The validity and utility of the California Family Risk Assessment under practice conditions in the field: A prospective study

Objective

Analysis of the validity and implementation of a child maltreatment actuarial risk assessment model, the California Family Risk Assessment (CFRA).

Questions addressed

(1) Is there evidence of the validity of the CFRA under field operating conditions? (2) Do actuarial risk assessment results influence child welfare workers’ service delivery decisions? (3) How frequently are CFRA risk scores overridden by child welfare workers? (4) Is there any difference in the predictive validity of CFRA risk assessments and clinical risk assessments by child welfare workers?

Method

The study analyzes 7,685 child abuse/neglect reports originating in 5 California counties followed prospectively for 2 years to identify further substantiated child abuse/neglect. Measures of model calibration and discrimination were used to assess CFRA validity and compare its accuracy with the accuracy of clinical predictions made by child welfare workers. The extent of use of an override feature of the CFRA and child welfare worker reliance on CFRA risk scores for making service decisions were analyzed.

Results

Imperfect but better-than-chance predictive validity was found for the CFRA on a range of measures in a large temporal validation sample (n = 6,543). For 114 cases where both CFRA risk assessments and child welfare worker clinical risk assessments were available, the CFRA exhibited evidence of imperfect but better-than-chance predictive validity, while child welfare worker risk assessments were found to be invalid. Child welfare workers overrode CFRA risk assessments in only 114 (1.5%) of 7,685 cases and provided in-home services in statistically significantly larger proportions of higher- versus lower-risk cases, consistent with heavy reliance on the CFRA.

Conclusions/practice implications

Until research identifies actuarial models exhibiting superior predictive validity when applied in every-day practice, the CFRA is, and will be a valuable tool for assessing risk in order to make in-home service-provision decisions.     

The role of student academic beliefs in perceptions of instructor ideological bias

A common perception exists in the media that university instructors are a liberal elite who use their positions to instill a biased perspective in their students. Exploring student attitudes in the United States and Australia, the present study examined how students’ academic beliefs are related to their inferences of instructor ideological bias and the degree to which they identify as reacting to these inferences in the college classroom. Results of regression analysis using previously validated survey instruments revealed that students’ academic entitlement and grade orientation (GO) predicted perceptions of instructor bias. In addition, students’ GO predicted students’ reactions to such inferred bias. Institutional differences, pedagogical implications, and areas for future research are discussed.     

Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls: a ‘political’ sports club that is not political and ‘anarchist’ sports club that is not actually anarchist

In this paper I offer an activist's own account of a grass-roots club I helped found in 1992 and I remain an active member of today. The Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls are an amateur sports club based in inner-city Bristol. We have not got our own ground and most people would not have heard of us. We play at the very lowest rung of UK mass participation sport – in the Sundays and Saturday leagues, on the muddy pitches and municipal sports grounds where week after week men and women run around, for their own enjoyment without expectation of financial gain of any sort. My aim is to explain why the Cowboys and Cowgirls are an extraordinary club, outlining some of the extraordinary things it has done, some of which reside beyond the imagination of most professional clubs. It is only now, 20 years after we first formed, that we can stand back and admire what we have achieved and appreciate the role we have played in developing a small but growing network of teams that stand at odds with the way society is organized and (to a certain extent) the mediated, poisoned world of professional sport.     

Fictionalized History in the Philippines: Five Narratives of Collective Amnesia

The paper analyzes five historical fictions for children in the Batang Historyador (Young Historian) series which detail five periods in Philippine history. The books discuss the issues of child labor in precolonial Philippines, child labor and the right to education regardless of gender during the Spanish colonial period, child labor during the American Occupation, children as witnesses of history in the Japanese Occupation and Martial Law periods. The narratives reveal (consciously or unconsciously) how distortedly and inaccurately the past is told from the perspective of a colonized mind. The struggles of historians to review and revision history from a pro-Filipino consciousness were totally unheeded. The works attempt to throw light on issues of class, gender and children’s rights but Filipino issues regarding culture, identity, politics and history were obliterated because the framework was tied to a “universal” notion of history.

Modelling relationships between match events and match outcome in elite football

Identifying match events that are related to match outcome is an important task in football match analysis. Here we have used generalised mixed linear modelling to determine relationships of 16 football match events and 1 contextual variable (game location: home/away) with the match outcome. Statistics of 320 close matches (goal difference ≤ 2) of season 2012–2013 in the Spanish First Division Professional Football League were analysed. Relationships were evaluated with magnitude-based inferences and were expressed as extra matches won or lost per 10 close matches for an increase of two within-team or between-team standard deviations (SD) of the match event (representing effects of changes in team values from match to match and of differences between average team values, respectively). There was a moderate positive within-team effect from shots on target (3.4 extra wins per 10 matches; 99% confidence limits ±1.0), and a small positive within-team effect from total shots (1.7 extra wins; ±1.0). Effects of most other match events were related to ball possession, which had a small negative within-team effect (1.2 extra losses; ±1.0) but a small positive between-team effect (1.7 extra wins; ±1.4). Game location showed a small positive within-team effect (1.9 extra wins; ±0.9). In analyses of nine combinations of team and opposition end-of-season rank (classified as high, medium, low), almost all between-team effects were unclear, while within-team effects varied depending on the strength of team and opposition. Some of these findings will be useful to coaches and performance analysts when planning training sessions and match tactics.     

Aspirations,education and inequality in England: insights from the Effective Provision of Pre-school,Primary and Secondary Education Project

Educational and occupational aspirations have become an important reference point in policy debates about educational inequality. Low aspirations are presented as a major barrier to closing educational attainment gaps and increasing levels of social mobility. Our paper contributes to this on-going debate by presenting data on the educational aspirations of students from the Effective Provision of Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education Project in England. We analyse factors that help predict students holding high aspirations. Our findings reveal generally high aspirations across all students but also differences by income group and other background factors. We evaluate the significance of these findings for the existing literature and public policy discussions about the importance of raising educational aspirations. In particular, we question the way in which low aspirations are framed by policy-makers as a major problem in debates around educational inequality.     

Community College and High School Reform: Lessons from Five Case Studies

The research reported in this paper examined a set of innovative high school programs on community college campuses. Specifically, a full-time dual enrollment program and 4 middle college high schools were studied. The authors used in-depth interviews and observational data to investigate the structure, processes, and perceptions of effectiveness of the programs. The study found multiple missions for these programs and identified common features that appear to play an important role in their formation and relative success. Although constituent perceptions of effectiveness were overwhelmingly positive, the programs did not systematically collect and analyze empirical evidence of their effectiveness.