The first objective of the map is to systematically and transparently describe the extent of research in the field, to identify gaps in the research base, and to provide direct links to the evidence base for those wishing to locate relevant research. As such, the map provides a tool for anyone interested in interrogating the evidence base in relation to the topic. It is important to note in this regard that the map itself does not constitute evidence, as no appraisal has been conducted of the quality of the records included, and no synthesis has been undertaken.It is intended that the map should inform specific questions for a number of SCIE projects including systematic reviews (as part of SCIE knowledge reviews). At the time of writing (August 2006) two reviews have been commissioned from this map. Where such reviews are commissioned, the map provides a route through the complexity of the search task and enables timely and straightforward identification of relevant research, allowing reviewers to focus on later stages of a systematic review.

Movers age 60+ are prompted to leave a community for a variety of reasons. . . . Disagreeable weather/climate is a chief motivator for people to leave a community. However, because counties with high 60+ in-migration are disproportionately located in areas featuring a mild climate, climate is a relatively unimportant incentive for people to move to a particular community (4%). . . . Relatively few say they move to be in a retirement community (5%), because they “always wanted to live” in the community (4%), for work or job opportunities (3%), because of something they read (3%), or because they happened to find a house in the community they like (3%).

A Family Guide To Keeping Youth Mentally Healthy & Drug Free is a public education Web site developed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to communicate to parents and other caring adults about how they can help promote their child's mental health and reduce his or her risk for becoming involved with alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs. The site's six main sections relate directly to what researchers and substance abuse prevention professionals term family-related "protective factors." These are situations and conditions that decrease a child's chances for engaging in drug-related and other risky behaviors. The site also includes information about "risk factors" that increase children's risk for using alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs. With content focusing on children aged 7 to 18, the site includes topics such as how to better communicate with young people, activities for promoting "family time," and what to say when discussing difficult issues.

There is a growing view among economists that the minimum wage offers substantial benefits to low-wage workers without negative effect. Although there are still dissenters, the best recent research has shown that the job loss reported in earlier analyses does not, in fact, occur when the minimum wage is increased. There is little question that the overall impact of a minimum wage is positive.

About one-half (53%) of baby boomers said they have at least a “mild”hearing loss. This is consistent with the findings from the 2004 study (49%). It appears that boomers, generally speaking, are willing to admit to having a hearing loss. When looking just as those boomers that said they do NOT have a hearing loss, only 18% said they sometimes or frequently find themselves in situations where people are not speaking loudly enough or clearly enough or where the television is not loud enough or clear enough.

The top 10 percent of U.S. counties in terms of percent 60+ in-migrants (about 300 counties) received over 1 million new 60+ residents between 1995 and 2000 –representing about 20 percent of their total population age 60+. Many of these retirement destination counties are found in the South and West, and often they are smaller counties where more moderate absolute migration volumes represented relatively large shares of total population. Top destination counties tend to have higher average temperatures, lower crime, lower property and state income tax rates, and higher percentages of recreation/entertainment employment, and are often non-metro counties with high percentages of federal lands – areas that tend to be rich in natural amenities, mostly in the western half of the country.

Social Explorer is dedicated to providing easy access to demographic information for United States. We have hundreds of interactive data maps of the United States, including historical data back to 1940.
Social Explorer is under continuous development. Our goal is to provide complete historical census reference as well as current information and 10 year projections.

The provision of information services for paid care workers has lagged behind provision in comparable professions such as the health services, where a multitude of initiatives have been put in place . . . The spread of digital media, particularly since the advent of the World Wide Web (www)in the mid-1990s, has resulted in
health information being more widely available than ever before. UK government initiatives have been developed to harness digital media to deliver health-related information to the general public . . . This is not to mention the volume of commercially provided web-based information. There have also been many recent initiatives to improve timely and effective provision of information to clinical and other staff within the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), notably the National Programme for IT in the NHS, which aims, over the next 10 years, to connect over 30,000 general practitioners (GPs) in England to almost 300 hospitals and give patients access to their personal health and care information . . . Recently a number of large-scale progammes for introducing innovative information technology (IT) solutions into local authority work have begun, such as the Project Nomad programme on mobile systems (www.projectnomad.org.uk) and the DigiTV programme for interactive TV (digitv.org.uk). Social care may eventually benefit from such initiatives, but until now there has been little investment in digital services and tools for those in social care professions.

Twenty years ago, University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias died of a drug overdose just hours after the Boston Celtics picked him in the NBA draft. His death sparked a national media frenzy largely focused on the drug that was suspected, mistakenly, of killing him – crack cocaine. Afew weeks after Bias’ death, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, establishing for the first time mandatory minimum sentences triggered by specific quantities of cocaine. Congress also established much tougher sentences for crack cocaine offenses than for powder cocaine cases. For example, distribution of just 5 grams of crack carries a minimum 5-year federal prison sentence, while for powder cocaine, distribution of 500 grams – 100 times the amount of crack cocaine – carries the same sentence. October 2006 marks the twentieth anniversary of this law. In the twenty years since its passage, many of the myths surrounding crack cocaine have been dispelled, as it has become clear that
there is no scientific or penological justification for the 100:1 ratio. The United States Sentencing Commission, created by Congress in 1984 to develop fair federal sentencing guidelines, concluded that crack is not appreciably different from powder cocaine in either its chemical composition or the physical reactions of its users. Accordingly, on three separate occasions, the
U.S. Sentencing Commission has urged Congress to reconsider the statutory penalties for crack cocaine. Judges, commentators, federal prosecutors, medical professionals, and other experts have all concurred with this assessment.

Approximately 1.4 million nonprofit organizations are registered with the IRS. The figure includes a diverse group of organizations, both in size and mission, which range from hospitals and human service organizations to advocacy groups and chambers of commerce. When compared to other sectors of the economy, the nonprofit sector accounts for 5.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and 8.3 percent of wages and salaries paid in the United States. While these figures shed light on the size and scope of the sector, a complete picture cannot be obtained without considering two critical components of the sector, voluntarism and charitable giving. In 2005, individuals, corporations, and foundations gave $26o billion in charitable contributions to nonprofits and 29 percent of Americans volunteered through a formal organization.

Seventy-four percent of gay, lesbian or bisexual individuals have been the victims of discrimination based on their sexual orientation. Thousands of individuals report employment discrimination based on sexual orientation in states that forbid such discrimination. Gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals also experience discrimination in such areas as applying to a college, university or other school; renting an apartment or buying a house; and getting health care or health insurance.
In 33 states, individuals can legally be fired from their jobs, or denied access to housing, educational institutions, credit, and public accommodations simply because they are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (GLBT). There are no federal laws that explicitly prohibit discrimination against GLBT individuals. Only 17 states (CA, CT, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, MN, NV, NH, NJ, NM, NY, RI, VT, WA, WI) and the District of Columbia prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. Without anti-discrimination laws, GLBT people have no legal recourse when landlords deny housing or employers fire or refuse to hire them.

Throughout the first six years of the new millennium, health care costs have skyrocketed, while working families’ wages have stood still. Other factors have also buffeted families’ economic well-being, including fluctuating gasoline prices and the recent downturn in real estate markets, but nothing has caused as much damage to family pocketbooks as the confluence of stagnant wages and rising health care costs. Numerous national studies have documented this damage. As important as these studies are, they do not reflect the varying burdens experienced by families in different states. Just as labor markets, health systems, and economic circumstances vary from one state to another, the consequences of rising health care costs and stagnant earnings differ considerably among the 50 states. Families USA has undertaken the first state-by-state analysis of growing health care premiums versus stagnant earnings over the past six years. This report, which is based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Health and Human Services, examines the impact of changes in employer-based health insurance premiums and earnings in New York.

The importance of working with perpetrators of ASB to help them change their behaviour has been recognised by policy makers and practitioners. In 2003 a small number of local authorities, housing associations and charities set up specialist ASB rehabilitation projects to work with families who are at risk of eviction or who have been evicted from their homes due to anti-social behaviour. The projects support service users to help them address the underlying causes of their behaviour.This two year evaluation examines the impact of such projects in terms of costs and benefits, effectiveness and lessons for dissemination.

Nightline is a listening, support and information service, run by students for students. Nightline services operate in over forty universities in the UK and beyond. All of them offer a telephone helpline service - usually all night, every night during term-time - and many also offer a drop-in service and email listening. We have no political, religious, sexual or moral bias. If you're a student at a university with a Nightline, you can call about anything you like. We won't judge you and we won't tell you what to do, but no matter what it's about, we'll listen. Nightline is confidential and anonymous. You don't have to tell us anything about yourself - not even your name. The Nightline Charity is the association of individual Nightlines. It exists to promote, support and develop Nightlines on both a national and local scale.

This study details a new effort to locate and describe the exurbs of large metropolitan areas in the United States. It defines exurbs as communities located on the urban fringe that have at least 20 percent of their workers commuting to jobs in an urbanized area, exhibit low housing density, and have relatively high population growth. . . . Despite their popularization by political analysts, media, and local growth activists, the “exurbs” do not abound nor fit a single, neat stereotype. Just 6 percent of large metro area residents live in an exurb, and these exurbs vary from affordable housing havens for middle-class families, to “favored quarters” for high-income residents, to the path of least resistance for new development. While they may continue to capture interest among political observers, the real test for exurbia lies in how our nation accommodates future growth. Will exurbs remain exurbs or become the suburbs of tomorrow?

This report is the latest in a series of AAUP initiatives aimed at improving the status of women faculty, dating from the formation of AAUP’s Committee W on the Status of Women in College and University Faculties in 1918. Over the intervening decades there has been considerable progress—yet equity remains elusive. Thirty-four years after Congress passed Title IX in 1972, prohibiting sex discrimination in education, women earned more than half of all graduate degrees awarded in 2004. Yet, among other findings, the AAUP report indicates that women occupied about 9 percent of full professor positions at four-year colleges and universities in 1972, and were still only 24 percent of all full professors in 2003. The four indicators compared in the report for men and women faculty are employment status (full- and part-time); tenure status for full-time faculty; promotion to full professor rank; and average salary for full-time faculty. The report consists of three sections: an article on “Organizing Around Gender Equity,” authored jointly by Professor Martha S. West of the University of California, Davis and John W. Curtis, AAUP Director of Research and Public Policy; aggregate national tables for each of the four equity indicators by type of institution; and an appendix listing the four indicators for each individual college and university. Data for the report are drawn primarily from the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey, with additional data on part-time faculty from the US Department of Education.

This study examined the characteristics, past and present, of different groups of unpaid caregivers in England and Wales in 2001. As not all people with care needs can be looked after at home, it also examined characteristics of older people who had moved into institutional care, and those who had moved in with other relatives. The research, by a team from the Centre for Population Studies, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, used data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study, including individual-level census information.

Engaging families in child welfare—both in case planning and as key stakeholders for system improvement—is critical for enhancing the safety, permanency, and well-being of children. Providers are more successful engaging parents and other caregivers when they recognize family members as the experts on their children and listen openly to their concerns and perspectives, seeking solutions with them as equal partners. After completing the first round of the Child and Family Services Reviews (CFSRs), the Children's Bureau identified a need for State child welfare systems to better engage families as meaningful participants in ensuring positive outcomes for their children. Engaging families in assessment, case planning, and service delivery are critical in child welfare practice.

Social care makes a substantial positive difference to people’s lives. It helps people retain or regain their independence and dignity. It helps them overcome difficult situations or transitions in their lives, giving them more choice and control, and rebuilding fractured relationships. It safeguards individual children and adults from harm, helps individuals who are more likely to harm others, and protects society from potential harm. Social care is vitally important to the estimated 2 million individuals (adults and children) who receive social care services in England. The social care workforce has been undergoing transformational change in recent years with a range of reforms and significant investment. The Care Standards Act 2000 put in place key structures to improve the quality of social care services. This included establishing the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI), the General Social Care Council (GSCC), a Training Organisation for Personal Social Services (Topss) (now superseded Skills for Care (SfC) and the Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC)), and the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE).

Pregnancy and Employment Transitions focuses on birth mothers with a natural child living with them who was under two years of age when the mother was interviewed in November 2005. The information collected covers: women's changing hours of work in their job during pregnancy; women's use of paid and unpaid leave associated with pregnancy, the birth of their child and the subsequent caring for the new born child; the length of leave breaks that mothers took in association with their pregnancy and the birth of their child; and the reasons for entering or not entering the workforce following the birth. Details of the work arrangements of the mother's partner, both before and after the birth, were also collected.

According to the latest results of the National Annenberg Risk Survey of Youth completed this summer, the overall percentage of male youth ages 14 to 22 who reported playing cards for money on a weekly basis dropped to 11.6% in 2006 from 12.5% in 2005 (see Table 1). Although this decline was not statistically significant, it represents the first absolute decline since the survey began tracking youth gambling patterns in 2002. Despite the overall small decline in card playing among all male youth in the survey, the ever-expanding popularity of card playing continued in male youth ages 18 to 22. Weekly card playing increased from 12.7% to 16.3%, reflecting the continued popularity of card playing among youth in college. However, for those under the age of 18, weekly card playing declined from 12.3% in 2005 to 6.6% in 2006. Although neither change was statistically significant on its own, the divergence in the trends was unlikely to have occurred by chance.

Using data on 11,000 graduate students from 100 departments over a 20 year period, I test whether graduate student outcomes (graduation rates, time to degree, publication success, and initial job placement) differ based on a student’s gender and marital status. I find that married men have better outcomes across every measure than single men. Married women do no worse than single women on any measure and actually have more publishing success and complete their degree in less time. The outcomes of cohabiting students generally fall between those of single and married students.

This section provides resources to help protect children's safety, support families, and reduce the risk of future harm. Includes information on reporting suspected child abuse and neglect; intake, investigation, and assessment of reports; case management; and responding to child fatalities and families affected by child neglect, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and substance abuse.

Court hearings are used to review the status and determine the permanent placement of children who have been placed in out-of-home care, including foster care. The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997 (P.L. 105-89) amended title IV-E of the Social Security Act in an effort to provide added safety and permanency for children in foster placement. ASFA placed an emphasis on expediting and improving planning and decision-making for the permanent placement of children in the child welfare system. This publication describes the schedule of hearings as required by ASFA, who may be present at hearings, the types of determinations made at hearings, and the various permanency options.

The purpose of this statement is to promote public understanding and support of academic freedom and tenure and agreement upon procedures to ensure them in colleges and universities. Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher1 or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition. Academic freedom is essential to these purposes and applies to both teaching and research. Freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth. Academic freedom in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning. It carries with it duties correlative with rights. Tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically: (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability. Freedom and economic security, hence, tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society.

The designers of the hate crime data collection program sought to capture information about the types of bias that motivate crimes, the nature of the offenses, and some information about the victims and offenders. In creating the program, the designers recognized that hate crimes are not separate, distinct crimes; instead, they are traditional offenses motivated by the offender’s bias (for example, an offender assaults a victim because of a bias against the victim’s race). After much consideration, the developers agreed that hate crime data could be derived by capturing the additional element of bias in those offenses already being reported to the UCR Program. Attaching the collection of hate crime statistics to the established UCR data collection procedures, they concluded, would fulfill the directives of the Hate Crime Statistics Act without placing an undue additional reporting burden on law enforcement and, in time, would develop a substantial body of data about the nature and frequency of bias crimes occurring throughout the Nation.

"Faculty Are Not Representative of the American Public
The majority of faculty are liberal and Democratic, and therefore
the full spectrum of beliefs and political behavior of the American
public is underrepresented on campus."

"Trustees Should Take a More Active Role in Tenure Decisions
Trustees and other stakeholders need to play an increased role
in tenure decisions. Currently, trustees, with rare exception, merely
rubber-stamp tenure recommendations, a lifetime employment contract.
This is an abdication of fiduciary responsibility, even though
many trustees may believe that protecting academic freedom requires
them to always defer to the faculty."

Every day, colleges and universities provide college students—who represent a large and growing source of the nation’s volunteers—with opportunities to deliver valuable services to communities across the country. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the nation has witnessed a significant upsurge in volunteers, particularly among this demographic. Both on campuses and in surrounding communities, millions of college students are participating in a wide range of volunteer service activities, from teaching and mentoring children from disadvantaged circumstances, to raising funds for worthy causes, to helping their fellow Americans recover from hurricanes and other disasters. The mission of the Corporation for National and Community Service is to improve lives, strengthen communities, and foster civic engagement through service and volunteering. As part of that mission, the Corporation makes a significant investment in nurturing a culture of service on college campuses. Building on that support, the Corporation is working with other federal agencies, colleges and universities, higher education and student associations, and nonprofit organizations to encourage even greater levels of college student volunteering and to ensure that college graduates embark on a lifetime of service. Our goal is to increase the number of college students volunteering each year, reaching 5 million by 2010.

The process of developing and implementing emergency response plans for States, governments, and agencies is complex. It is hoped that the resources on these pages may help States and jurisdictions in developing comprehensive disaster preparedness plans and responding to emergencies quickly and effectively to protect children and families. The resources are organized by preparedness (before a disaster), response (the immediate aftermath) and recovery (the longer-term reconstruction/healing phase).

This gives information about secondary legislation to allow registered social landlords to build and manage gypsy and traveller sites and receive social housing grant for that purpose. it includes a regulatory impact assessment and a race equality impact assessment.

Laws in all States, the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico require the provision of services that will assist families in remedying the conditions that brought the child and family into the child welfare system. The statutes in most States, however, use a broad definition of what constitutes reasonable efforts. This publication summarizes when reasonable effort are, and are not, required.

Over the past five years, there has been substantial momentum around the issue of prisoner reentry. It is now well known that some 650,000 prisoners return from state and federal prisons each year, facing a myriad of challenges and high recidivism rates. At the same time, little attention has been paid to the issue of reentry from local jails, despite the fact that jails process more than 12 million admissions and releases each year. . . . Informing the Roundtable discussion were a set of papers that focus on the following jail reentry issues: inmate challenges, short-term interventions, community supervision, evidence-based reentry practices in the jail setting, reentry from jails for females, the economics of jail reentry, jail to community linkages, and reentry from rural jails.

The authors review the recent literature on crime and violence in Latin America and the Caribbean and present a broad overview of the main ideas and empirical findings. They provide estimates of the magnitude of the problem, trends, and the manifestations of crime and violence in Latin America. They also discuss the ways in which violence affects development, the root causes of violence and the empirical evidence on the determinants of crime. The authors conclude by stressing that preventive measures and innovative social policies are efficient and under-utilized strategies to address the problem and call for both more research and operational experimentation.

The National Children's Bureau (NCB) were commissioned to undertake a literature review and consultation on what children and young people think of social care worker; specifically social workers and foster carers.

The Healthy Kids program of Los Angeles County provides insurance coverage to low income children who do not have access to other health insurance. This report is one of a series of reports being produced under the Healthy Kids program evaluation, which is designed to provide feedback to stakeholders on the progress of the initiative. First 5 L.A. contracts with The Urban Institute and its partners to conduct the evaluation. The report provides an analysis of data from a survey—conducted by Mathematica Policy Research for the evaluation—of the parents of Healthy Kids children ages 1 to 5.

Whether eating out or buying carry-out, Americans are consuming more and more of their calories from full-service and fast-food restaurant fare. The share of daily caloric intake from food purchased and/or eaten away from home increased from 18 percent to 32 percent between the late 1970s and the middle 1990s, and the away-from-home market grew to account for about half of total food expenditures in 2004, up from 34 percent in 1974. Analysis of a survey of U.S. consumers indicates that respondents want convenience and an enjoyable dining experience, but the desire for health also plays a role as does diet-health knowledge.

The current bulletin assesses whether there is any relationship between the increasing assault rate in NSW seen over the past decade and increasing methamphetamine use. During this time, there have been several changes to methamphetamine use patterns that could have contributed to an increase in methamphetaminerelated problems, such as violent behaviour. There is currently insuffi cient evidence to infer a direct causal link between methamphetamine use and violence, but there is considerable evidence that the two entities are related. The strongest evidence for a relationship between methamphetamine use and violence is in the context of methamphetamine-induced psychosis. In this context, violence is likely to be related to persecutory delusions and perceived threat. There is also experimental evidence that chronic use of the drug increases the risk of violent behaviour, and a proportion of chronic methamphetamine users report problems controlling violent behaviour. Despite this evidence, it is not clear whether violent behaviour among chronic methamphetamine users is due to methamphetamine use per se or co-occurring factors (e.g. alcohol use, psychiatric status, personality, lifestyle associated with illicit drug use). Acute intoxication with methamphetamine alone does not appear to lead to violent behaviour, but it may enhance aggression in someone who is otherwise provoked. In conclusion, there is currently insufficient empirical data to estimate whether, or to what extent, methamphetamine use has increased assaults in NSW. Existing evidence suggests that methamphetamine use is likely to have a relatively minor impact on the assault rate in NSW in comparison with other factors.

Guided by the leadership of the Attorney General, Project Safe Childhood (PSC) aims to combat the proliferation of technology-facilitated sexual exploitation crimes against children. The threat of sexual predators soliciting children for physical sexual contact is well-known and serious; the danger of the production, distribution, and possession of child pornography is equally dramatic and disturbing. The response to these growing problems must be coordinated, comprehensive, and robust. It must aim to investigate and prosecute vigorously, and protect and assist victimized children. At the same time, it must recognize the need for a broad, community-based effort to protect our children and to guarantee to future generations the opportunities of the American dream.

The concept of transitional housing has a long history in the fields of mental health and corrections, predating its application to the homeless arena by decades. State and local public mental health and corrections departments developed these residential programs to ease the transition back into regular housing for people leaving mental hospitals or prisons. Stevens (2005) describes the history of halfway houses for people leaving correctional settings, and their transition quite recently into community residential centers. To use one state as an example, in 1974 Ohio had 22 certified halfway houses for people leaving prison (Ohio Adult Parole Authority 2005). Policy makers in the mental health arena were also focusing on community-based residential and nonresidential services during the 1970s and early 1980s (Biegel and Naparstek 1982). In 1982 an American Psychiatric Association task force published its report, A Typology of Community Residential Services (APA 1984), which sought to establish a common nomenclature for residential programs serving people with serious mental illness located throughout the country. The task force had spent four years identifying, cataloging, and attempting to classify the many such programs in existence at that time. These community-based transitional programs were developed for many reasons, including a desire to avoid the high cost of institutional versus community-based care and a desire or legal obligation to maintain some intermediate level of supervision over people being released from institutions.

This report presents findings from the 2004-05 British Crime Survey on perceptions and experience of anti-social behaviour. British Crime Survey measures have shown that although anti-social behaviour is perceived to be a problem by a minority of adults in England and Wales it remains an important area of concern for those whose lives are affected by it.

This report summarises evidence about the current performance of home care in England, and draws conclusions about the overall state of this sector and its capacity to expand and develop. Although home care services support a range of people of all ages, the report focuses on older people, as they are the largest group of people using the service. In doing so, it looks at the roles of different players in the home care market, including the people who use services, local authority commissioners and registered service providers.

Records of child abuse and neglect reports are maintained by State child protection or social services agencies to aid in the investigation, treatment, and prevention of child abuse cases and to maintain statistical information for staffing and funding purposes. In many States, these records and the results of investigations are maintained in databases, often known as central registries. This publication summarizes State statutes on the rights of reported persons to review and challenge records, and when records must be expunged.

This guide deals with the problem of assaults in and around bars. We know a lot about the risk factors for these assaults, and about effective responses to them. We know less about which particular responses are most effective in addressing specific aspects of the problem. Therefore, your challenge will be to conduct a good analysis of the local problem, guided by the information presented here, and put together the right combination of responses to address that problem. The guide begins by reviewing factors that increase the risks of assaults in and around bars. It then identifies a series of questions that might help you analyze your local problem of assaults in and around bars. Finally, it reviews responses to the problem, and what is known about them from evaluative research and police practice.

This report is mostly based on information from the 18,386 households who were interviewed for the Survey of English Housing (SEH) in the year beginning April 2004. The SEH is a continuous survey that started in April 1993. It provides key housing data on tenure, owner occupation and the social rented sector, and is the principal source of information about the private rented sector.

The report presents findings from the 2004-05 British Crime Survey. It examines black and minority ethnic groups' experiences of crime and racially- motivated crimes and compares these with the white population. It also examines levels of victimisation, including racially-motivated crimes, and the nature of racially-motivated crimes. Information about the respondents' attitudes towards and contact with the police are included in the report.

Working Partners strives to build a drug-free workforce by equipping businesses and communities with tools and information to effectively address drug and alcohol problems.

This document provides an overview of the current state of wheelchair provision. It makes recommendations on how the NHS, working with partners, can improve outcomes for wheelchairs users.

The findings in this document are based on analysis of very early stage data and should be understood as 'indicative' only.

In order for States to be eligible to receive Federal grants under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), they are required to establish provisions for immunity from liability for individuals making good faith reports of suspected or known instances of child abuse or neglect. Some States have provisions of immunity that extend beyond the initial report of abuse or neglect, and some States have limitations to immunity.

Presents Federal criminal case processing statistics on peonage and slavery statutes in the U.S. criminal code with a focus on human trafficking offenses created by Congress in the Trafficking in Victims Protection Act of 2000. The report includes national data on the number and type of human trafficking offenders referred to and prosecuted by U.S. attorneys. It describes human trafficking case processing, including number of convictions and types of sentences imposed. Data are presented on matters referred by investigating law enforcement agency and Federal judicial district.

FirstStep is an easy-to-use, interactive tool for case managers, outreach workers, and others working with people who are homeless. The information on this CD-ROM will help you assist your clients to access benefits from Federal mainstream benefit programs. FirstStep offers advice on how to be a good benefits counselor as well as helpful, timesaving tips from others who work with people who are homeless. In addition, it includes Tools and Resources you can use to keep all of the benefits information in one place or learn about other programs and organizations that may benefit your client but are not included on this CD-ROM.

By many estimations, the Western medical model of mental health is dangerously incomplete. If we step outside of the traditional disease model there are many new and different ways to understand, treat, and even accept mental illness. Culture how we collectively live, interact, and view the world frames our mental outlook. Arguably, culture even creates it. Western culture, for example, has completely embraced the medical model of mental illness. We quickly turn to physicians if we are unhappy or otherwise mentally discomfited, seeking solutions on a prescription pad. We expect brain chemistry to be at the root of any mental malady, forgetting the deeply entwined relationship between the biology of the brain and the environment in which we think, feel, and react. But every culture has a different view of the world, a lens through which normal or insane are viewed and defined. Anthropologist Meredith Small contends there is much to be learned from stepping away from the traditional Western medical model to explore and embrace alternative perspectives. By examining culture itself, rather than focusing on biology and medicine, we can fully understand the nature of our discontent. Looking at social, evolutionary, cross-cultural, and nutritional influences, Small deconstructs mental illnesses like depression and anxiety conditions that appear in different forms and for different reasons within the culture that defines them. By rethinking assumptions and questioning standard treatment programs, she helps us gradually relax our grip on the medical model to discover a new perspective on mental illness.

This green paper sets out a radical package of proposals for change which will be delivered only through absolute commitment from central and local government and from professionals working on the front line.

The 5 A Day for Better Health Program is a national initiative to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables by all Americans. Eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables every day will promote good health and may help reduce the risk of stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, and some cancers. The program seeks to do this by increasing public awareness of the importance of eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables every day for better health, providing consumers with specific information about how to include more servings of fruits and vegetables into their daily routines, and increasing the availability of fruits and vegetables at home, school, work, and other places where food is served.

This report summarises evidence about the current performance of home care in England, and draws conclusions about the overall state of this sector and its capacity to expand and develop. Although home care services support a range of people of all ages, the report focuses on older people as they are the largest group of people using the service. In doing so, it looks at the roles of different players in the home care market, including the people who use services, local authority commissioners and registered service providers. It draws upon a range of evidence collected by CSCI over the last two years, including evidence from our engagement with older people, our regulatory and inspection work, and our performance assessment of councils. The report aims to make a contribution to the debate about what kinds of changes are needed, by setting out some of the evidence that will help national and local policy makers and commissioners make decisions about what home care services should be offered to whom, and what form they should take.

Too Smart to Start is a public education initiative that provides professionals and volunteers at the community level with materials and strategies to help them conduct an underage alcohol use prevention initiative. The materials contained in this guide are designed to help you plan, develop, promote, and implement a local initiative to educate 9- to 13-year-olds and their parents about the harms of underage alcohol use and to support parents and caregivers as they participate in their children’s activities. The hallmark of the Too Smart To Start program is its flexibility in the way it can be implemented in the local community. Too Smart To Start is not intended to be prescriptive. Rather, it offers information on the alcohol use behaviors of 9 to 13 year olds, a consistent message, and basic materials and strategies to deliver the core behavioral messages. The expectation is that local specific data will be added to Too Smart To Start information, messages, and materials, and elements will be tailored or adapted to the locality.

Intercountry adoptions may be finalized abroad or domestically. Most State statutes give full effect and recognition to intercountry adoptions finalized abroad. Full effect of a foreign adoption decree means that adoptive parents and adopted children have the same rights and obligations as they would have if a State court had issued the adoption decree. Recognition of a foreign adoption decree means that the decree is just as valid and binding as a decree issued by a State court. Additionally, most State statutes provide for validation of the foreign adoption or readoption of the child under State law and establish application procedures for adopted children to obtain a U.S. birth certificate.

The National HIV/AIDS Clinicians’ Consultation Center (NCCC) has released its updated State HIV Testing Laws Compendium. The document describes each state’s policies, rules, and regulations on HIV testing and provides state-by state comparisons.

Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the most common of the psychiatric disorders that appear in childhood, are often the subject of great concern on the part of parents and teachers. Children with ADHD are unable to stay focused on a task, cannot sit still, act without thinking, and rarely finish anything. If untreated, the disorder can have long-term effects on a child's ability to make friends or do well at school or in other activities. Over time, children with ADHD may develop depression, lack of self-esteem, and other emotional problems. Experts estimate that ADHD affects 3 to 5 percent of school-age children and two to three times as many boys as girls. Children with untreated ADHD have higher than normal rates of injury. ADHD frequently co-occurs with other problems, such as depression and anxiety disorders, conduct disorder, drug abuse, or antisocial behavior.

The United Nations Secretary-General's Study on Violence against Children has been a global effort to paint a detailed picture of the nature, extent and causes of violence against children, and to propose clear recommendations for action to prevent and respond to it. This is the first time that an attempt has been made to document the reality of violence against children around the world, and to map out what is being done to stop it. Since 2003, many thousands of people have contributed to the study in consultations and working groups, through questionnaires and in other ways. Children and young people have been active at every level.

This guide contributes to a growing body of work in the area of cultural competency – a concept which embeds the notion of reciprocity. The particular strength of this resource is its national application, and its focus across the four domains — systemic, organisational, professional and individual — where action is critical to increase cultural competency. The guide aims to increase cultural competency for the benefit of people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, taking a cue from growing international emphasis on improving health outcomes by promoting healthier living and environments. It uses the issue of overweight and obesity to illustrate the model. The guide acknowledges diverse views in the landscape of cultural competency, using feedback from the consultation process to highlight current debates in Australia and internationally.

Each year, substance abuse treatment programs in the United States record approximately 150,000 admissions of youths under the age of 18. Nevertheless, little is known about the effectiveness of the types of community-based services typically available to youths and their families. Researchers interviewed youths treated in 11 adolescent programs that had been identified as having suggestive evidence of effectiveness, in order to learn whether they had better outcomes a year after treatment admission than they would have had at other facilities. The study failed to find strong and persuasive evidence of greater treatment effectiveness at the facilities studied. Relative effectiveness may be difficult to measure because facilities serve different populations, because the study examined relative rather than absolute treatment effects, or because large and significant treatment effects might exist for each evaluated treatment program but might be no longer detectable a year after admission. However, there were consistently small positive effects for direct measures of substance use.

The purpose of this study was to document the economic role of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) by estimating the short-term economic impact that each of these institutions has on their local communities. In this study, short-term economic impact was defined as the change in overall economic activity in the institutions’s community that is associated with four important categories of college/university-related expenditures, salaries, other institutional expenditures, and the expenditures of undergraduate and separately, graduate and professional students attending the institution. The IMPLAN (Impact Analysis for Planning) Professional Version 2.0 modeling system was used to build regional models for each of the 101 HBCUs in the 50 states and the District of Columbia and to calculate multipliers for estimating the HBCUs’ impact in terms of output, value-added, labor income, and employment. These multipliers were applied to each institution’s salary, staff, enrollment and expenditure data from the 2001 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey. In 2001, the combined initial spending associated with the nation’s 101 HBCUs totaled $6.6 billion. Public HBCUs accounted for 62 percent of the total amount. The total economic impact of the nation’s HBCUs was $10.2 billion with 35 percent due to the multiplier effect.

This paper explores the challenge of understanding chronic and structural poverty in South Africa, and questions the dominance of the econometric imaginary in present-day development and poverty studies. It argues that measurement-based, econometric approaches to chronic poverty are dependent upon mystifying narratives about the nature of poverty and how it can be known, that they direct attention away from the underlying structural dimensions of persistent poverty and that understanding structural poverty in turn requires a theorised engagement with the complexities of social relations, agency, culture and subjectivity. Valuable as the recent re-recognition of the need to connect qualitative and quantitative research has been, attempts at ‘qual-quant’ integration often remain tied to positivist assumptions, bringing the risk of a new ‘ordering’ of methodological dissent that leaves problematic aspects of the econometric imaginary unchanged. Underlying this process is the entanglement of poverty research with the ‘government of poverty’: the attempt to constitute poverty as something objectively measurable and scientifically manageable. The paper closes with a consideration of the ethical and political challenges this poses for critical researchers and intellectuals in post-colonial contexts.

FNS estimates that about 1.0 cent per dollar of benefits redeemed in 2005 were trafficked; this trafficking usually occurred in small convenience and grocery stores and often, we found, between store owners and food stamp recipients with whom they were familiar. The national rate of food stamp trafficking declined from about 3.8 cents per dollar of benefits redeemed in 1993 to about 1.0 cent per dollar during the years 2002 to 2005. However, even at that lower rate, FNS estimates that about $241million in food stamp benefits would have been trafficked annually in those years. The rate of trafficking in small stores remains higher—an estimated 7.6 cents per dollar—than the rate for large stores—an estimated 0.2 cents per dollar. Since the nationwide implementation of EBT, the way some food stamp benefits are trafficked has changed. Previously, in addition to trafficking conducted directly between store owners and recipients, middlemen purchased large numbers of food stamp coupons at a discounted rate directly from recipients and then exchanged the coupons for cash from a retailer. EBT has largely eliminated the middleman. Retailers now must have the recipients’ EBT card and personal identification number to conduct a trafficking transaction and are likely to limit their trafficking transactions to people from their neighborhood or with whom they are familiar.

If you or an older person you know has fallen, you're not alone. More than one in three people age 65 years or older falls each year. The risk of falling -- and fall-related problems -- rises with age. Falls don't "just happen," and people don't fall because they get older. Often, more than one underlying cause or risk factor is involved in a fall. A risk factor is something that increases a person's risk or susceptibility to a medical problem or disease.

The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA) was touted as making fundamental changes in how the Medicare program works—and indeed, it did. Proponents argued that moving toward privatization of Medicare would save billions of taxpayer dollars while providing better health care for the 43 million seniors and people with disabilities who rely on Medicare. But now, nearly three years after passage of the MMA, the move to privatize Medicare has resulted in windfalls for the drug and insurance industries and huge costs to both taxpayers and beneficiaries. The MMA is most widely known for the creation of the Part D drug program, but the law also made significant changes in Medicare’s managed care option, Medicare Advantage (formerly Medicare+Choice). This report analyzes three aspects of Medicare that were affected by the MMA.

Traditionally, project evaluations look into the number of people benefiting from a project, and high take-up is considered as an indicator of success of the scheme. This assumes that take-up is according to the guidelines of the project, and therefore whether guidelines have been maintained is perceived as irrelevant for study. However, in recent times, targeting has become a subject of evaluation, especially by academics and funding agencies that want to make sure their funds are reaching the needy. But these studies are not helpful for understanding the causal factors of targeting failures. Rather, they examine whether ‘F-mistakes’, where some of the poor are excluded from the benefits, or ‘E-mistakes’, where benefits are provided to the non-poor as well as poor (Cornia and Stewart 1995), are taking place. To understand the causal factors associated with F-mistakes and E-mistakes, process tracing associated with targeting needs to be done, using a mixture of methods. There is a dearth of studies of this kind, including in the context of social protection interventions, an emerging set of targeted programmes in developing countries. This paper aims to bridge this gap. By focussing on the issue of targeted programmes of social protection, the paper is an attempt to demonstrate the effects of process deficits on poor people.

Human trafficking takes many different forms. It is dynamic and adaptable and, like many other forms of criminal activity, it is constantly changing in order to defeat efforts by law enforcement to prevent it. The responses to the problems are also rapidly evolving, in particular since an internationally agreed upon definition was adopted by the United Nations in November 2000. We learn daily about new ways of preventing, investigating and controlling the crime of trafficking and about more effective ways of protecting and assisting the victims of this crime. International cooperation, which is so crucial to the success of most interventions against human trafficking, is gaining a new momentum and new cooperation mechanisms are being developed. The present Toolkit was prepared because there is still much to be learned about what works best to prevent and combat human trafficking under various circumstances. It presents a selection of conceptual, legislative and organizational tools in use in different parts of the world.

On the basis of extremely cautious assumptions, which do not capture all college learning and do not capture any of the other social benefits that such learning would bring, the net economic benefit of colleges through improved qualification levels is at least £1.3bn. In effect the college sector turns £1 into an asset worth (at least) £3.20 in a year. Colleges transform people's lives and give opportunity in many other ways as set out in the case studies in this report. This represents an excellent return on investment.

Internationally, chronic urban poverty has been discussed from a variety of perspectives. Issues include the global rate of urbanisation, the scale and measurement of urban poverty and its spatial and social dimensions (Mitlin, 2004). After indicating the global urbanisation trend, Mitlin discusses the difficulty of understanding the scale of urban poverty which she relates to problems associated with its measurement. It is argued that this measurement problem might in turn be due to the lack of a clear definition of poverty. For instance, in many quantitative studies, the welfare indicator of households is defined as the household’s total expenditure. But, to be credible, this needs adjusting for spatial price differences and household composition (Mitlin 2004; Lanjouw and Lanjouw, 2001; Deaton and Zaidi, 1999). These issues are illustrated in the case of Ethiopia below. When such critical adjustments are made in a non-transparent and ad hoc manner, poverty will be vaguely defined and incorrectly measured. Obviously this has important policy implications.

Since 2003, mortality rates among Medicare beneficiaries have steadily declined. However, consistent with other studies, this study demonstrates that considerable variation in quality continues to persist, and in some cases worsen among the nation’s hospitals. This underscores that hospitals are in fact not the same, and thus, the value and importance of this information being readily available to prospective patients when making decisions about where to get their medical treatments. For the second part of this study, HealthGrades analyzed the inhospital mortality rates associated with 18 diagnoses and procedures to assess quality differences between 1-, 3-, and 5- tar rated hospitals. This analysis compared inhospital risk-adjusted mortality rates for Medicare patients from 2003 through 2005 and found that these rates have improved, but vary widely across hospitals, diagnoses and procedures.

Presents data from the 2004 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities on prisoners' prior use, dependence, and abuse of illegal drugs. Tables include trends in the levels of drug use, type of drugs used, and treatment reported by State and Federal prisoners since the last national survey was conducted in 1997. The report also presents measures of dependence and abuse by gender, race, Hispanic origin, and age. It provides data on the levels of prior drug use (with an in-depth look at methamphetamine use), dependence, and abuse by selected characteristics, such as family background, criminal record, type of drug used, and offense.

A scan of city finances in 2005 and 2006 reveals that the fiscal condition of municipalities appears to have stabilized, but not fully recovered from the post-2001 recessionary period. In the National League of Cities’ latest annual survey of city finance officers, nearly two in three respondents (65%) said their cities were better able to meet financial needs during 2006 than in the previous year. Looking ahead, 56 percent say they expect their cities to be better able to meet their 2007 needs, relative to the current fiscal year. Growth in city revenues appears to have surged in 2005 and then returned to the levels of the recessionary period (2002-04) in 2006, while growth in city spending levels remained relatively flat in 2005 and 2006. City finance officers responded to 2006 fiscal conditions in a variety of ways. The most common response was to raise or institute new fees and charges for services. Cities have also increased public safety spending and capital/infrastructure spending.

Despite international agreements and national laws, marriage of girls <18 years of age is common worldwide and affects millions. Child marriage is a human rights violation that prevents girls from obtaining an education, enjoying optimal health, bonding with others their own age, maturing, and ultimately choosing their own life partners. Child marriage is driven by poverty and has many effects on girls' health: increased risk for sexually transmitted diseases, cervical cancer, malaria, death during childbirth, and obstetric fistulas. Girls' offspring are at increased risk for premature birth and death as neonates, infants, or children. To stop child marriage, policies and programs must educate communities, raise awareness, engage local and religious leaders, involve parents, and empower girls through education and employment.

Hispanic Students and their families are scrambling to pay for college. Tuition costs are rising far faster than inflation, while real wages have been stagnant for years. Federal assistance to students and parents has been shrinking and states have been cutting back institutional support. For most families the only solution has been to borrow the money needed for college, but Congress has recently raised interest rates on student loans and cut $12 billion from the program. What has been the result? Hundreds of thousands of students are foregoing higher education, or dropping out early because they cannot afford to attend. Graduates of four-year colleges now have an average loan debt of $23,6002 plus $2,000 in credit card debt. The United States used to lead the world in the number of students receiving higher education. Now we rank 13th in affordability and 4th in accessibility among European and North American countries. These increasing cots are increasingly putting higher education out of reach for hard working Latino Families - a problem being exasperated by recent Congressional actions that have increased the costs of obtaining student loans.

Going without health insurance can have devastating consequences for children. While children of all races and ethnicities are affected by lack of health insurance coverage, minority children are most at risk. Of the 9,069,000 uninsured children in this country, more than 60 percent are racial or ethnic minorities . . . .The lack of health coverage can lead to dramatic differences in quality of care, mortality rates, and other health outcomes. Minority children are more likely to lack health coverage; they are also more likely to have unmet medical needs and to suffer higher rates of infant mortality, asthma, lead poisoning, and obesity. These problems affect minority communities across the country. Complete data are available only for the following 12 states, which have significant numbers of minority children.

This study uses panel data to examine the direct link between state funding and graduation rates at four-year institutions. When other factors are held constant, a $1,000 increase in state appropriations per FTE student at four-year public institutions is associated with about one percentage point increase in graduation rates. This positive link appears to hold for all research/doctoral, master’s, and baccalaureate institutions. In addition, there is evidence that a slow increase (or a decrease) in state funding seems to be associated with a fast increase in the tuition rate charged at four-year public institutions, which likely result in a negative impact on graduation rates further. Simply put, there is no such a thing as free lunch when it comes to graduation rates at public higher education institutions.

This working paper presents a review and analysis of the Kalomo Pilot Social Cash Transfer Scheme, initiated in November 2003 by the Ministry of Community Development and Social Services (MCDSS) of the Republic of Zambia, in cooperation with German Technical Assistance (GTZ). The Zambian context of widespread food poverty and vulnerability is introduced, and it is suggested that there are approximately 200,000 households that suffer both critical levels of food poverty and high dependency ratios, and as such are unable to respond to any development opportunities that arise. It is these ‘worst off’ households that are targeted by the Pilot Scheme. Following a discussion of the rationale, objectives, and recent history of the Pilot Scheme, the targeting, approval and payment mechanism is detailed. The paper concludes with initial analysis of the performance and impact of the scheme. It is noted that while the Pilot Scheme has been highly effective in selecting only eligible households, the number of eligible households outstrips the ‘bottom 10%’ ceiling in some communities. The Scheme is highly effective in distributing transfers to beneficiaries with bank accounts living near Kalomo Town, as well as through the decentralised ‘Pay Points’, after initial delays. Both targeted beneficiaries and the local community have expressed that the transfers have improved the well being of the poorest households. Beneficiaries are using the transfers to buy food and other basic needs. Further, some beneficiaries have saved some of the cash (including through a rotating fund) and have invested in seed and small animals.

Over the past 10 years, the advent of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and the increased push for children’s coverage that the new program created have led to marked declines in the number of uninsured children. Nevertheless, a great deal of work remains to be done. The most recent Census data show that, for the first time since 1998, the rate of uninsured children increased, from 10.8 percent to 11.2 percent. One in nine children is uninsured, and more than half of all uninsured children live in two-parent families. Gone are the days when working parents could rely on employer-based health insurance to cover the whole family. Today, low-income parents often do not have access to a health plan at work, or their employer’s plan may be unaffordable. Fortunately, a large proportion of uninsured children are eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP, although better outreach is needed to get them enrolled. This report takes a closer look at uninsured children—who they are and what kinds of services they miss out on as a result of being uninsured.

The nation’s public housing units provide affordable homes to about 1.1 million low-income households, approximately half of which are headed by people who are elderly or have disabilities. The local housing agencies that administer these units are required by federal law to rent them to low-income families at rents the families can afford. Those rents are often inadequate to cover the costs of operating the housing, such as maintenance, security, and utilities. Accordingly, the federal government provides operating subsidies to make up the difference. In recent years, however, the amount of funding Congress has provided for public housing operating subsidies has been inadequate to bridge the gap between rents and operating costs, with the shortfalls increasing with each passing year. Rising utility rates are a major factor behind the growing shortfalls.

With mental health problems experienced by one in six people, the health and well-being of people of working age is of fundamental importance to our future. The Government believes that everyone, including employers, has a role to play in improving the mental health of society. This document outlines a new initiative to support organisations in helping to achieve this goal.

A study of tenants views of the Right to Buy policy has just been published. The research revealed many positive impacts of the policy, making it far easier for tenants to become home-owners, providing a sense of investment in the future, and having a significant effect on sense of self and well-being. However, the depletion of rental stock, particularly larger properties in better areas, was cited as a particular concern. Respondents were unlikely to exercise their right to buy unless the location and the property were ideal.

There is a growing realisation in Uganda that inequality has been rising amongst the population, both during and after the periods of poverty reducing growth of the 1990s, and that a significant proportion of the national population has not benefited from opportunities to ‘escape’ from poverty during this period. Many of these are people in chronic poverty.

Before the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003, it was not clear the extent to which state departments of corrections (DOCs) were addressing sexual violence in systematic ways. In fact, little information existed about what strategies were being put into practice in prison systems across the country. PREA has changed the way DOCs are addressing prison sexual violence (PSV). Mandatory recordkeeping and a push for eliminating such incidents has moved many DOCs to develop specific responses to PSV or to further refine approaches already in place. The purpose of the current project was to provide a national snapshot of DOC initiatives to address PSV, as well as to identify specific practices that seemed to be, in the absence of formal evaluations, particularly promising or innovative in nature.

This report presents findings of research into an association between the outcomes of the In Work Benefit Calculation (IWBC), or ‘better off calculation’ (BOC), received by lone parents during a Lone Parent Work Focused Interview (LPWFI) and their work and benefit outcomes, such as work entry, benefit exit and the speed of these events occurring. The research used both administrative and survey data and explored the outcomes separately for existing and new/repeat lone parent claimants. The examination covers the work and benefit outcomes within the first 12 months after their initial LPWFI, achieved by lone parents that received an IWBC. The experiences reflect a sample selected from the August-October 2001 cohort who had records of attending an LPWFI. Provision of the financial incentives to work is one of the key means of achieving the Government’s target of 70 per cent of lone parents being in work by 2010. The IWBC delivers a key means of communicating these incentives with claimants. Lone parents, especially existing claimants of Income Support (IS), face multiple barriers to work, such as caring responsibilities, lack of skills and/or confidence and ill-health. Some of these barriers could be addressed during an LPWFI and Thomas and Griffiths (2004) found that Personal Advisers (PAs) were most successful in tackling lone parents’ fears of leaving benefits and being worse off in work.

For many years, evidence has existed that high rates of growth might not, in some cases, translate into welfare gains for poor people. One of the first demonstrations of this was the paper by Fishlow (1972) which showed that in Brazil, over the fast-growth decade of the 1960s, inequality had increased and the living standards of the lowest income groups had deteriorated. This evidence was one of the main pressures behind the efforts of the World Bank and its president, Robert McNamara, to engineer Redistribution with Growth (Chenery et al 1974),2 in particular through a wave of pro-poor aid policies which sought, later in the 1970s, to redistribute resources towards poorer countries and in particular towards small-farm agriculture. During the second wave of pro-poor policies, from 1990 onward, the Bank’s earlier scepticism about the distributional potential of growth has been less in evidence. In its most famous essay about the link between the two variables, Dollar and Kraay (2001, 2003) not only argue that, across low-income countries as a whole, there is a one-to-one positive relationship between growth and the welfare of the bottom quintile of the population, but also that attempts to improve this ratio (the ‘poverty elasticity’) by increases in social expenditures might be ineffective,3 which has led many people inside and outside the Bank to see growth as the major highway to poverty reduction, and some if not most attempts to enhance its pro-poor impact as ineffective; we may call this approach the ‘growth is (nearly) enough thesis’. This essay has given rise to a large literature, of which three strands are especially significant.

The goal of the hiring process is to attract and identify the individual who has the best mix of skills and attributes for the job available. Ensuring that all qualified individuals can participate in the process is key to achieving this goal. By examining their hiring procedures and implementing some simple steps, employers can widen their pool of potential talent and ensure that they do not miss out when the best person for the job happens to have a disability.

This research evaluates the net impact of the combination of LPWFI and NDLP on the movements off benefit by eligible lone parents. The chief aim of LPWFI was to assist movement into paid employment, with a subsidiary objective of encouraging participation in NDLP. Participation in LPWFI is mandatory for those eligible, while participation in NDLP is voluntary. Lone parents eligible for an LPWFI in the first year of the LPWFI programme, year April 2001/2002, were examined. The net impact was estimated using propensity score matching methods. A static multiple treatment framework was applied. Only the first programme participation was considered. However, multiple participations introduced by repeated participation in NDLP and review meetings for LPWFI were observed.

This document gives practical best practice advice on how NHS organisations might produce a disability equality scheme that sets out how they will meet their statutory duty to promote disability equality. The duty comes into effect on 4 December 2006.

Are higher taxes and strong social "safety nets" antagonistic to a prosperous market economy? The evidence is now in. . . . Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness, economic equality and international competitiveness.

School shootings are sobering and tragic events that cause much concern about the safety of children. Despite these events, schools remain a very safe place for children to spend their days. In fact, the vast majority of children and youth homicides occur outside school hours and property. To learn how these events may be prevented, CDC is conducting ongoing research to learn more about the nature of school associated violent deaths.

Key Messages from the Youth Justice Improvement Group
The behaviour of most young people, including those living in difficult circumstances, is a credit to them, and to their families and communities. There is a small minority whose behaviour causes serious problems in their schools, in their communities and to other young people. There is no single solution to reducing offending and a wide range of family, community and individual approaches are needed.

WHO’s landmark study documents the horrifying extent of violence against women by their intimate partners. It also clearly shows that violence against women demands a public health response, because the impact of such violence goes far beyond the immediate harm caused, affecting all aspects of women’s future health. This summary outlines the initial results of the study based on evidence collected from over 24 000 women by carefully trained teams of interviewers. It presents the findings from 15 sites in 10 countries representing diverse cultural settings: Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, Japan, Peru, Namibia, Samoa, Serbia and Montenegro, Thailand, and the United Republic of Tanzania. Focusing on the prevalence of violence by intimate partners, and the associations between such violence and women’s physical, mental, sexual and reproductive health, the report also deals with non-partner violence, sexual abuse during childhood and forced first sexual experience.

This paper examines national-level explanations for poverty decline in Bangladesh in micro-level detail, in order to better understand the nature of the causalities at work and why some households have gained, while others have failed to gain, in the processes of change involved. The analysis is based on empirical data on the lives and livelihoods of rural households in two locations: Chandina thana in Comilla district and Modhupur thana in Tangail district. The data is drawn from panel data on 1184 household in 1994 and 2001, and qualitative data collected by the author at various points during the period covered by the study. The paper demonstrates that the distribution of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ is not determined purely by chance; it also reflects differences in endowments and efforts.

The changes made by the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 and the corresponding regulations have increased pressure on states to place TANF recipients in federally countable activities. “Needy states” may qualify for extended counting of job search and job readiness assistance toward the TANF work participation rate. Section 407(c)(2)(A)(i) of the Social Security Act and corresponding regulations at 45 CFR §261.34 limit the period of time for which an individual may be counted as engaged in work based on participation in job search and job readiness assistance for purpose of the participation rate calculation. HHS has just issued a Program Instruction (TANF-ACF-PI-2006-04) describing this provision and how it will be implemented.

Care Matters sets out a radical package of proposals for transforming the lives of children in care. Although outcomes for these children have improved, they have not kept pace with other children. This is unacceptable. We want children in care to receive no less than we would expect for our own children. The Green Paper sets out consultation policies to ensure earlier interventions and support for families where children are on the edge of care. It goes on to include proposals to strengthen the corporate parenting role of local authorities; high quality placements which meet their needs; a first class education; positive life outside school; and support for transition into adulthood. This guide to the Green Paper is aimed at children and young people who are in, or have been, in care. We want to hear your views so that we can make a real improvement to the lives of children and young people in care.

As employers well know, the job interview plays a critical role in the hiring process, allowing them the opportunity to identify the individual who possesses the best mix of knowledge, skills and abilities for the position available. Below is information that may assist employers in ensuring maximum benefit from an interview when the person being interviewed happens to have a disability.

The United States is experiencing a severe shortage of qualified direct-care workers to provide personal care services (PCS), a shortage promising to increase as our country ages. Evidence from a growing number of studies reveals that wages and benefits paid to PCS workers play a fundamental role in determining the quality and quantity of these workers. This AARP Public Policy Institute report by Dorie Seavey and Vera Salter of the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute examines state and local initiatives for improving wages and benefits of direct-care workers delivering Medicaid personal care services. The report provides an in-depth analysis of state and local practices and reviews the pros and cons of seven strategies for enhancing PCS-worker wages and benefits.

Factsheets covering specific topics on health improvement including the Public Service Agreement target areas specifically associated with the achievement of improvement of overall public health, and the reduction of health inequalities.

Many believe the child welfare system must do more to prevent child abuse and neglect; to provide specialized treatment to families struggling with problems of mental health, substance abuse, or domestic violence; to support grandparents and other relatives who have stepped in to raise children when their parents cannot; and to provide adequate numbers of child welfare workers who are trained to deal with the complex needs of families in crisis. At the heart of the debate lie questions about how best to increase the capacity, in each of these areas, to improve outcomes for children and families—and how to hold federal, state, and local governments more accountable for these outcomes. As Congress debates various reform proposals, these fact sheets—one for each state and one for the nation—will provide useful background on the current fiscal structure of the child welfare system and on the ways different financing reform proposals will affect children across the country.

Housing and transportation are the two largest expenses for most households in the 28 metropolitan areas in this study. For households of all income levels, 27 percent of income goes for housing alone and another one-fifth goes to the cost of getting around. Together these items account for almost 48 percent of household income. Working Families with incomes between $20,000 and $50,000 spend a similar percentage of income on housing; however, their transportation costs consume almost 30 percent of their income.

The report takes issue with aspects of the federal government’s regulations for research on human subjects that constitute a threat to academic freedom. The application of the federal regulations to research methodologies that present no serious risk of harm to research subjects has long been of concern to Committee A, which will continue to keep this matter and other troubling features of the regulations on its agenda. Committee A welcomes comments on the report from Association members and other interested parties and organizations.

Underage drinking can have serious consequences. You can protect your children from the risks associated with drinking by maintaining open communication and expressing a clear, consistent message about alcohol. Building a close relationship with your kids will encourage them to come to you for help in making decisions that impact their health and well-being. This guide provides facts and practical advice on how to talk with your children about underage drinking. It helps you create household rules to support your values.

he Health Profile of England provides a collection of national and regional data to provide a yardstick against which people can compare data from their own local health profile. A focus of the profile is the six priority areas identified in Choosing health: Tackling health inequalities; Reducing the number of people who smoke; Reducing obesity and improving diet and nutrition; Improving sexual health; Improving mental health and wellbeing; and Reducing harm and encouraging sensible drinking.

People with disabilities face a particular kind of risk when authorized personal care services (PCS) are not delivered. In some cases, people may not receive the support they need, such as assistance that enables them to go to work or to maintain their independence and self-direction. In ot