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The aim of this chapter is to clarify how decision-making processes within the context of child welfare and child protection could be improved by decision-making theories (i.e., Decision-Making Ecology [DME] and decisional conflict model), with specific interest in methods intended to support practitioners based on these theories, in particular methods of structured decision-making and actuarial methods. Existing studies indicate that structured decision-making methods have a limited effect on the decision-making process, as well as on the reliability and validity of the judgments and choices made by professionals in cases of suspected child abuse and neglect. Actuarial methods may be more precise in making valid judgments but may ignore factors relevant to decisions concerning treatment and intervention. The DME framework reveals that other factors—in addition to rationally weighing information and arguing—influence the decision-making process and outcomes. Especially the influence of decision-maker factors seems to be ignored in structured decision-making methods. Although systematic methods and instruments do have some value, several additional options are available that take decision-maker factors more into account. This chapter discusses the potentials of critical thinking, team decision-making, systematic feedback, and shared decision-making.

This chapter summarizes a series of published papers that used data from the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (CIS) to explore the influence of case and organizational characteristics on decisions to place Aboriginal children in out-of-home placements. The premise of the analyses was that these influences were consistent with the framework of the Decision-Making Ecology. In Canada, Aboriginal children are overrepresented at all points of child welfare decision-making: investigation, substantiation, and placement in out-of-home care. Case factors accounting for the overrepresentation of Aboriginal children at all service points in the child welfare system include poverty, poor housing, and substance misuse, and these factors, when coupled with inequitable resources for First Nations children residing on reserves, result in the overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in the Canadian child welfare system. For this study, the authors examine case characteristics and organizational factors in a multilevel context, hypothesizing that children are more likely to be placed out of home in agencies that serve a relatively high proportion of Aboriginal children. According to the statistical models presented, the most important of these factors is whether the provincial government operates the child welfare agency. As with the proportion of Aboriginal children on the caseload, the risk of a child being placed is greater in government-run agencies compared to agencies operated by private funders. Further analysis needs to be conducted to fully understand individual- and organizational-level variables that may influence /decisions regarding placement of Aboriginal children.

Human and nonhuman animals share an adaptive capacity to plan for the future by acquiring and saving important items, such as food to survive long, cold winters. In addition, humans amass material goods well beyond what they appear to need—a tendency that we refer to as “acquisitiveness.” The current chapter frames our view of acquisitiveness as a typical, human phenomenon that exists across individuals to varying degrees, from a “Spartan” desire to avoid excess possessions or clutter, through normal levels of acquisition, up through the excessive acquisition and retention observed in hoarding disorder. Acquisitiveness is adaptive at most levels but shares features in common with the excessive hoarding of clinical populations including hoarding disorder, OCD, frontal lobe syndrome, and eating disorders. Acquisitiveness appears to derive from multiple underlying instincts, including the tendency to hold on to goods that are needed in the future, the desire to display one’s quality to mates and social partners, and the “nesting instinct” to surround oneself with materials that afford a feeling of security. We summarize this framework and our own work on the phenomenon. Acquisitiveness is an important and ubiquitous human behavior that reflects adaptive instincts, which can nevertheless negatively impact personal finances, emotional well-being, and the environment in ways that we need to understand.

This chapter begins by exploring the potential benefits of restorative justice for child victims. It then reviews five restorative justice programs in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. All these programs have included child victims, in some more than in others; they have all been evaluated and therefore provide valuable lessons from their levels of success, and most of them included sexual assaults, family violence and abuse. The chapter discusses the major concerns that emerge in relation to the involvement of child victims in restorative processes, and considers some of the solutions deployed in these case studies. The concluding section uses the Needs/Rights model to demonstrate the challenges to RJ involving child victims and its potential benefits for them.

In this chapter, Robinson discusses the leader as a manifest idea, the relationship of political leadership to political authority, the leader as a deviant, the conceptual imprint of the market society, and the decision as a logical-positivist event. He analyzes the meaning(s) of leadership to identify the perceived character of political authority and political order extant in a particular community. Robinson suggests that political authority is integrated in the dialectic of the social, economic, conceptual, and ideological forces of a society. It is a dynamic, developing aspect of the culture of that society, an historical expression. And political leadership is inseparable from political authority.

This volume has gathered together research from multiple disciplines, integrated into one overall picture of the current state of our justice system. The system of pleas that defendants inhabit means that while plea bargaining is thoroughly entrenched in our present-day notion of justice, the law has not caught up. In this concluding chapter of the book, our goal is twofold. First we highlight two major themes that cut across the chapters. Although there were many possible themes to choose among, we focus on Innocence (with a capital ‘I’) and plea decision-making. Second, we summarize chapter authors’ suggestions for future research—that is, to delineate what the next generation of plea-related scholarship may look like, so that scholars and legal decision-makers alike may continue to move forward.

Consumption is the endpoint of any resource-allocation decision in which individuals acquire something for their own use. This can occur in conserved and ancient forms (e.g., ingesting food, drinks, or drugs of abuse) but also in modern and symbolic forms (e.g., shopping and purchasing products, scanning and appreciating images, and paying for and burning fuel). Humans make hundreds of consumption decisions each day, with important personal consequences for their health and finances as well as collective consequences for others’ welfare and the sanctity of the environment. Growing evidence suggests that decisions to consume across multiple domains rely on overlapping circuits in the mesolimbocortical system, which evolved to motivate animals towards adaptive and pleasing ends including food, mates, and secure shelter. Correlated psychological processes may also contribute to decisions to consume, often encouraging individuals to approach highly salient and immediate rewards, even at a long-term cost to themselves or others. In addition, decisions to consume food and other material goods appear responsive to contextual feelings of security or uncertainty as well as perceived social status. Although from disparate fields, all of the authors in the current volume conduct research on some aspect of consumption, ranging from food hoarding in animals to the neural and psychological bases of pleasure, addiction, shopping, saving, and hoarding in humans. This work emanates from multiple scientific approaches, including evolutionary theory, animal behavior, neuroscience, experimental psychology, and clinical psychopathology. Through this integrative collection, we hope to illuminate a critical and timely convergence

This chapter draws on terror management theory (TMT) to argue that our political thinking and behavior are influenced by an unconscious motive or emotion, termed here as the “death terror.” According to TMT, because of a need to transcend death, people are motivated to engage an anxiety buffering system, which consists of a natural tendency to cling to our cultural worldviews and see ourselves as meaningful contributors to culture. However, cultural worldviews or beliefs about reality are fragile, and may be threatened by competing views. In order to maintain consistency, people are motivated to denigrate rivals who hold different views about reality. A wide range of political processes including voting behavior, peace, conflicts, and wars may be affected by such existential concerns as the death terror. This chapter reviews a number of empirical studies on the effects of the death terror on political decision-making and behavior.

Chapter 3 chronicles the history of sanctuary—the act of giving refuge to fugitives in houses of worship—and its lack of strategic and tactical fit for the immigration context that gave rise to the New Sanctuary Movement. If sanctuary was such a poor fit for early activists’ political goals, why did they choose to organize the network's identity and strategy around it? This chapter shows that thinking of New Sanctuary as a multi-target social movement renders the seemingly irrational decision to use sanctuary into a fitting choice for reaching its religious goals. Because of its potential to cultivate relationships between native-born religious communities and undocumented immigrants, sanctuary was a rational strategy for changing the hearts and minds of religious people, a form of religious conversion. Since sanctuary undermined New Sanctuary's political goals while also furthering its religious aims, this chapter highlights the challenges to strategic decision-making faced by multi-target movements.

This chapter investigates how well the Council’s evolutionary development served in enabling it to satisfy the differing constituencies of support that form part of the landscape of film provision. Drawing on original interviews with senior figures from the UKFC and with key industry stakeholders, it assesses the challenges the organisation faced in handling a multiplicity of interest groups, concerns and expectations and how effectively the Council addressed competing economic, industrial and cultural objectives. This chapter also considers how the Council negotiated the various tensions between regional, national, European and international interests in an increasingly transnational film industry.

In this chapter, the author argues that the ill-grounded explanations agents sincerely offer for their choices have the potential for epistemic innocence. Such explanations are not based on evidence about the causes of the agents’ behaviour and typically turn out to be inaccurate. That is because agents tend to underestimate the role of priming effects, implicit biases, and basic emotional reactions in their decision making. However, offering explanations for their choices, even when the explanations are ill-grounded, enables them to share information about their choices with peers, facilitating peer feedback and self-reflection. Moreover, by providing plausible explanations for their behaviour—rather than acknowledging the influence of factors that cannot be easily controlled—agents preserve a sense of themselves as competent and largely coherent decision makers, which can improve their decision making.

Ireland is an island in north-western Europe. It is divided into the state called Ireland, often referred to as the Republic of Ireland, which comprises the greater part of the island of Ireland, and Northern Ireland. This chapter relates to the law of Ireland and references to the ‘State’ refer to the Republic of Ireland.

This chapter has two aims. The first is to provide a brief historical introduction to mental capacity law and adult guardianship law. The second is to compare and contrast how these laws operate in states within the common law tradition, which originated in England, with their operation in civil law countries, where the laws were derived from Roman law.