School-based parents’ groups - a politics of voice and representation?

In this paper we consider two discussion-based parents’ forums at two secondary schools. We ask whether such forums can be considered as part of the small, local associative mechanisms which theorists claim have the potential to encourage a more vibrant and interactive public conversation concerning state provided welfare services. We conclude that they cannot – at least in any simple way. However, a study of the forums does raise several interesting issues to do with parents’ relationships with schools, the differential resources particular class fractions bring to bear in developing their relations with teachers, and the responses of the schools to parental voices

Class, culture and agency: Researching parental voice

This paper explores the differential possession and deployment of social, cultural and material resources by parents, and the effect of these processes on their willingness and ability to be involved with and intervene in their children’s school life – what we have called parental voice. The data presented here is drawn from a study of parents at two secondary schools, a sub-sample of data from a larger study involving six schools. We consider the social positioning and behaviour of three cohorts of parents, those demonstrating high, low and intermediate levels of intervention with the school. Our conclusions stress both the similarities and differences in parents’ experience of voice. Certainly parental access to and deployment of a number of social resources significantly affected how often, how easily and over what range of issues they approached the school. However, we also describe the overall character of parental voice in these two schools as individual, cautious and insecure

Implications for Research Methods When Conducting Studies With the Users of Online Health Communities

Bournemouth Universit

Can Governments Do It Better? Merger Mania and Hospital Outcomes in the English NHS

The literature on mergers between private hospitals suggests that such mergers often produce little benefit. Despite this, the UK government has pursued an active policy of hospital merger. These mergers are initiated by a regulator, acting on behalf of the public, and justified on the grounds that merger will improve outcomes. We examine whether this promise is met. We exploit the fact that between 1997 and 2006 in England around half the short term general hospitals were involved in a merger, but that politics means that selection for a merger may be random with respect to future performance. We examine the impact of mergers on a large set of outcomes including financial performance, productivity, waiting times and clinical quality and find little evidence that mergers achieved gains other than a reduction in activity. In addition, mergers reduce the scope for competition between hospitals.

Household Characteristics of Higher Education Participants

The aim of this paper is to analyse the characteristics of Irish households that have a member participating in higher education, using surveys of Irish households collected in 1994-95 and 1999-2000. The results do not show a significant effect of income; this is notable, especially alongside the strong result that longer-term factors such as household wealth and cultural capital have a significant effect. This lends support to the argument proposed by Heckman (2000) that family income is only important over the entire educational investment cycle of a child. However, the importance of grant eligibility is a notable result, which suggests that short-term financial constraints cannot be dismissed. A combination of suitably beneficial short-term and long-term factors may be important for encouraging participation in higher education.higher education, human capital, credit constraints

Can governments do it better? Merger mania and hospital outcomes in the English NHS

The literature on mergers between private hospitals suggests that such mergers often produce little benefit. Despite this, the UK government has pursued an active policy of hospital mergers, arguing that such consolidations will bring improvements for patients. We examine whether this promise is met. We exploit the fact that between 1997 and 2006 in England around half the short term general hospitals were involved in a merger, but that politics means that selection for a merger may be random with respect to future performance. We examine the impact of mergers on a large set of outcomes including financial performance, productivity, waiting times and clinical quality and find little evidence that mergers achieved gains other than a reduction in activity. Given that mergers reduce the scope for competition between hospitals the findings suggest that further merger activity may not be the appropriate way of dealing with poorly performing hospitals.Hospital mergers, event study, quality, political influence.

The Theatrical Life of Documents

The notion that documents provide incontrovertible evidence has long been in question. Yet documents, in both their material and digital forms, are still well respected and are used as sources of information with consequences for the creation of meaning in historical accounts, in legal procedures, and on theatre stages. The theatrical life of documents may or may not contain anything real, in the sense of actual, physical, factual, or material. What is the document, what is its province, and what kinds of meanings does the way in which it is staged produce? I will address these questions in relation to three international performances: Double Edge Theatre’s The Grand Parade directed by Stacy Klein (2013), The Year I Was Born (2010), and The Pixelated Revolution (2011)

Death by Market Power. Reform, Competition and Patient Outcomes in the National Health Service

The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from non experimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a pro-competitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact of competition on hospital outcomes. The English government introduced a policy in 2006 to promote competition between hospitals. Patients were given choice of location for hospital care and provided information on the quality and timeliness of care. Prices, previously negotiated between buyer and seller, were set centrally under a DRG type system. Using this policy to implement a difference-in-differences research design we estimate the impact of the introduction of competition on not only clinical outcomes but also productivity and expenditure. Our data set is large, containing information on approximately 68,000 discharges per year per hospital from 160 hospitals. We find that the effect of competition is to save lives without raising costs. Patients discharged from hospitals located in markets where competition was more feasible were less likely to die, had shorter length of stay and were treated at the same cost.competition, hospitals, quality