There’s an app for that: Modernizing domestic violence support through the creation of new technologies,tools, and services

With domestic violence (DV) at an all-time high, police departments are drastically underutilizing technology to combat DV. Currently, New York police departments complete a “Domestic Incident Report” at the scene of domestic incidents but fail to adequately facilitate support services. New York State should mandate a services component into police DV protocols, specifically by commissioning: (1) an application linked to DV organizations presented at the scene of domestic incidents; and (2) a gateway application to refer victims to the correct services. Such tools would allow for the rendering of more efficient support to DV victims in times of immediate crisis.     

Ideology,party systems and corruption voting in European democracies

What is the impact of corruption on citizens' voting behavior? There is a growing literature on an increasingly ubiquitous puzzle in many democratic countries: that corrupt officials continue to be re-elected by voters. In this study we address this issue with a novel theory and newly collected original survey data for 24 European countries. The crux of the argument is that voters' ideology is a salient factor in explaining why citizens would continue voting for their preferred party despite the fact that it has been involved in a corruption scandal. Developing a theory of supply (number of effective parties) and demand (voters must have acceptable ideological alternatives to their preferred party), we posit that there is a U-shaped relationship between the likelihood of corruption voting and where voters place themselves on the left/right spectrum. The further to the fringes, the more likely the voters are to neglect corruption charges and continue to support their party. However, as the number of viable party alternatives increases, the effect of ideology is expected to play a smaller role. In systems with a large number of effective parties, the curve is expected to be flat, as the likelihood that the fringe voters also have a clean and reasonably ideologically close alternative to switch to. The hypothesis implies a cross level interaction for which we find strong and robust empirical evidence using hierarchical modeling. In addition, we provide empirical insights about how individual level ideology and country level party systems – among other factors – impact a voter's decision to switch parties or stay home in the face of their party being involved in a corruption scandal.     

Winds of Change: Voter Blame and Storm Gudrun in the 2006 Swedish Parliamentary Election

Can a natural disaster shift long-standing party support for the long-term? Studies of political behavior indicate that, as elections approach, voters punish or credit governments based on their responses to severe weather phenomena. It may still be considered an open question, however, if poor crisis response could trigger more durable shifts in long-standing party support. I provide empirical evidence suggesting that it could. I exploit a crucial case for the study of change in party support, Storm Gudrun (Erwin), to examine long lasting punishment effects over crisis response. The estimated effect is of a magnitude that equals the largest block-transfer of voters in Swedish history and can be seen over three parliamentary elections (2006, 2010 and 2014).     

The patriarchy index: a comparative study of power relations across historical Europe

This article stands at the confluence of three streams of historical social science analysis: the sociological study of power relations within the family, the regional demography of historical Europe, and the study of spatial patterning of historical family forms in Europe. It is a first exercise in the design and application of a new ‘master variable’ for cross-cultural studies of family organization and relations. This indexed composite measure, which the authors call the Index of Patriarchy, incorporates a range of variables related to familial behaviour, including nuptiality and age at marriage, living arrangements, post-marital residence, power relations within domestic groups, the position of the aged, and the sex of the offspring. The index combines all these items, with each being given equal weight in the calculation of the final score, which represents the varying degrees of sex- and age-related social inequality (‘patriarchal bias’) in different societal and familial settings. In order to explore the comparative advantages of the index, the authors use information from census and census-like microdata for 91 regions of historical Europe covering more than 700,000 individuals living in 143,000 domestic groups, from the Atlantic to the Urals. The index allows the authors to identify regions with different degrees of patriarchy within a single country, across the regions of a single country, or across and within many broader zones of historical Europe. The unprecedented patterning of the many elements of power relations and agency contained in the index generates new ways of accounting for both the geographies and the histories of family organization across the European landmass.     

Mosaic: recovering surviving census records and reconstructing the familial history of Europe

In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the demand for global data on historical family systems, both in the social sciences and in the humanities. Until lately, however, scholars interested in historical global family variation had to rely on simplified and often ahistorical world-scale classifications of family systems by world geographic regions. This article communicates Mosaic to the scholarly community – one of the largest infrastructural projects in the history of historical demography and family sociology. The article provides a brief history of the project, a discussion of the main issues involved in creating the database (including sampling and representativeness), and Mosaic's data structure and coverage. In the remainder of the article, the authors provide an overview of methodological and research opportunities that the project can offer to scholars, showing how the most pertinent problems of historical family demography can be tackled in more systematic ways than previously.     

“Supporting me through emotional times,all different kinds of behaviour.” Forensic mental health service users understanding of positive behavioural support

This service evaluation project explored service users’ experiences of positive behavioural support (PBS) within a medium secure mental health service. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to analyse interviews with ten service users. Four main themes emerged from the data: My plan; How I understand PBS; How PBS has helped me, the benefits; and Making the plan work. Overall, service users viewed their experience of having a PBS plan positively. They reflected that the plans offered staff greater understanding of their behaviours and needs, enabling them to receive appropriate support. Service users valued the experience of being involved in the process, offering important insights into their experiences. They also expressed frustrations about staff not following the plan and not understanding why they had a plan whilst others did not. Limitations of the study, clinical implications and ideas for future research have been discussed.     

Vicarious Trauma in Child Welfare Workers: A Study of Organizational Responses

Child welfare is provided within an organizational context that both supports and thwarts the efforts of workers and administrators to meet the myriad of goals established by federal, state, and local regulation and professional bodies. As the field moves toward trauma-informed services for children and families (Ko et al., 2008 Ko, S. J., Ford, J. D., Kassam-Adams, N., Berkowitz, S. J., Wilson, C., Wong, M., Brymer, M. J., &; Layne, C. M. (2008). Creating trauma-informed systems: Child welfare, education, first responders, healthcare, juvenile justice. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 39(4), 396–404.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), the effect of trauma on workers has received less agency attention (Middleton &; Potter, 2015 Middleton, J. S., &; Potter, C. C. (2015). Relationship between vicarious traumatization and turnover among child welfare professionals. Journal of Public Child Welfare, 9(2), 195–216.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). This exploratory, qualitative study examines the level of knowledge administrators have regarding vicarious trauma and probes the organizational responses of public child welfare agencies to the vicarious trauma experienced by workers.     

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.     

The Complexity of Social Outcomes from Cooperative,Competitive, and Individualistic Reward Systems

Previous research on cooperative and competitive reward systems has investigated the relation between extreme cooperative and competitive conditions, along with an intermediate noninterdependent neutral condition, to numerous outcome variables. This study added two additional conditions to these three usual conditions, between the neutral midpoint and the cooperative or competitive extremes, to see if these intermediate conditions might be distinctive in the outcomes they produced. The study used 240 participants, divided into groups of three that played a board game under these five different reward conditions. Participants' attitudes toward self, others, and task were then assessed and analyzed along with objective measures of performance, measures of self-esteem, state and trait anxiety, and results coded from an autobiographical report in game-defined roles. Results indicated that the intermediate cooperative condition was distinctively different from the extreme cooperative condition in predicted ways, and that the intermediate competitive condition was distinctively different from the extreme competitive condition, but in unpredicted ways. The research also demonstrated that an individualistic condition, which had previously been thought to produce neither a cooperative nor competitive social orientation, in fact produced both, raising questions as to whether reward interdependence, as researchers have defined it, is really the cause of cooperation and competition.     

Where is public affairs going?

This paper suggests the future direction in which public affairs practice is developing and advances a number of propositions about public affairs and political systems which provide the context in which public affairs practitioners operate. The paper examines the changing nature of the political systems in which public affairs functions and argues that, by inference, public affairs practice is culturally specific. The paper explores these contextual issues from both a European and a global perspective. The paper argues that an understanding of public affairs should be recognised as an essential element on management teaching syllabi and laments the fact that this is far from the case. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications