Designing the past: the National Trust as a social-material agency

The National Trust was founded in 1895 for ‘the preservation of places of historic interest or natural beauty’. While the distinction between the cultural and the natural seemed obvious at that time and members and visitors were not even implicated actors, we argue that the National Trust may be better understood as a co-constructed network effect of the social and material, which in turn affords social-material agency. There are currently 3.5 million members of the National Trust and 50 million visitors every year to National Trust properties, which include the largest collection of gardens in the world and over 300 historic houses and open-air properties. While the notion of design itself may seem to be an exemplar of the humanist love of agency, we argue (following Latour) that traditional notions of agency, which were asymmetrically distributed to the human actors, take insufficient cognisance of evident occasions of ‘material agency’ (Pickering, 1995) and the site of conservation is one site whereby the agency produced by social-material assemblages seems interesting and revealing. Whereas the social-material practices of design may seem in some tension with those of conservation, we argue in this paper that a close analysis of a particular site of conservation shows a manifold of ‘designing’ actors. Whatever the National Trust conserves could be considered as an example of particular and situated designs condensed from the interactions of humankind and nature. Similarly the visitor experience is also designed. While conservation can imply a certain social-material agency, it is much less well understood how conservation co-produces agency, and how these network effects serve the purposes of conservation by the Trust, visitors and other actors through the agency of the social and material. This paper will reveal some of the social-material practices which afford a visit to a property and what such visits afford the social-material practices of the National Trust

Child Mental Health and Educational Attainment: Multiple Observers and the Measurement Error Problem

We examine the effect of survey measurement error on the empirical relationship between child mental health and personal and family characteristics, and between child mental health and educational progress. Our contribution is to use unique UK survey data that contains (potentially biased) assessments of each child's mental state from three observers (parent, teacher and child), together with expert (quasi-) diagnoses, using an assumption of optimal diagnostic behaviour to adjust for reporting bias. We use three alternative restrictions to identify the effect of mental disorders on educational progress. Maternal education and mental health, family income, and major adverse life events, are all significant in explaining child mental health, and child mental health is found to have a large influence on educational progress. Our preferred estimate is that a 1-standard deviation reduction in ‘true' latent child mental health leads to a 2-5 months loss in educational progress. We also and a strong tendency for observers to understate the problems of older children and adolescents compared to expert diagnosis.Child mental health; Education; Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire; Measurement error

Child mental health and educational attainment: multiple observers and the measurement error problem

We examine the effect of survey measurement error on the empirical relationship between child mental health and personal and family characteristics, and between child mental health and educational progress. Our contribution is to use unique UK survey data that contains (potentially biased) assessments of each child's mental state from three observers (parent, teacher and child), together with expert (quasi-) diagnoses, using an assumption of optimal diagnostic behaviour to adjust for reporting bias. We use three alternative restrictions to identify the effect of mental disorders on educational progress. Maternal education and mental health, family income, and major adverse life events, are all significant in explaining child mental health, and child mental health is found to have a large influence on educational progress. Our preferred estimate is that a 1-standard deviation reduction in 'true' latent child mental health leads to a 2-5 months loss in educational progress. We also find a strong tendency for observers to understate the problems of older children and adolescents compared to expert diagnosis.

STATED PREFERENCES AND LENGTH OF RESIDENCY IN RURAL COMMUNITIES: ARE DEVELOPMENT AND CONSERVATION VALUES HETEROGENEOUS?

Newer residents of rural, urban-fringe communities are often assumed to have preferences for the development and conservation of rural lands that differ from those of longer-term residents. The existing literature offers little to verify or quantify presumed preference shifts. This paper provides a systematic, quantitative examination of whether stated preferences for development and conservation tradeoffs differ according to length of residency in a rural community, and explores implications of these findings for assumptions regarding development and conservation preferences. Results are based on stated preferences estimated from a multi-attribute contingent choice survey of Rhode Island rural residents. Heterogeneity-according to length of town residency-is incorporated using Lagrangian Interpolation Polynomials. This approach models the influence of policy attributes as a polynomial function of residence time, thereby allowing estimated coefficient values to vary as a continuous function of residence duration.Community/Rural/Urban Development, Land Economics/Use,

Fixation Region Overlap: A quantitative method for the analysis of fixational eye movement patterns

This article presents a new method for the quantitative analyses of fixation patterns in eye tracking data. The Fixation Region Overlap Analysis (FROA) uses thresholded spatial distributions of fixation frequency or duration to determine regions-of-interest (ROIs). The locations of these ROIs are contrasted with fixation regions of other empirically-derived, or modelled, data patterns by comparing region pixel overlap. A Monte Carlo procedure is used to assess the statistical significance of fixation region overlap based on 95% confi-dence intervals (C.I.) of the distribution of random overlap for each set of thresholded ROIs. The value of the FROA method is demonstrated by applying it to data acquired in an object recognition task to determine which of two potential models best account for the observed fixation patterns

THE INFLUENCE OF SPATIAL LAND USE PATTERNS ON RURAL AMENITY VALUES AND WILLINGNESS TO PAY FOR GROWTH MANAGEMENT: EVIDENCE FROM A CONTINGENT CHOICE SURVEY

This paper reports on a contingent choice study in which residents of a rural Rhode Island community were asked to express their preferences for packages of growth management outcomes, where surveys presented both spatial and non-spatial attributes of growth management outcomes. Survey results provide insight on the extent to which estimated willingness to pay (WTP) for marginal changes in specific landscape features or land uses may be influenced by spatial considerations. Results also characterize the potential impact of spatial context on public preferences and WTP for coordinated packages of growth management outcomes. Keywords: Land Use, Spatial, Contingent Choice, Growth Management, Economics, ValuationLand Use, Spatial, Contingent Choice, Growth Management, Economics, Valuation, Land Economics/Use,