Looking Inside Muslim Minds

Flinders University sociologist Riaz Hassan has spent more than ten years doing a comparative study of Muslims in seven countries, and his findings were published earlier this year in Inside Muslim Minds. His study brings together the results of interviews with more than six thousand Muslims in Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Pakistan and Turkey, all countries in which the majority of the population are Muslims. The data, collected in four countries before, and three countries after, the world-changing events of September 2001, is analysed country by country, showing fascinating patterns of attitudes across these seven countrie

Looking inside the brain

"Fall 2008

Looking Inside The Black Box

Intensive family preservation services (IFPS), designed to stabilize at-risk families and avert out-of-home care, have been the focus of many randomized, experimental studies. The emphasis on gold-standard evaluation of IFPS has resulted in fewer black box studies that describe actual IFPS service patterns and the fidelity with which they adhere to IFPS program theory. Intervention research is important to the advancement of programs designed to protect the safety of children, improve family functioning, as well as prevent out-of-home placement. Employing a retrospective “clinical data-mining” (CDM) methodology, this exploratory study of Families First, an IFPS program, makes use of available information extracted from client records to describe interventions and service patterns provided over a two year period. This study uncovers actual IFPS service patterns, demonstrates IFPS program fidelity, as well as reveals the usefulness of CDM as a social work research methodology. These findings are particularly valuable for program planning and treatment, policy development and evidence-based practice research

The Enlightenment of Administrative Law: Looking Inside the Agency for Legitimacy

This article’s investigation into the “agency for legitimacy” proceeds in five steps: Part I introduces the concept of “administrative constitutionalism,” which encompasses the debate over what should be the role and nature of public administration to ensure its legitimacy. It then lays out the elements of the rational-instrumental and deliberative-constitutive paradigms and explains how they contribute to administrative constitutionalism respectively from the outside-in and inside-out. Part II provides a brief history of administrative constitutionalism, which reveals there have been ongoing tensions between two paradigms—and thus between outside in and inside out accountability—since the 1880s. Part III elaborates on the authors’ argument that the current emphasis on the rational-instrumental model has been administrative constitutionalism unsustainable. Part IV argues that acknowledging and developing the deliberative-constitutive paradigm will strengthen administrative constitutionalism by admitting the existence of agency discretion and by looking for realistic ways to make it accountable. Finally, Part V offers a case study in how the deliberative-constitutive paradigm can contribute to administrative constitutionalism.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

Vesicles: Looking inside the cell.

Advances in imaging techniques have shed new light on the structure of vesicles formed by COPI protein complexes

Looking Inside the Unemployment Spell

As data from multiple waves of HILDA become available, Australian researchers will be able to study the unemployment spell in detail never before possible, hopefully leading to an improved understanding of the nature and impact of unemployment. This paper makes an initial contribution in analysing the experience of unemployed Australians based on a range of variables available in the Wave 1 data, largely with a view to highlighting HILDA’s potential for future research in this area. Aspects of unemployment investigated include the perceived barriers to employment, job search methods, financial circumstances, subjective measures of ‘wellbeing ’ and the role of social support and ‘social network capital ’ in shaping the unemployment experience. The initial findings show that the unemployed are clearly worse off than other Australians on a range of measures, however no pronounced deterioration in their circumstances with time in unemployment is observed