Assessing Risk of Placement Instability to Aid Foster Care Placement Decision Making

Placement stability is of critical importance to the well-being of children in foster care and has an impact on other key outcomes. Placement decision-making that matches children with placement resources is often cited as a practice that impacts placement stability, but little research exists to inform this practice. The focus of this research is on a child assessment tool that was developed to determine the appropriate level of care, which serves as one component of a web-based matching system that pulls together child and placement information used to inform the placement decision. The research examines the relationship between the child assessment subscale domains and placement stability for first and subsequent placement decisions and evaluates the stability of placements made in and outside of the indicated level of care.     

Race and treating other people's children as adults

Juvenile offenders are sometimes transferred to a criminal court where they may stand trial as adults. The rationale for this current trend cannot be justified based on evidence from developmental psychology, the evidence of consistent positive effects for particular intervention strategies, and ethical arguments for justification of punishment. The rationale in actuality reflects the selective manipulation of the alternative conceptions of young people as dependent and vulnerable or as autonomous and responsible to continue to justify policies that entail cultural and racial discrimination. Discretionary decisions at various stages of the justice process amplify racial disparities as minority youths proceed through the system and result in more severe dispositions than for comparable White youths.     

Predictors of Underreporting of Male Violence by Batterer Program Participants and Their Partners

Self-reports on domestic violence inventories remain the basis of court and clinical decision-making and program outcome evaluations, but previous research questions their reliability and validity. Accurate prediction of underreporting would help practitioners and researchers adjust batterer and victim self-reports. We develop prediction equations of underreporting on the Conflict Tactics Scale, using a multi-site database of men admitted to batterer programs and their female partners (n = 840). First we use variables measured at program intake to predict female and male underreporting of male violence at program intake. Second, we use variables measured at program intake, as well as measures of program participation, to predict male-female disagreement (male underreporting) at 12-month follow-up. Several variables were predictive of underreporting, both at intake and follow-up, but overall prediction was marginally better than chance. The findings suggest that men and women underreport based on situational factors (such as relationship characteristics) and rational reasons, rather than based on personality traits or social desirability. However, the ability to predict underreporting is too weak for adjustment of self-reports by clinicians and program evaluators.     

‘Rise of the Great Powers’=Rise of China? Challenges of the advancement of global history in the People's Republic of China

Ever since it was first broadcasted in 2006, the Rise of the Great Powers, a popular Chinese TV mini-series of 12 episodes, has received great attention both at home and abroad. Some have suggested that the showing of this series marked a new orientation in China's foreign policy and a new perception of its position in the world. Using oral interviews and written works by the historians who masterminded the project, this article analyzes the view of the Chinese historian, and of current Chinese leadership, about the globalizing world today and China's position in and relation to it. Using the documentary as a starting point, it discusses the status quo of world-history study in China today and argues that though receptive to the incentive for globalizing history writing, historical scholarship in China remains grounded in a Eurocentric understanding of modern world history. China's recent economic expansion has paradoxically reinforced this tradition, as the country is bracing for its own world power status.     

Political Competition and Ethnic Identification in Africa

This article draws on data from over 35,000 respondents in 22 public opinion surveys in 10 countries and finds strong evidence that ethnic identities in Africa are strengthened by exposure to political competition. In particular, for every month closer their country is to a competitive presidential election, survey respondents are 1.8 percentage points more likely to identify in ethnic terms. Using an innovative multinomial logit empirical methodology, we find that these shifts are accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the salience of occupational and class identities. Our findings lend support to situational theories of social identification and are consistent with the view that ethnic identities matter in Africa for instrumental reasons: because they are useful in the competition for political power.     

The Neglected Power of Elite Opinion Leadership to Produce Antipathy Toward the News Media: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Today, most Americans dislike the news media as an institution. This has led to considerable debate about why people dislike the media and how their public standing could be improved. This paper contributes to this literature by using a survey experiment to test the effect of several different considerations on evaluations of the media. It finds, consistent with the broader literature on political persuasion, that elite partisan opinion leadership can powerfully shape these attitudes. Additionally, it finds that tabloid coverage creates antipathy toward the press regardless of predispositions and that horserace coverage has a negative effect on opinions among politically aware citizens on both sides of the political spectrum. Contrary to some claims in the literature, this study finds no detectable effect of news negativity.     

The Signaling Effect of Pro se Status

When claimants press their claims without counsel, they fail at virtually every stage of civil litigation and overwhelmingly fail to obtain meaningful access to justice. This research program harnesses psychological science to experimentally test a novel hypothesis: mainly, a claimant's pro se status itself sends a signal that biases decision making about the claimant and her claim. We conducted social psychological experiments with the public (N = 157), law students (N = 198), and employment discrimination lawyers (N = 39), holding the quality and merit of a Title VII sex discrimination case constant. In so doing, we examined whether a claimant's pro se status itself shapes stereotypes held about the claimant and biases decision making about settlement awards. These experiments reveal that pro se status influences stereotypes of claimants and settlement awards received. Moreover, the signaling effect of pro se status is exacerbated by socialization in the legal profession. Among law‐trained individuals (i.e., law students and lawyers), a claimant's pro se status generates negative stereotypes about the claimant and these negative stereotypes explain the adverse effect of pro se status on decision making about settlement awards.     

Organised Cybercrime or Cybercrime that is Organised? An Assessment of the Conceptualisation of Financial Cybercrime as Organised Crime

Criminological research over the last couple of decades has improved our understanding of cybercrimes. However, this body of research is regarded as still theoretically thin and not fully developed; more knowledge on the actors involved, their characteristics, and modus operandi is needed. Some publications recently suggested that organised crime is or might be involved in cybercrimes, which would have important policing implications, but evidence-based research on this point is still scarce and inconclusive. This article seeks to further this path of inquiry by providing a systematic analysis of 40 cases from The Netherlands, Germany, UK, and USA where criminal networks were involved in financial cybercrimes affecting the banking sector. It also assesses whether and to what extent these criminal networks meet the definitions of organised crime and discusses the theoretical and policing implications of our findings.     

Our Democracy,Our Identity,Our Anxiety

The Brexit referendum result has given focus to and amplified a series of anxieties: the successful campaign gave visibility to anxiety about immigration and loss of sovereignty, while also creating anxiety about illiberal populism. This anxiety about national identity, current and prospective (both from supporters of Brexit and its opponents), about Brexit, as caused by anxiety and cause of anxiety, has provoked a debate even about the merits of democracy, if ‘the voice and will of the people’ disrupts the traditional constitutional assumptions regarding checks and balances and becomes despotic. Reference to the tradition of anxiety about democracy, exemplified by Kierkegaard and Kant, establishes a context here for a discussion of the Brexit political debate in terms derived from Lyotard’s investigation of, on the one hand, an appeal to mythic narrative to stabilise a claim of identity, and, on the other hand, narratives of emancipation embodied in a future-oriented deliberative process, which can be analysed in terms of seven different types of language game at play. Particular reference to the image of ‘triggering’ used in the Supreme Court’s judgments in the (R (on the application of Miller and another) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2017] UKSC 5) case in relation to Article 50 and the UK’s exit from the EU is made to illustrate the significance of figures of speech within discourse. The conclusion draws on Lyotard’s distinction between a litigation and a differend in order to better understand the politics of Brexit.