Using the Delphi process to analyze social policy implementation: A post hoc case from vocational rehabilitation

This study uses a Policy Delphi to discern differences in perspective among and within groups responsible for formulating and implementing vocational rehabilitation policy. Four groups of players were chosen for our analysis: government officials, academics, directors of rehabilitation centers, and the staff who interface with program participants. Significant differences were found between the groups regarding the relative importance of possible legislative goals. This suggests that the failure of vocational rehabilitation policy to promote a work agenda may be attributed to a lack of consensus among policy implementors. The Delphi technique could help policy planners understand the different perspectives within the implementation community, and hence craft more realistic legislation.     

The Reputation of Political Science Journals: Pluralist and Consensus Views

Individual scholars and their departments are increasingly judged according to the alleged 'quality' of the academic journals in which they publish. This article is the first systematic attempt to measure the reputation of political science journals and is designed for comparison with American academics' evaluations. It explores academics' criteria for judging journals, the consensus of judgement on any one journal across different criteria. and the range of evaluations between different journals. A relatively strong consensus is found among academic political scientists about the relative quality of political science journals. Nevertheless the order of the ranking depends, in part, on the measure adopted. Ranking by impact scores supports the consensus theory, while the rankings by quality lend some weight to the pluralist argument that specialist journals can be highly rated by small groups of experts while having little impact in the profession as a whole. Striking contrasts between the British and American political science communities are revealed.     

Hollowing out or filling in? Taskforces and the management of cross-cutting issues in British government

This article considers the problem posed by the need to build policy coherence across the levels of government but with a focus on the strategic role of the centre in the hollow state. It considers the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) as an example of a structure, the taskforce, designed to meet the demands of coherence-building. It concludes that, far from the centre being hollowed out, resulting in a permanent loss of capacity, there is a growing emphasis in the core executive on strategic co-ordination and the emergence of institutions such as the SEU indicate a counter-tendency to hollowing out: filling in.     

On Correcting Biases in Self-Reports of Age at First Substance Use with Repeated Cross-Section Analysis

Household survey data on age at first use of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana,and hard drugs can be biased due to sample selection and inaccuraterecall. One potential concern is attrition, whereby individuals who getinvolved with substance use at an early age become increasingly less likelyto be surveyed in successive years. A comparison of data from the NationalHousehold Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) with data from a longitudinal studysuggested that attrition might have caused substantially less bias thandid forward telescoping, the inflating of age at first useover time. The evidence of forward telescoping was particularly pronouncedwith respect to age at first use of alcohol. This paper presents a procedurefor correcting the distribution of age at first use for forward telescoping(but not attrition) by viewing a portion of the NHSDA data collected insuccessive years as constituting a cohort study. Results are presented fromapplying this procedure with NHSDA data collected from 1982 to 1995 forrespondents born 1968–1973. The findings suggest that preventionprograms need to be introduced at an earlier age than would be indicatedby uncorrected retrospective data. Other implications are alsohighlighted.     

Does sexual dimorphism in facial soft tissue depths justify sex distinction in craniofacial identification?

Separation of male and female soft tissue depths into discrete groups for craniofacial identification implies that males and females differ enough from each other, with respect to this application, for this distinction to be useful. In this study, previously published soft tissue depth data were analyzed for sex separation. It was found that the variation within each sex was large while the variation between the sexes was small. Often the value of two standard deviations of the measurement for either sex was larger than the difference displayed between the means of each sex. Furthermore, opposite sex overlap in regions defined to be close to the male or female mean were found to be large and the amount of variance explained by sex was small (less than 6% on average). These results indicate that while male and female means at single craniofacial landmarks may differ slightly, and even at statistically significant levels, individual male and female soft tissue depths are often the same or very similar. On average, soft tissue depths of the face do display some sexual dimorphism but it is not marked and of little practical meaning for craniofacial identification where a single individual must be independently considered. Thus, there is little use in separate reporting of data for males and females and data should be combined to increase sample sizes.     

Development and evaluation of a standard method for the quantitative determination of elements in float glass samples by LA-ICP-MS

Forensic analysis of glass samples was performed in different laboratories within the NITE-CRIME (Natural Isotopes and Trace Elements in Criminalistics and Environmental Forensics) European Network, using a variety of Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) systems. The main objective of the interlaboratory tests was to cross-validate the different combinations of laser ablation systems with different ICP-MS instruments. A first study using widely available samples, such as the NIST SRM 610 and NIST SRM 612 reference glasses, led to deviations in the determined concentrations for trace elements amongst the laboratories up to 60%. Extensive discussion among the laboratories and the production of new glass reference standards (FGS 1 and FGS 2) established an improved analytical protocol, which was tested on a well-characterized float glass sample (FG 10-1 from the BKA Wiesbaden collection). Subsequently, interlaboratory tests produced improved results for nearly all elements with a deviation of < 10%, demonstrating that LA-ICP-MS can deliver absolute quantitative measurements on major, minor and trace elements in float glass samples for forensic and other purposes.