Child Health and Developmental Problems and Child Maltreatment among AFDC Families

This paper explores the complex interrelationship among the physical health and developmental problems of a child, child abuse and neglect, and poverty. Gaps in agency attention to children\u27s medical needs are identified and recommendations made for reducing these gaps. The analysis is based on interview and agency data for 45 families randomly selected from a group of 365 AFDC recipient families under supervision for child abuse and neglect

Research Data as Aides in Formulating Agency Policy

Excerpt from the full-text article: Much is being written these days about the role of evaluation in the formulation of social policy. While few writers question the need for basing policy on systematic evaluation a good deal of the literature appears to focus on the obstacles in Larrying out as well as applying evaluative research. By contrast, the number of studies which in the eyes of critics measure up to minimum standards of scientific adequacy appears to be exceedingly small. Regardless of the problems inherent in the use of research data for policy formulation, the dearth of good studies constitutes the main reason why social policy is made, by and large, without reference to information secured with the aid of systematic research. The present paper endeavors to show how a set of empirical data, collected at four casework agencies, can serve as aids in choosing among policy alternatives. The size of the sample and problems in design make this study a demonstration in the use of policy-relevant research rather than a substantive contribution to knowledge in agency policy formulation. The data were produced as part of an effort to evaluate the outcome of services to clients. Whereas the agency executives, who encouraged and supported the study, were mainly concerned with the results of services, the researchers in this study were of the opinion that evaluation of outcome extends beyond a determination of whether treatment was or was not helpful to most clients. Questions that loomed large pertained to differences in criteria of outcome, effectiveness of techniques of service, effect of client characteristics on outcome, and others. Evaluation, in this study, was intended to encompass several areas of concern to agency decision-makers

Inferring HIV incidence trends and transmission dynamics with a spatio-temporal HIV epidemic model

Reliable estimation of spatio-temporal trends in population-level HIV incidence is becoming an increasingly critical component of HIV prevention policy-making. However, direct measurement is nearly impossible. Current, widely used models infer incidence from survey and surveillance seroprevalence data, but they require unrealistic assumptions about spatial independence across spatial units. In this study, we present an epidemic model of HIV that explicitly simulates the spatial dynamics of HIV over many small, interacting areal units. By integrating all available population-level data, we are able to infer not only spatio-temporally varying incidence, but also ART initiation rates and patient counts. Our study illustrates the feasibility of applying compartmental models to larger inferential problems than those to which they are typically applied, as well as the value of data fusion approaches to infectious disease modeling.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Epidemics

Evaluating distributional regression strategies for modelling self-reported sexual age-mixing

The age dynamics of sexual partnership formation determine patterns of sexually transmitted disease transmission and have long been a focus of researchers studying human immunodeficiency virus. Data on self-reported sexual partner age distributions are available from a variety of sources. We sought to explore statistical models that accurately predict the distribution of sexual partner ages over age and sex. We identified which probability distributions and outcome specifications best captured variation in partner age and quantified the benefits of modelling these data using distributional regression. We found that distributional regression with a sinh-arcsinh distribution replicated observed partner age distributions most accurately across three geographically diverse data sets. This framework can be extended with well-known hierarchical modelling tools and can help improve estimates of sexual age-mixing dynamics

Seq2Seq Surrogates of Epidemic Models to Facilitate Bayesian Inference

Epidemic models are powerful tools in understanding infectious disease. However, as they increase in size and complexity, they can quickly become computationally intractable. Recent progress in modelling methodology has shown that surrogate models can be used to emulate complex epidemic models with a high-dimensional parameter space. We show that deep sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models can serve as accurate surrogates for complex epidemic models with sequence based model parameters, effectively replicating seasonal and long-term transmission dynamics. Once trained, our surrogate can predict scenarios a several thousand times faster than the original model, making them ideal for policy exploration. We demonstrate that replacing a traditional epidemic model with a learned simulator facilitates robust Bayesian inference