MEASURING QUALITY IN SOCIAL CARE SERVICES: THEORY AND PRACTICE

ABSTRACT 1 : Measuring and assessing service quality in the social care sector presents distinct challenges. The ‘experience’ good properties of social care, for instance, and the large influence played by subjective judgements about the quality of personal relationships between carer and user and of process‐related service characteristics make it difficult to develop indicators of service quality, including those of service impact on final outcomes. Using some of the key features of the ‘Production of Welfare’ approach, the paper discusses recent developments in the UK of the theoretical and practical frameworks used for assessing quality in social care and for understanding the final impact of services on the wellbeing of their recipients. Key current and future challenges to the development of such frameworks include difficulties in disentangling the impact of social care services on final outcomes from the often dominating effects of other, non‐service related factors, and the generalization of consumer‐directed care models and of the ‘personalization’ of care services. These challenges are discussed in the context of the different possible applications of quality indicators, including their role as supporting the service commissioning process and their use for assessing the performance of service providers.     

Sport and Measurement of Competition

Summary  Sport is becoming an activity of increasing importance: over time more people participate in sport (active sport consumption), more time is spent watching sport (passive sport consumption). An important part of sport consumption is passive sport consumption where production and consumption are separate: (professional) athletes engage in a contest, and fans pay to watch the contest. An important characteristic of sport that generates this demand is relative competition: the competitiveness of a particular match or league. In this paper, we set out to measure competitive balance in three sports (soccer, tennis, and skating), and assess its development over time. As we separate variation in quality of teams or athletes from randomness of outcome, we can compare relative competition in these three sports. Part of this paper was written when I enjoyed the hospitality of the University of Salford. I thank David Forrest, Ian McHale, and Bertus Talsma for fruitful discussions. Bertus Talsma helped to get the skating data. All calculations and graphs were done using R (R Development Core Team 2008). An Appendix with additional tables and graphs is available on .     

The Asymmetric Effect of Endowments on Vertical Intra‐industrial Trade

(1238) J. Milgram‐Baleix and Ana I. Moro‐Egido This paper investigates the determinants of vertical Spanish intra‐industry trade with developed and developing countries. We empirically test the comparative advantage explanation. To do so, we build physical, human and technological capital stocks. On average, when using OLS techniques, differences in endowments are a limitation for vertical intra‐industry trade. Using quantile regression techniques, we observe that this negative effect decreases in absolute terms as vertical intra‐industry trade flows increase and, in some cases, the impact becomes positive for the upper tails, thus supporting the view of a reduced version of the comparative advantage explanation. Our results provide interesting insights into Spain and emerging countries. A large part of Spanish trade already takes place on an inter‐industry basis or consists of exporting low quality products in exchange for similar products of a higher quality range, in particular with European countries but more surprisingly with emerging countries. Our study shows that high quality exports and horizontal intra‐industry trade are mainly driven by proximities of demand and technological capital while low quality exports share most determinants of inter‐industry trade.     

The effectiveness of Public Employment Service workers in the Netherlands

In this paper, we measure the effectiveness of the Dutch Public Employment Service (PES) workers for various performance indicators. Using unique administrative monthly data from local PES offices during 2004, we exploit the fact that the number of PES workers per job seeker varies substantially between offices and over time. We find additional PES workers to significantly increase outflow rates for short term unemployed (i.e. the first half year of unemployment), whereas no effects are obtained for the outflow rates of long term unemployed. PES workers are also found to reduce the inflow into the schemes and to increase the number of vacancies that are registered by offices. Although the effectiveness of PES workers is limited, we conclude that changes in the number of PES workers per client are cost-effective—that is, the extra costs are compensated for by the resulting reduction in benefit expenses.     

Netherlands company pension funds international portfolio diversification: An empirical analysis 1967 I–1972 II

A model of portfolio behaviour is developed, based on the assumption that the distribution of a portfolio over different countries is determined by the general level of returns and costs of investments in those countries. From the model an iso-capital exports line is derived. With the help of this line it is shown under which circumstances ‘perverse’ capital movements will occur. The model implies that only temporary compensating operations on the domestic money and capital markets may be sufficient to make a domestic monetary policy effective.A partial adjustment version of the model is estimated for Netherlands company pension funds.     

Effects of company visits on Dutch primary school children’s attitudes toward technical professions

Technology-oriented company visits could potentially provide children with a stimulating ‘real-world’ setting to develop more broad and positive images of and attitudes toward technology and technical professions. The present study was the first to explore whether children’s images of and attitudes toward technology, technical competencies and technical professions could be affected by technology-oriented company visits, as they are presently carried out in the Netherlands. A previously validated measurement instrument was used to measure children’s images and attitudes prior to and after the visits and results were compared to similar measurements among children who did not take part in the visits. In addition, based on recent review studies about school visits to science centers, we derived several key theoretical guidelines for organizing effective school visits. Based on these guidelines, structured interviews were carried out with all teachers prior to the company visits. Results indicated that children’s images and attitudes remained mostly unaffected by the company visits, a finding that could be explained by the fact that the level of in-school preparation, follow-up activities and teachers’ level of involvement during the visits was generally low. In addition, observations during the visits showed that the activities at the technical companies were mostly ‘hands-on’ and stereotypical (e.g., working with machines). Based on these findings, we formulate a set of new guidelines for technology-oriented company visits that could improve the desired attitudinal effects.