Ego identity status and decision styles

It was hypothesized that the decision processes used in coping with the identity crisis would be related to more general decision styles in that identity achievers and moratoriums would tend to be reflective in their conceptual tempo while foreclosures would typically be impulsive. No prediction was made about identity diffusions. Ninety-two male college students were given an identity status interview and the Matching Familiar Figures Test. The results were consistent with the hypotheses, and in addition it was found that identity diffusions were generally impulsive. Since conceptual tempo has been found to be well established in childhood, the results of this study have implications for the early prediction of adult identity status.Received Ph.D. from SUNY/Buffalo. Recent research has been mainly concerned with the development of ego identity and correlates of the different identity statuses.Received Ph.D. from SUNY/Buffalo. Recent research has been mainly concerned with the development of ego identity and correlates of the different identity statuses.     

Bibliography of Recent Publications on Africa

This bibliography covers publications noticed between Augustand November, 1954. It has been compiled with the co-operationof Miss Ruth Jones (International African Institute).     

The net effects of the Project NetWork return-to-work case management experiment on participant earnings, benefit receipt, and other outcomes

The Social Security Administration (SSA) initiated Project NetWork in 1991 to test case management as a means of promoting employment among persons with disabilities. The demonstration, which targeted Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) beneficiaries and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) applicants and recipients, offered intensive outreach, work-incentive waivers, and case management/referral services. Participation in Project NetWork was voluntary. Volunteers were randomly assigned to the "treatment" group or the "control" group. Those assigned to the treatment group met individually with a case or referral manager who arranged for rehabilitation and employment services, helped clients develop an individual employment plan, and provided direct employment counseling services. Volunteers assigned to the control group could not receive services from Project NetWork but remained eligible for any employment assistance already available in their communities. For both treatment and control groups, the demonstration waived specific DI and SSI program rules considered to be work disincentives. The experimental impact study thus measures the incremental effects of case and referral management services. The eight demonstration sites were successful in implementing the experimental design roughly as planned. Project NetWork staff were able to recruit large numbers of participants and to provide rehabilitation and employment services on a substantial scale. Most of the sites easily reached their enrollment targets and were able to attract volunteers with demographic characteristics similar to those of the entire SSI and DI caseload and a broad range of moderate and severe disabilities. However, by many measures, volunteers were generally more "work-ready" than project eligible in the demonstration areas who did not volunteer to receive NetWork services. Project NetWork case management increased average annual earnings by $220 per year over the first 2 years following random assignment. This statistically significant impact, an approximate 11-percent increase in earnings, is based on administrative data on earnings. For about 70 percent of sample members, a third year of followup data was available. For this limited sample, the estimated effect of Project NetWork on annual earnings declined to roughly zero in the third followup year. The findings suggest that the increase in earnings may have been short-lived and may have disappeared by the time Project NetWork services ended. Project NetWork did not reduce reliance on SSI or DI benefits by statistically significant amounts over the 30-42 month followup period. The services provided by Project NetWork thus did not reduce overall SSI and DI caseloads or benefits by substantial amounts, especially given that only about 5 percent of the eligible caseload volunteered to participate in Project NetWork. Project NetWork produced modest net benefits to persons with disabilities and net costs to taxpayers. Persons with disabilities gained mainly because the increases in their earnings easily outweighed the small (if any) reduction in average SSI and DI benefits. For SSA and the federal government as a whole, the costs of Project NetWork were not sufficiently offset by increases in tax receipts resulting from increased earnings or reductions in average SSI and DI benefits. The modest net benefits of Project NetWork to persons with disabilities are encouraging. How such benefits of an experimental intervention should be weighed against costs of taxpayers depends on value judgments of policymakers. Because different case management projects involve different kinds of services, these results cannot be directly generalized to other case management interventions. They are nevertheless instructive for planning new initiatives. Combining case and referral management services with various other interventions, such as longer term financial support for work or altered provider incentives, could produc     

Attrition in the new beneficiary survey and followup, and its correlates

Panel surveys interview the same individuals more than once over a period of time. Attrition from the survey occurs when those individuals die, refuse to be interviewed again, or, for some other reason, cannot be contacted. If the original sample was representative of a specific population, then survey analysis may provide misleading conclusions about changes in population characteristics over time if these individuals leave the sample in a nonrandom way. Therefore, it is important to identify the characteristics of individuals who leave the survey for various reasons. This article explores the extent of and reasons for attrition in the New Beneficiary Survey (NBS) between the first interview in 1982 and the followup interview in 1991. Presented is a comparison of the characteristics of survivors (the reinterviewed sample) with attriters (those in the sample not reinterviewed) from the retired-worker and disabled-worker samples. The article explores a variety of potential determinants of attrition to the probability of attrition. These determinants are examined alone and in a multivariate framework. The NBS sample population is drawn from and linked to Social Security Administrative records, which have exact matched data on mortality as a cause of attrition. These data do not depend on survey-reported reasons for attrition; hence, it allows the examination of the differences in the patterns and predictors of attrition due to death and due to other reasons, primarily, the refusal to be interviewed. Attrition due to death must be identified precisely because misidentification of death as refusal to be interviewed may lead researchers to infer more selective attrition than might be the case. Different patterns of attrition are evident in the comparison of attrition levels and the determinants of attrition for the retired and disabled samples, both composed of persons with relatively high mortality risk. In particular, individuals' health, health insurance coverage, and level of education have different impacts on their likelihood of attrition. In general, it appears that refusal to be interviewed is more evenly spread across populations and characteristics than is death. The analysis shows that attrition due to death and attrition due to refusal are quite different processes, even though health conditions play a role in both processes. The results suggest that because attrition patterns (including death) may be quite different across population samples, sample-specific attrition patterns must be analyzed over the lifetime of any panel study. Long-term studies of panel attrition are necessary to provide researchers analyzing the data with information on potential biases due to nonrandom attrition.     

Capacity Building as an Instrument of Institutional Reform: Improving the Quality of Higher Education through Academic Audits in the UK, New Zealand, Sweden, and Hong Kong

As countries convert from state to market-centered public policies, there is increasing interest in new forms of public accountability. Capacity building initiatives that reform institutional frameworks are useful policy instruments during this period of transition. What are the impacts and implementation problems characteristic of this approach? This article reviews the experience with "Academic Audit," a capacity building accountability instrument for universities adopted in the UK, Sweden, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. Academic audits altered the incentives for cooperative behavior among faculty members to improve student learning. Identified implementation problems included: training for the new process, the uncertainty of capacity building benefits, and the central role of information.     

Political Parties,Australia and the U.S. Alliance: 1976-2016

ABSTRACT

What causes variation in the foreign policies of U.S. allies regarding their desired U.S. military role in their region and their troop commitments to U.S. military interventions? This paper addresses this question through documenting and explaining the sources of variation in Australia’s foreign policies regarding these issues over four decades. Treating the two major political parties in Australia and their respective leaders who self-select into them as endogenous, the paper argues that Australian foreign policy, whilst always supportive of the U.S. alliance, has systematically varied. This variation has correlated with the political party in power while the late Cold War and post-Cold War balances of power remained constant. While the Labor party has only been willing to send combat troops to large U.S. military interventions when the latter have a supporting United Nations Security Council Resolution, the conservative Liberal party has been willing to military intervene without this multilateral support. The Labor party, unlike the Liberal party, has also frequently proposed the formation and consolidation of multilateral regional institutions. These preferences render the U.S. to have been necessary for the Labor Party but sufficient for the Liberal party. Future Sino-U.S. armed conflict would provide a harder test of these hypotheses.