1,721,008 research outputs found
Parental joblessness, financial disadvantage and the wellbeing of parents and children
Full text linkThis paper used Longitudinal Study of Australian Children data to analyse links between parental employment and the wellbeing of families.The study found that jobless families and families with short part-time hours (fewer than 21 hours) were at considerable financial disadvantage compared to families with full-time or long part-time hours of employment.Of the children in the study, 5 per cent were living in a family with short part-time hours, and 11 per cent lived in a jobless family – this figure includes half of the children of single parents. Developmental outcomes for these children were lower than those for children in families working more than 21 hours. Joblessness and short part-time hours contributed to these poor outcomes for children through the effect of financial stress on parents.Authored by Jennifer Baxter, Matthew Gray, Kelly Hand, and Alan Hayes
Headspace evaluation report
No full text
headspace, the National Youth Mental Health Foundation, was launched in 2006 as part of the Australian Government’s commitment to the Youth Mental Health Initiative (YMHI). It was established to promote and facilitate improvements in the mental health, social wellbeing and economic participation of young people aged 12-25 years-old. headspace aims to achieve this by:
• Providing holistic services via Communities of Youth Services (CYSs);
• Increasing community capacity to identify young people with mental ill-health and related problems as early as possible;
• Encouraging help-seeking by young people and their carers;
• Providing evidence-based, quality services delivered by well-trained professionals; and
• Impacting on service reform in terms of service coordination and integration within communities and at an Australian and state/territory government level.
In 2008, the Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC) was contracted by headspace and the University of Melbourne (UoM) to conduct the first independent evaluation of headspace. The evaluation is a longitudinal, mixed methods research project, established to examine the achievements, limitations and future directions of the headspace program. The evaluation draws on qualitative and quantitative data from primary and secondary sources collected over two waves. The main methods used were:
• Policy, procedure and documentary analysis;
• Interviews and surveys with key stakeholders, including CYS staff, local service providers, headspace training participants, staff from the national headspace components, government representatives, carers and young people using CYS services;
• Service coordination study;
• Sustainability instrument;
• Secondary analysis of existing datasets, including the headspace dataset, medicare data, the National Youth and Parent Community Survey (NYPCS) and the National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing (SMHWB);
• Meta-analysis.
Authors: Kristy Muir, Abigail Powell, Roger Patulny, Saul Flaxman, Shannon McDermott, Ioana Oprea, Sandra Gendera, Joaquin Vespignani, Tomasz Sitek David Abello and Ilan Katz
National evaluation (2004-2008) of the Stronger Families and Communities Strategy 2004-2009
No full textThis report covers three of the Stronger Families and Communities Strategy initiatives - Communities for Children (CfC), Invest to Grow and Local Answers. It examines service provision, service coordination, Indigenous families and children in CfC sites, factors that facilitate or hinder service provision and outcomes, and sustainability.Many research participants compared the SFCS 2004–2009 model favourably with other funding models noting that it gave service providers considerable control over the types of services they could provide and the way they could deliver them. Programs benefited greatly from consultations and partnerships with Indigenous organisations and community members, but effective community engagement takes considerable time, especially in rural and remote areas.
Partnerships, better coordinated services, and a focus on early childhood may be long-term outcomes of the SFCS 2004–2009 initiative in some areas. However, without ongoing funding, it is unlikely that SFCS 2004–2009 programs will be sustainable. Short-term interventions can fuel resentment and mistrust. Furthermore, preliminary positive program outcomes may diminish, and potential benefits remain unrealised without sustained funding.
The evaluation was undertaken over four years by a consortium comprising the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, supported by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. This report is written by Kristy Muir, Ilan Katz, Christiane Purcal, Roger Patulny, Saul Flaxman, David Abelló, Natasha Cortis, Cathy Thomson, Ioana Oprea, Sarah Wise, Ben Edwards, Matthew Gray and Alan Hayes
Young carers in receipt of Carer Payment and Carer Allowance 2001 to 2006: characteristics, experiences and post-care outcomes
Full text linkThis paper aims to provide a better understanding of the circumstances of young people (aged under 25 years) who receive transfer payments to support them in providing ‘informal’ care to people with disabilities and the frail aged. A specific motivation of the research was to examine the extent to which young carers are reliant on income support, both while caring and post-care, and their education participation.Author: J. Rob Bray, Social Policy Evaluation, Analysis and Research Centre, Australian National University
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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