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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 examines the legal context within which decisions about the end of life are made. It argues that an ethical approach to end-of-life care must be centred on the dying person and that finding ways to ensure that this person’s voice is heard must be core to the development of legal frameworks. In this respect, the law has, to date, been inadequate. It explores the ways decisions about the end of life are made in Ireland and identifies likely changes, including an increased formalisation of dying. Drawing on experiences from the United States and the United Kingdom, it develops arguments regarding the most appropriate decision-making structures within which to consider difficult questions around end-of-life care.

There was general consensus that the advantages of being in senior management were extensive, partly stemming from the perceived purpose of the university and partly from the intellectual calibre of the people working there. Limited resources and the nature of internal and external decision making structures were widely seen as disadvantages. The impact of senior management on work-life balance, on personal well-being (and on the manager-academics teaching and research activities) were generally perceived as acceptable costs. But many of the men were seen as uneasy about their female colleagues’ presence in senior management: seeing them as ‘disruptive’ challenging and even ‘frightening’- their very existence in senior management undermining stereotypical ideas about ‘a woman’s place’. A minority of men valued their female colleagues’ perceptions of them more than their male colleagues ones: reflecting their dis-identification with the male dominated contexts. They are thus also potential allies in transforming its structure and culture.

The key to wise decision-making in disciplines such as conservation, wildlife management, and epidemiology is the ability to predict consequences of management actions on focal systems. Predicted consequences are evaluated relative to programme objectives in order to select the favoured action. Predictions are typically based on mathematical models developed to represent hypotheses about management effects on system dynamics. For populations ranging from large mammals to plant communities to bacterial pathogens, demographic modelling is often the approach favoured for model development. State variables of such models may be population abundance, density, occupancy, or species richness, with corresponding vital rates such as rates of reproduction, survival, local extinction, and local colonisation. A key source of uncertainty that characterises such modelling efforts is the nature of relationships between management actions and vital rates. Adaptive management is a form of structured decision-making developed for decision problems that are recurrent and characterised by such structural uncertainty. One approach to incorporating this uncertainty is to base decisions on multiple models, each of which makes different predictions according to its underlying hypothesis. An information state of model weights carries information about the relative predictive abilities of the models. Monitoring of system state variables provides information about system responses, and comparison of these responses with model-based predictions provides a basis for updating the information state. Decisions emphasise the better-predicting model(s), leading to better decisions as the process proceeds. Adaptive management can thus produce optimal decisions now, while simultaneously reducing uncertainty for even better management in the future.

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.