Book reviews

Understanding Gender in the Social Sciences and Women's Research Karin Widerberg and Arnhild Taksdal, eds, F?rståeker av kj?nn —i samfumsvitenskapenes fag og kvimeforskning (Understanding Gender in the Social Sciences and Women's Research). Oslo: Ad Notam Gyldendal, 1992.

A feminist literary study in romanticism Eva Borgström: "Om jag får be om öbst”: Kring kvinnliga författares kvimobilder i svensk romantik. ("If I may ask for ölost”: On the Images of Women Portrayed by Women Writers of the Swedish Romantic Age). 272 pp. Summary in English. Göteborg: Anamma förlag, 1991.     

Politics and the implementation of public policy: The case of the US military housing allowance program

Are bureaucracies in fact controlled by the president, Congress, or legislation? We analyze a 1998 policy change in the Department of Defense’s (DoD) $6.5 billion annual military housing allowance program. Results show that both the president and Congress were able to influence the bureaucracy, even in the presence of an exceedingly specific law that outlined the manner in which the DoD was to allocate the funds. After policy implementation, allowances were disproportionately higher in locations that (a) supported the president in the 1996 election and (b) were represented by members of the House or Senate Armed Services Committees.     

District Complexity as an Advantage in Congressional Elections

Scholars of congressional elections have argued that an increase in constituent diversity increases the level of electoral competition. Following models of boundedly rational candidates, we argue that there is strong reason to believe that the opposite is true. As the complexity of the electoral landscape increases, challengers will have a more difficult time locating an optimal platform when facing an experienced incumbent. Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Study, we construct a novel measure of district complexity for U.S. House districts and test whether the entry of quality challengers and the incumbent's share of the two-party vote are affected by the complexity of the electoral landscape. We find strong support for the hypothesis that complexity benefits incumbents for both indicators of electoral competition, which stands in contrast to most of the existing literature on diversity and incumbent performance .     

Child maltreatment profiles and adjustment problems in high-risk adolescents

The purpose of this article is to identify profiles of maltreatment experiences in a sample of high-risk adolescents and to investigate the relationship between the derived profiles and psychological adjustment. Participants are 1,131 youth between the ages of 12 and 18 years involved with publicly funded mental health and social services. Information on physical, sexual, and emotional maltreatment and psychological symptoms are obtained in interviews with adolescents and their primary caregivers. Using latent profile analysis, three maltreatment profiles are identified: "sexual+physical+emotional maltreatment," "physical+emotional maltreatment," and "low maltreatment." Adolescents in the two maltreatment profiles generally have significantly higher scores on symptom scales compared with those in the "low maltreatment" profile, but scores in the two maltreatment profiles do not differ. Findings highlight the need for agencies to identify and provide appropriate intervention for youth who experience multiple types of maltreatment.     

‘Walking in two worlds’: A qualitative review of income management in Cape York

The Cape York Welfare Reform (CYWR) initiative aims to reduce ‘passive dependence’ on welfare and restore ‘positive social norms’ to revitalise cultural and social networks and support economic engagement in Indigenous communities in the Cape York Region of Australia. Critics of the initiative and, in particular, its income management (IM) policies have associated it with a broader neoliberal reform agenda that delineates social ‘problems’ from their historical and structural context. This paper discusses key qualitative findings from a strategic review of CYWR, paying particular attention to the ways in which Cape York IM (CYIM) straddles both Indigenous and settler social norms, while perpetuating neoliberal conceptualisations of welfare ‘dependency’. We situate these findings within the existing literature on Australia's other IM models and also consider them in relation to subsequent government responses to the review and associated policies. We argue that CYIM represents a unique initiative, the subtle nuances of which have been largely ignored or misunderstood by critics. Further, we conclude that any extension or revision of this initiative should be considered with respect to deep and wide-ranging consultation of the Indigenous communities subject to CYWR. However, such consultation has not been the standard practice in Australian contexts.     

Predicting Sex Offender Recidivism. I. Correcting for Item Overselection and Accuracy Overestimation in Scale Development. II. Sampling Error-Induced Attenuation of Predictive Validity Over Base Rate Information

The authors demonstrate a statistical bootstrapping method for obtaining unbiased item selection and predictive validity estimates from a scale development sample, using data (N = 256) of Epperson et al. [2003 Minnesota Sex Offender Screening Tool-Revised (MnSOST-R) technical paper: Development, validation, and recommended risk level cut scores. Retrieved November 18, 2006 from Iowa State University Department of Psychology web site: http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/ approximately dle/mnsost_download.htm] from which the Minnesota Sex Offender Screening Tool-Revised (MnSOST-R) was developed. Validity (area under receiver operating characteristic curve) reported by Epperson et al. was .77 with 16 items selected. The present analysis yielded an asymptotically unbiased estimator AUC = .58. The present article also focused on the degree to which sampling error renders estimated cutting scores (appropriate to local [varying] recidivism base rates) nonoptimal, so that the long-run performance (measured by correct fraction, the total proportion of correct classifications) of these estimated cutting scores is poor, when they are applied to their parent populations (having assumed values for AUC and recidivism rate). This was investigated by Monte Carlo simulation over a range of AUC and recidivism rate values. Results indicate that, except for the AUC values higher than have ever been cross-validated, in combination with recidivism base rates severalfold higher than the literature average [Hanson and Morton-Bourgon, 2004, Predictors of sexual recidivism: An updated meta-analysis. (User report 2004-02.). Ottawa: Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada], the user of an instrument similar in performance to the MnSOST-R cannot expect to achieve correct fraction performance notably in excess of what is achievable from knowing the population recidivism rate alone. The authors discuss the legal implications of their findings for procedural and substantive due process in relation to state sexually violent person commitment statutes and the Supreme Court's Kansas v. Hendricks decision regarding the constitutionality of such statutes.     

The Queensland Health Royal Commissions

Utilisation of public inquiries and royal commissions in Westminster systems of government is a source of continuing interest. That royal commissions continue to be appointed when there is an increasing array of other institutions governments can now employ and given that royal commission reports often have very adverse impacts on the appointing governments, remains a key issue. So the appointment by the Queensland government of not one, but two royal commissions in 2005 into the same topic – the recruitment and performance of doctors recruited abroad working in Queensland public hospitals – provides a special opportunity to analyse the circumstances in which a royal commission mechanism is activated. That one of these royal commissions had to be disbanded because of legal action taken by several of those being investigated is another reason to assess these royal commissions. This is almost without precedent in Australia and has implications for the future conduct of such bodies. Lastly, how the Queensland government was able to minimise the blame from the subsequent royal commission's highly critical report, is also instructive and worthy of assessment .     

Candidate Recruitment and Selection in Latin America: A Framework for Analysis

This article provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the recruitment and selection of legislative candidates in Latin America. It argues that political recruitment and candidate selection are undertheorized for Latin America yet have determinative impacts on political systems, often overriding the influence of more commonly studied institutional variables. The article elucidates a typology of legislative candidates based on the legal and party variables that lead to the emergence of particular selection methods, as well as the patterns of loyalty generated by those methods. It analyzes the recruitment and selection processes as independent and dependent variables, underscoring the significant effect these procedures have on the incentive structure and subsequent behavior of legislators. Those factors, in turn, have important consequences for democratic governability and the performance of presidentialism.     

Journey history reconstruction from the soils and sediments on footwear: An empirical approach

The value of environmental evidence for reconstructing journey histories has significant potential given the high transferability of sediments and the interaction of footwear with the ground. The importance of empirical evidence bases to underpin the collection, analysis, interpretation and presentation of forensic trace materials is increasingly acknowledged. This paper presents two experimental studies designed to address the transfer and persistence of sediments on the soles of footwear in forensically relevant scenarios, by means of quartz grain surface texture analysis, a technique which has been demonstrated to be able to distinguish between samples of mixed provenance.It was identified that there is a consistent trend of transfer and persistence of sediments from hypothetical pre-, syn- and post-crime event locations across the sole of the shoe, with sediments from ‘older’ locations likely to be retained in small proportions. Furthermore, the arch of the shoe (the area of lowest foot pressure distribution) typically (but not exclusively) retained the highest proportion of grain types from previous locations including the crime scene. A lack of chronological layering of the retained sediments was observed indicating that techniques that can identify the components of mixed provenance samples are important for analysing footwear sediment samples. It was also identified that the type of footwear appeared to have an influence on what particles were retained, with high relief soles that incorporate recessed areas being more likely to retain sediments transferred from ‘older’ locations from the journey history. In addition, the inners of footwear were found to retain sediments from multiple locations from the journey history that are less susceptible to differential loss in comparison to the outer sole. These findings provide important data that can form the basis for the effective collection, analysis and interpretation of sediments recovered from both the outer soles and inners of footwear, building on the findings of previously published studies. These data offer insights that enable inferences to be made about mixed source sediments that are identified on footwear in casework, and provide the beginnings of an empirical basis for assessing the significance of such sediment particles for a specific forensic reconstruction.