Societal participation: examining the impact of a rehabilitation approach for young people with schizophrenia.

This paper is based on research that focuses on the impact of a rehabilitation approach with respect to 99 young people diagnosed with schizophrenia in a Dutch mental health facility. The approach focused on societal participation goals. Nurses and social workers play a key role in such treatment. The research focused on developmental trajectories and showed significant improvement with respect to societal participation levels. Impairment scores remained stable. The results indicate that rehabilitation counselling by nurses and social workers, in addition to medication and psychosocial treatment and integrated in a multidisciplinary team, can make a difference in a patient's societal participation.

Fractional designs: a simulation study of usefulness in the social sciences.

Fractional designs can be extremely useful in social science research, especially when a large number of factors is involved. Reluctance for the use of fractional designs seems to be warranted for two reasons: (1) In the social sciences, the amount of measurement error is often large, which may decrease the power, and (2) higher order interactions are assumed to be nonsignificant, which is difficult to guarantee without sufficient research. This simulation study shows the effects of measurement error and assumption violations under various conditions. It is concluded that fractional designs handle measurement error gracefully and that they are as powerful as a full design when equal degrees of freedom are available. Significant interaction effects can cause serious problems, especially in situations with low or intermediate measurement error, and can lead to erroneous conclusions. Only when estimated confounded effects are clearly not significant, the chance of a wrong decision is reasonably small. Therefore, fractional designs are especially warranted for the exclusion of irrelevant factors. However, we note pitfalls in the use of Version 1.0 of the program Trail Run from SPSS, Inc., to implement the procedures.

Punishments adolescents find justified: an examination of altitudes toward delinquency.

The purpose of this study was to examine adolescents' attitudes toward delinquency, specifically the degree to which they find norm violations acceptable in various circumstances. A total of 1,914 Dutch youths participated: 1,046 reported having committed no crimes in the past year, 578 reported having committed only nonviolent offenses, and 290 reported having committed both violent and nonviolent offenses. It was hypothesized that, in general, delinquents would prescribe less severe punishments for deviant behavior, irrespective of the circumstances. This hypothesis was rejected. It was found, however, that violent delinquents were significantly more tolerant of violent behavior as compared with nondelinquents, with one important exception: when injury was inflicted on someone they knew, they were as little inclined to excuse the perpetrator as were nondelinquents. Violent delinquents discriminated most strongly between friends and strangers as both victims and perpetrators.