongly related to depressive symptoms. We discuss implications for use of the present PYD measure in youth development programs.     

Health workforce redesign in Australia: implications for health care professional liability and the provision of professional indemnity insurance

The Productivity Commission's research report entitled Australia's Health Workforce, which was commissioned by the Commonwealth Government and released in January 2006, has been key to recent health workforce policy development. Many of the Productivity Commission's proposals have been endorsed by the Council of Australian Governments and a National Health Workforce Taskforce established to drive change. Surprisingly, the report gave little attention to medico-legal factors that may impact upon workforce supply and consequently may represent a barrier to workforce redesign. This column examines the implications of health workforce redesign and in particular the potential impact of task substitution and task delegation on professional liability and the provision of professional indemnity insurance for private sector health care professionals in Australia. It also identifies and addresses some other medico-legal issues not considered in the report.     

Fifty years as the fourth pillar of public administration: A polycentric extension of the social equity framework

While public consideration of social equity pre-dates Minnowbrook (Blessett et al., 2019; Burnier, 2021), the field formally recognized social equity as its fourth pillar after the conference (Frederickson, 1971). The National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA, 2000), Svara and Brunet (2004, 2005), and Johnson and Svara (2011) outlined a unified social equity framework along four dimensions: procedural fairness, access, quality, and outcomes. We build on this important work by offering a polycentric extension, which considers what social equity means when government programs are often place-based and delivered in an intergovernmental context with multiple decision-making units across spatial levels (e.g., state, city, neighborhood) simultaneously. Using the Community Development Block Grant as an example, we demonstrate the importance of careful consideration of geographic levels in the delivery of public goods for understanding the program's social equity implications. The polycentric framework can be a useful tool for evaluating the social equity of policies.