A Quasi-Contract Theory of Political Obligation

Law and Philosophy - Whether there is a general moral obligation to obey the law, often referred to as ‘political obligation’, is an enduring question in contemporary legal and...     

Personality,cognitive, and interpersonal factors in adolescent substance use: A longitudinal test of an integrative model

This study tests a multidimensional model of adolescent drug use. The model incorporates sociodemographic variables, personality variables (state and trait anxiety, depressive mood, and sensation seeking), cognitive variables (knowledge, attitudes, and intentions), interpersonal factors (relationships with peers and parents), and the availability of drugs. The model was tested in a longitudinal study, comprising two phases. A total of 1446 high school students served as subjects. The role of cognitive (attitudinal) and interpersonal factors (relationships with parents and peers) was confirmed. In addition, sensation seeking proved to have significant predictive power. Anxiety, depression, and sociodemographic factors, by contrast, had virtually no influence. Availability had a minor effect. The multidimensional explanation was validated longitudinally. The factors related to drug use at the first phase predicted use at the second. This multidimensional explanation accounted for the use of various substances, suggesting that different substances—whether legal or illegal—share a common multidimensional explanation.This work is based on the doctoral dissertation of Zipora Barnea supervised by Meir Teichman and Giora Rahav, and submitted to the Tel-Aviv University. The research was partially supported by a grant from the National Interministerial Committee on Substance Use and the National Research and Development Foundation.Received Ph.D. from Tel-Aviv University. Research interests are substance use, delinquency, and social deviance.Received Ph.D. from University of Missouri. Research interests are drug and alcohol abuse, and family violence.Received Ph.D. from Indiana University. Research interests are substance use, delinquency, and cross-national studies of deviant and violent behavior.     

Restoring a Lost Identity: Models of Education in Modern Islamic Thought

Education occupied a central position in modern Islamic thought. It aimed at purifying faith, but also at nurturing activism in the service of Islam and the community. Education was required to be holistic, strengthening both soul and body. It embraced all aspects of life and was conveyed by diverse means, ranging from communal involvement to political revolution. The broad scope of this education was impelled by the comprehensiveness of the Islamic religion, but also by the multifaceted nature of Westernization itself. The corrupting presence of hedonistic culture backed by indigenous regimes heightened the functional aspect of the pedagogic realm in Islamic discourse more than ever before. Re-education was perceived as the main lever for achieving cultural authenticity and as a core component of identity politics. The paper offers a contextualized reading of education in Islamic thought, an issue largely overlooked in the scholarly literature, which has focused more on socio-political aspects of the modern Islamic revival.     

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.     

Removing interfering contaminations from gelatin lifters

Gelatin lifter is widely used for recovering shoeprints from crime scenes. Dusty shoeprints removed from paper with loose fibers, cloth or plasterboard, might be concealed by the detached fibers. A novel technique to clean the gelatin lifter from the interfering contaminations, using adhesive lifters, was developed. The adhesive lifter is applied directly on the surface of the gelatin lifter, and is removed instantly. The adhesive lifter removes the upper layer of the attached material on the gelatin lifter. After removing the concealing material from the hidden imprint, the quality of the visualized imprint is improved. The cleaning process can be applied as many times as needed and the optimum number is different for each substrate. The small dust particles comprising the shoeprint remained attached to the sticky side of the gelatin lifter even though the adhesion force applied by the adhesive lifter is great. Repeating the procedure too many times could harm the quality of the print severely, yet the advantages of this method are greater than the risks of relocation of image quality reduction.