The Admissibility of the R-PAS in Court

The admissibility of the Rorschach has been a concern of forensic psychologists for many years. The focus of this debate has been the Comprehensive System, which is the most researched of the current Rorschach Systems available in the USA. However, recently, a new, competing system has been published: the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS; Meyer et al., Rorschach Performance Assessment System: Administration, Coding, Interpretation, and Technical Manual, 2011). Using Heilbrun’s (Law and Human Behavior 16:257–272, 1992) guidelines as a framework, we examine the admissibility of this new system according to the standards outlined in Daubert (1993) and Frye (1923). We conclude that we have reservations about the admissibility of the R-PAS in court at the present time, notwithstanding ongoing work on this system.     

Reducing recurrent care proceedings: initial evidence from new interventions

The English family justice system faces a crisis of recurrence. As many as one in four birth mothers involved in public law care proceedings in English family courts are likely to reappear in a subsequent set of proceedings within seven years. These mothers are involved in up to one-third of total care applications, as they are – by definition – linked to more than one child . Few birth mothers experiencing the removal of a child to care are offered any follow-up support, despite often facing multiple challenges including poverty, addiction, domestic violence and mental health problems. Since 2011, however, a number of new services have been established to begin to address their unmet needs. This article summarises the findings of the first academic-led evaluation of two of these initiatives. Presenting evidence from a mixed-methods evaluative study, it concludes that the new services were able to foster relationships that ‘worked’ in reducing recurrent proceedings. None of the women engaging with the services went on to experience what could be described as a ‘rapid repeat pregnancy’ within the evaluation window. Just as significantly, a number of clients reported some improvement in their psychological functioning, and the practitioners involved reported positively on their experience of delivering and managing innovative services. The article closes with a discussion of the challenges of evaluating personalised, strengths-based interventions and the possibilities of evidencing empowerment in these cases.     

“The Politics of Political Advertising” in Australia and Britain, 1970–1989

The role of advertising in the production of political campaigns deserves more consideration than it has previously received. My study examines advertising agencies associated with election campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s, investigating their decisions to accept or reject political accounts. Focusing on Britain and Australia, and using a range of primary sources including the industry press, interviews and memoirs, I demonstrate that an agency's decision to accept a political account is always complex, contested and highly contingent. Accepting a political account may alienate clients and agency staff who support another party. Campaigns are labour‐intensive and may detract from an agency's core business. Involvement in a losing campaign can damage an agency's reputation, just as association with a successful one may attract clients. Agencies are often unsure how to approach political advertising where traditional techniques may not be suitable. Such concerns about accepting a political account will likely be put aside where an agency principal has close personal ties to a party or leader.     

A Multidimensional Definition of Partner Abuse: Development and Preliminary Validation of the Composite Abuse Scale

The lack of definitional consistency about domestic violence and the absence of a well-validated comprehensive abuse screening questionnaire have been major methodological flaws in domestic violence research. While there are several screening questionnaires in use, they either are narrowly defined and do not have discrete measures of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse or have not been validated on both abused and nonabused samples. This study presents the development and preliminary validation of a new partner abuse screening questionnaire (Composite Abuse Scale; CAS). Items measuring the three areas of partner abuse were extracted from four published scales: the Conflict Tactics Scale, Measure of Wife Abuse, Inventory of Spouse Abuse, and Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory. A survey using these items was sent to all nurses working at a large Australian public, inner-city teaching hospital. Factor analyses of the responses of 427 participants revealed four dimensions: Severe Combined Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Physical Abuse, and Harassment. Preliminary evidence is presented on validity and a high scale reliability is reported fof each subscale.     

Has the Global War on Terror Changed the Terrorist Threat? A Time-Series Intervention Analysis

Whether the Global War on Terror (GWOT) has changed the terrorist threat is a matter of controversy. This study, using transnational terrorism events data from 1993 through 2004, employs a time-series approach to investigate the extent to which the onset of the GWOT (beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan) and related events (the invasion of Iraq, the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the release of photos from Abu Ghraib) are associated with changes in transnational terrorist activity, its frequency, dispersion, lethality, type of attack, and type of victim of transnational terrorist incidents.