A public/private partnership in offering relationship education to the Norwegian population

This article is an overview of the relationship education field in Norway. We explain the roles of the national authorities and private organizations in education, and analyze achievements and challenges in the field. Involvement and economic support from the national authorities have made relationship education available to large groups of the population, though the characteristics of those who choose to attend are largely unknown. To ensure recruitment of those most in need of education, new strategies based on systematic information on barriers among different groups of the population must be developed. A variety of relationship education programs are offered by public and private organizations, with the U.S.-developed Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP) being the most widespread. We present preliminary data of an effectiveness evaluation of PREP workshops in Norway. In general, participants evaluate the workshops positively. It is important to tailor relationship education to fit the various customs, beliefs, and challenges of couples attending programs.     

Policy evaluation: Design and utilization

In the 1960s when evaluation research came into fashion in the US, the assumption was that it would be used by public policymakers in an instrumental way for purposes of problem solving. This entailed a linear, knowledge-driven model for research utilization in which a direct relationship exists between knowing and doing (i.e., knowledge leads to action). The model combined the “rational” paradigm of organizational theory and the “scientific” paradigm of positivist philosophy of science into a consistent model of how evaluation research should be conducted and would be utilized. Both with respect to its normative and its empirical dimensions, original evaluation research model failed. Today evaluation research and its utilization are seen in quite a different perspective. However, though a parallel paradigm revolution or shift has taken place both with respect to the organization theory of evaluation research and its methodological basis, no new comprehensive and coherent evaluation research model has emerged to replace the original linear one. Erik Albaek is an associate professor of public administration at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. One of his main research areas is the utilization of social science in public policymaking.     

医学专科能力评审的争议及规避策略

医院的医学重点专科建设是医院发展的重要战略,如何认定某医院某专科为地方的重点专科,是一个系统工程。地方卫生行政主管部门如何把握评审认定标准,展示政府执政的公正公平,是十分敏感的问题,它蕴藏着很大的风险。在重点专科的评定过程中如何体现政府形象,规避行政风险,需要认真探讨。结合某市重点专科检查的实际情况进行分析,就此种争议及规避策略提出建议。     

Community Coalition Building—Contemporary Practice and Research: Introduction

Over the last 20 years, coalition building has become a prominent intervention employed in communities across America. Coalitions provide community psychologists and those in related fields with a chance to work with whole communities and to better understand how to create community change. As we reflect on the past two decades of community coalition building, there are many questions to be answered about this phenomenon. Why has there been such an upsurge in community coalition building activity? What is the impact of this activity? What have we as students of community learned? What are the questions that we need to be asking to improve the effectiveness of coalition building efforts and their evaluation? This set of articles will review the state of the art of community coalition building in both practice and research. The structure of the articles reflects a collaborative process, with multiple contributors from different disciplines, using a variety of formats. Because this is an evolving phenomenon where the questions asked are as important as the lessons learned, many of the major sections include dialogues with community experts from across the country and from multiple fields, including community psychology, public health, political science, public administration, and grassroots organizing.     

Community coalition building--contemporary practice and research: introduction.

Over the last 20 years, coalition building has become a prominent intervention employed in communities across America. Coalitions provide community psychologists and those in related fields with a chance to work with whole communities and to better understand how to create community change. As we reflect on the past two decades of community coalition building, there are many questions to be answered about this phenomenon. Why has there been such an upsurge in community coalition building activity? What is the impact of this activity? What have we as students of community learned? What are the questions that we need to be asking to improve the effectiveness of coalition building efforts and their evaluation? This set of articles will review the state of the art of community coalition building in both practice and research. The structure of the articles reflects a collaborative process, with multiple contributors from different disciplines, using a variety of formats. Because this is an evolving phenomenon where the questions asked are as important as the lessons learned, many of the major sections include dialogues with community experts from across the country and from multiple fields, including community psychology, public health, political science, public administration, and grassroots organizing.     

The evaluation of european expenditure: The current state of play

Moving evaluation to the “best practice frontier” is a laborious task at any level of government. At the level of the European Union, better budget performance is a shared responsibility of the main European institutions as well as of the individual national and regional governments, while specific budgetary factors complicate matters further. To increase the transparency of decision making at the Union level and of the value for money of the approximately 80 billion ecus spent annually through the European budget, the Coucil, European parliament and the Commission have stepped up evaluation efforts over the last few years. Marc Vanheukelen, M.Sc. in economics, is Head of Sector “Budget Evaluation” in the Directorate General of Budgets in the European Commission. Aside from evaluation methodology, his research interests include the economics of integration and public finance federalism. This article reflects the views of the author and not necessarily those of the European Commission.     

公共行政的道德之维

公共行政道德,是现代公共行政的理论研究与实务运行的一个重要维度。但长期以来,公共行政领域存在着严重的忽视价值取向的“技术主义”倾向;公共行政道德以其公共性、服务性和责任性的基本特征,区别于其他领域或类型的道德性质;公共行政道德建设要正确认识和处理技术与价值、公正与效率、制度与品性、权力与权利的关系,坚持价值优先、公正优先、制度优先和权利优先的原则。     

School psychology in the Federal Republic of Germany

Reviews of the origins and evaluation of the present status of school psychology in the Federal Republic of Germany reveals the current system to be rooted in the strict separation of school tracks. However, the system has been evolving into a more flexible organizational structure in recent years. In addition to roles and functions, the administration, training, relationships with other professions, and future trends in school psychology are discussed.     

Pitfalls in the psychoeducational assessment of adolescents with learning and school adjustment problems

Over the past decade there has been a growing interest on the part of educators, medical specialists, mental health personnel, and the lay public in the diagnosis, evaluation, and remediation of specific learning disabilities in the school-age child. This paper attempts to show through case illustrations of five high school-age adolescents how parents can seek from clinical evaluators a diagnostic impression of primary learning disability for their nonlearning disabled children; how this otherwise legitimate diagnostic category can be inappropriately used in the service of denying the salient individual, emotional, and family system factors at work in the school-related difficulties; and how the label of learning disability can work as a formidable resistance on the part of the family when, following comprehensive, in-depth assessment, professional recommendations focus less on specific educational remediation and more on the need for individual or family psychotherapy. Suggestions are made for dealing with this clinical issue.     

Out of Sight,out of Mind? Controversy over Offshore Wind Energy in Norway's News Media

News media are important reference points for public sense-making of emerging technology. In Norway, offshore wind can be considered an emerging technology. Siting renewable energy technology offshore is commonly regarded as a solution to onshore implementation problems, as development happens ‘out of sight, out of mind’ of the public. However, does moving renewable energy technology offshore really prevent controversy? How is emerging offshore wind technology made comprehensible in Norwegian news media? The dominance of supporting actors and arguments in the Norwegian news media discourse on offshore wind energy technology and the high prevalence of the argument that offshore wind should be non-controversial due to its placement ‘out of sight’ suggest that the expectation that such technology will prevent controversy has been partly met. Still, the emerging technology has been accompanied by an evolving controversy, though with a different extent and focus than the controversy over onshore wind. Both supporting and opposing actors have made offshore wind energy technology comprehensible by employing economic, environmental and moral arguments. Economics has appeared as a privileged frame of interpretation used by both supporters and opponents. Environmental arguments have shifted their focus to biodiversity and global aspects such as sustainability and climate change, and lost their dominance relative to their role in onshore controversies.     

A Review of: “Learning in Places: The Informal Education Reader”

ABSTRACT

Fluctuations in visitor numbers over the past 50 years at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Museum of Natural History and Archaeology in Trondheim, Norway, indicate an overall decline in visitation since the 1990s but with some positive figures in the last years. Separate data available from 1977 to 2006 show a strong correlation between the numbers of school students and the general public. The general public paid relatively few visits in December, but visitation peaked in summer and autumn. Sundays and midweek were the busiest days. This article discusses factors that may influence the short-term, monthly, and daily distribution of visitors as well as the more long-term variations. These include the development of museums in Norway and how the historical, cultural, and nationalistic background may influence the topics and information in exhibitions, and hence the public interest in what the museum has to offer.     

Reporting Ethics Committee Approval in Public Administration Research

While public administration research is thriving because of increased attention to social scientific rigor, lingering problems of methods and ethics remain. This article investigates the reporting of ethics approval within public administration publications. Beginning with an overview of ethics requirements regarding research with human participants, I turn to an examination of human participants protections for public administration research. Next, I present the findings of my analysis of articles published in the top five public administration journals over the period from 2000 to 2012, noting the incidences of ethics approval reporting as well as funding reporting. In explicating the importance of ethics reporting for public administration research, as it relates to replication, reputation, and vulnerable populations, I conclude with recommendations for increasing ethics approval reporting in public administration research.     

Evaluating the Source of the Risks Associated with Natural Events

Within philosophy there has been little discussion of the risks associated with natural events such as earthquakes. The first objective of this paper is to demonstrate why such risks should be the subject of more sustained philosophical interest. We argue that we cannot simply apply to risks associated with natural events those insights and frameworks for moral evaluation developed in the literature considering ordinary risks, technological risks and the risks posed by anthropogenic climate change. The second objective of this paper is to identify and develop a framework for the moral evaluation of the source of the risks associated with natural events, or the actions which sustain and impact such risks. Our discussion concentrates on the ways the construction and modification of built and natural environments can alter the probability of occurrence of natural events and the character and magnitude of the impact that such events have. We then argue for the need to develop a standard of reasonable care for decisions about the built and modified natural environment, which accounts for technical and resource constraints, as well as the place of natural hazard mitigation in public policy.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Commentary</Emphasis>: Implementing Empirically Supported Treatments in the Schools: What Are We Asking?

The research reported in this special issue addresses important areas for the continued development of empirically supported school-based treatments. Although advances in the development and evaluation of treatment services have occurred, there is little public demand for the widespread dissemination of these treatments. In this commentary, the authors draw data from historical examples, related research, and personal experience to demonstrate the need to create a societal mandate for change. They present specific implications for future areas of research and the type of public education and marketing campaign that will be needed to create a demand for empirically supported school-based treatments.     

Dutch experience in the utilization of evaluation research: The procedure of reconsideration

This article examines evidence for the influence of program evaluation results on political decisionmaking. Dutch practice at central government level is illustrated by an interesting and well documented case: the Reconsideration (Review) Procedure, an annual evaluation process attuned to the budget cycle. Possible implications for the optimalization of the use of evaluatory research are discussed. Evaluators have emerged from the 20-year embrace (by the real world) more sophisticated about the complexity of their task and more realistic about the political realities that exist in social programs and about how social science information is used in social problem solving. Marie-Louise Bemelmans-Videc was, until recently, associate professor of public administration at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. She is currently engaged in (meta-) evaluatory research and advisory work at the Dutch supreme audit institution: the General Accounting Chamber. This article in no way reflects the views of the GAC. He publishing activities cover books and articles related to the science of public administration, the role of professionals in policy-design, and the comparative study of practice and utilization of policy evaluation with European and American governments.     

The impact of stigma on behavioral health care utilization among active duty service members

This study assessed the relationship between the stigma of seeking psychological help and use of outpatient behavioral health services over a 2-year period among active duty military service members initially referred for neuropsychological evaluation secondary to their histories of mild traumatic brain injury. Although research has examined how stigma predicts proxies for help-seeking (i.e., attitudes towards/intentions to use services), very little research has looked at actual behavior, and studies that do have largely focused on previous use. In this study, we examined the relationship between participants’ stigma and subsequent behavioral health use. Our results indicated that whereas greater self-stigma (i.e., negative self-judgments for seeking psychological help) was associated with attending fewer behavioral health care sessions, public stigma (i.e., perceptions of public attitudes towards people who seek psychological help) was not associated with service use. These findings support the need for addressing the self-stigma associated with seeking behavioral health care.     

Personal Debt,Cognitive Delinquency and Techniques of Governmentality: Neoliberal Constructions of Financial Inadequacy in the UK

In the UK in recent years, there has been a considerable and sustained increase in both levels of personal debt and over‐indebtedness. This commentary argues that recent UK policy formulation on personal debt management has sidelined problematic macroscopic political and economic changes by locating personal debt as a problem of individual financial incompetence. Through specific institutions, tools, techniques and practices, certain configurations of people in debt have been rendered knowable and changeable. In doing so, public policies that have brought about a greater need for a greater number of people to rely on personal debt remain largely beyond public view and have instead been reconstituted as problems of access to financial capability training. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

医疗保障制度改革过程中的价值取向问题及其影响

随着社会主义市场经济体制的建立,我国传统的劳保医疗制度和公费医疗制度已越来越不适应社会发展的要求,呈现出诸多弊端,亟待改革。作为一项公共政策,医疗保障制度在改革与完善的过程中应根据科学行政的要求对政策的价值取向进行深入分析,以便顺利实施改革的各项方案。分析医疗保障制度改革中所涉及的各方面的价值观及其对改革的影响,希望唤起政策制定者对不同群体利益的关注,从而保证政策体系的稳定。     

Intentions, All-Out Evaluations and Weakness of the Will

The problem of weakness of the will is often thought to arise because ofan assumption that freely, deliberately and intentionally doing something must correspondto the agent's positive evaluation of doing that thing. In contemporary philosophy, a verycommon response to the problem of weakness has been to adopt the view that free, deliberateaction does not need to correspond to any positive evaluation at all. Much of thesupport for this view has come from the difficulties the denial of it has been thought togive rise to, both with respect to giving an account of weakness, as well as explaining thefuture-directed nature of intentions. In this paper I argue that most of these difficulties onlyarise for one particular version of the view that free, deliberate action must correspond toa positive evaluation, a version associated with Donald Davidson's account of weakness.However, another version of this view is possible, and I argue that it escapes the standardobjections to the Davidsonian account.     

National evaluation of US newborn screening system components

Newborn screening has existed as a state-based public health service since the early 1960s. Every state and most territorial jurisdictions have comprehensive newborn screening programs in place, but in the United States a national newborn screening policy does not exist. This results in different administrative infrastructures, screening requirements, laboratory and follow-up services, medical management approaches, and related activities across the country. Federal initiatives and support have contributed to limited evaluations of various aspects of individual newborn screening programs at the national level, but funding is an issue. The national evaluation strategies have taken various forms, all with the intent of improving the screening system through review of actions taken and suggestions for future improvements. While participation in the national evaluation effort for newborn screening laboratory practices includes all US programs, and this has aided in improving quality and harmonizing protocols, other national evaluation activities have been only moderately successful. National data reporting of quality indicators for various program elements must be comprehensive and timely, and the elements must be universally accepted in order to meet the evaluation and improvement needs of the national newborn screening system. A comprehensive real time national evaluation activity will likely require additional resources and enforcement incentives. Limited federal actions through grant incentives and selected reporting requirements provide a possible means of stimulating programs to participate in national harmonization efforts.