Decentralisatie: maatwerk of uniformiteit? Het Wmo-beleid van Nederlandse gemeenten

A main motive for policy decentralization is the belief that municipalities are better able to customize public policy to local circumstances, and to realize made-to-measure service provision. In this respect, the introduction of the Social Support Act (Wmo) is an interesting example. With the lack of ‘vertical’ accountability obligations to the national government, the Wmo is governmentally innovative. Whether the decentralization results in customized forms of social support is a fascinating one because a detailed reading of the Wmo and its implementation displays possible incentives as well as barriers to made-to-measure service provision. The empirical exploration in this article uses data from the 2007-2009 evaluation of the Wmo conducted by the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP). The evaluation shows that municipalities involve diverse stakeholders in formulating Wmo policy, and that their involvement seems to lead to customized service provision. At the same time, municipalities follow nationwide models, and information provided by the central government seems to have a major impact on local social care policy. The article concludes with an outlook on future directions in local debates on social care and the recommendation to give time for major decentralization trajectories such as the Wmo

Reproducibility in the absence of selective reporting : An illustration from large-scale brain asymmetry research

Altres ajuts: Max Planck Society (Germany).The problem of poor reproducibility of scientific findings has received much attention over recent years, in a variety of fields including psychology and neuroscience. The problem has been partly attributed to publication bias and unwanted practices such as p-hacking. Low statistical power in individual studies is also understood to be an important factor. In a recent multisite collaborative study, we mapped brain anatomical left-right asymmetries for regional measures of surface area and cortical thickness, in 99 MRI datasets from around the world, for a total of over 17,000 participants. In the present study, we revisited these hemispheric effects from the perspective of reproducibility. Within each dataset, we considered that an effect had been reproduced when it matched the meta-analytic effect from the 98 other datasets, in terms of effect direction and significance threshold. In this sense, the results within each dataset were viewed as coming from separate studies in an "ideal publishing environment," that is, free from selective reporting and p hacking. We found an average reproducibility rate of 63.2% (SD = 22.9%, min = 22.2%, max = 97.0%). As expected, reproducibility was higher for larger effects and in larger datasets. Reproducibility was not obviously related to the age of participants, scanner field strength, FreeSurfer software version, cortical regional measurement reliability, or regional size. These findings constitute an empirical illustration of reproducibility in the absence of publication bias or p hacking, when assessing realistic biological effects in heterogeneous neuroscience data, and given typically-used sample sizes

Weg uit het verleden: Een institutionele analyse van de gemeentelijke uitwerking van de Wet maatschappelijke ondersteuning (Wmo)

Trommel, W.A. [Promotor]Huberts, L.W.J.C. [Promotor

Aan de slag met de Wmo in de gemeente Tilburg; een schets ten behoeve van de landelijke evaluatie van de Wmo 2007-2009

Het ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport (vws) heeft het Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (scp) gevraagd evaluatieonderzoek naar de Wmo uit te voeren. Een groot deel van het onderzoek heeft plaatsgevonden via vragenlijstonderzoek bij gemeenten, bij uitvoerende organisaties en bij (organisaties van) burgers en cliënten. Om goed zicht te krijgen op de gemeentelijke Wmo-praktijk, heeft het scp daarnaast de ontwikkelingen rond het Wmo-beleid in negen gemeenten wat intensiever gevolgd. De gemeente Tilburg behoort tot deze negen ‘verkenningsgemeenten’. Met dit rapport doet het scp verslag van het onderzoek in de gemeente Tilburg