Does Coproduction of Public Services Support Government's Social Equity Goals? The Case of U.S. State Parks

The growing phenomenon of government-supporting charities prompts the question of whether these institutions help or hinder public values of equity in service access. Logit and tobit regression analysis using multiple data sources from the California and Florida state parks systems compares public parks with and without supporting “friends” groups. The results suggest that while parks philanthropy has produced real benefits in rallying citizen support for improved public spaces, it also introduces some distributional consequences that policy makers should not ignore. Namely, a philanthropic failure hypothesis is supported whereby wealthier Florida counties with greater income inequality are more likely to benefit from a charity supporting a nearby state park. Finding no similar result in California, the authors conclude that the association between community wealth and park charity presence may also depend on state characteristics such as the funding structure of each state park system, not just community wealth differences.     

The BDAE Complex Ideational Material—a Measure of Receptive Language or Performance Validity?

Scores on the Complex Ideational Material (CIM) were examined in reference to various performance validity tests (PVTs) in 106 adults clinically referred for neuropsychological assessment. The main diagnostic categories, reflecting a continuum between neurological and psychiatric disorders, were epilepsy, psychiatric disorders, postconcussive disorder, and psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. Cross-validation analyses suggest that in the absence of bona fide aphasia, a raw score ≤9 or T score ≤29 on the CIM is more likely to reflect non-credible presentation than impaired receptive language skills. However, these cutoffs may be associated with unacceptably high false positive rates in patients with longstanding, documented neurological deficits. Therefore, more conservative cutoffs (≤8/23) are recommended in such populations. Contrary to the widely accepted assumption that psychiatric disorders are unrelated to performance validity, results were consistent with the psychogenic interference hypothesis, suggesting that emotional distress increases the likelihood of PVT failures even in the absence of apparent external incentives to underperform on cognitive testing.