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In Scotland residential units for children remain largely in the hands of local authorities. A reluctance to plan for and use such services as a positive choice results in many children being placed as a last resort. Two research studies gathered data over a six‐month period and considered seven local authorities' admissions to children's units, allowing for in‐depth exploration of the manner in which children are being placed in residential care. The studies revealed a significant number of children aged under 12 being admitted to residential care, many placements of a very short duration, poor evidence of placement planning, substantial numbers of sibling groups being separated and admitted to different residential care settings and many instances of residential placements being used when not the preferred option. The implications of the findings are discussed and possible solutions offered as to how the residential sector can be developed to achieve the wide range of roles it is currently expected to fulfil.

This article reviews the contents of the previous year's editions of the Journal of Children's Services (Volume 2, 2007), as requested by the Journal's editorial board. It draws out some of the main messages for how high‐quality scientific research can help build good childhoods in western developed countries, focusing on: the need for epidemiology to understand how to match services to needs; how research can build evidence of the impact of prevention and intervention services on child well‐being; what the evidence says about how to implement proven programmes successfully; the economic case for proven programmes; the urgency of improving children's material living standards; how to help the most vulnerable children in society; and, lastly, the task of measuring child well‐being.

The aim of this study was to identify those elements of health care which women who have experienced domestic violence consider to represent quality care and explore opportunities for an area health service to improve its service delivery to these women. To do this nine focus groups were conducted with six urban and three rural groups, recruited from Women’s Support Services and Refuges, and 65 women participated. A trained facilitator conducted the focus groups with a representative from each participating organisation. Audiotapes were transcribed then coded using a thematic analysis approach. Analysis of the tapes revealed six opportunities for improvement of health services. Improve services to Aboriginal women; increase access to services; promote available services; improve the health service environment; educate service providers; and provide specialist health services. A major theme to emerge was the importance of a supportive environment where women were supported to make choices for their future.

Unspoken: A Story from the Underground Railroad is a remarkable picture book that opens with a young farm girl discovering an unknown person hiding in her family’s barn. What should she do? It’s not legal or safe to assist a runaway slave in the South during the Civil War. Whatever she does, her action (or inaction) will have consequences that may affect the life of another person in a positive or negative manner. This lesson focuses on the costs and benefits of the choices made by the farm girl. Young readers will use the wonderful illustrations to follow the tale’s linear storyline. Older students will be fascinated by the combination of embedded visual clues and unstated communication that defines the Civil War and Underground Railroad. The author’s endnote reveals the inspiration for the book and invites readers to write their own story.

The Latin American region experienced an electoral shift to the political left during the 2000s but this leftist shift did not radically alter the political economy of the region. Following Jessop’s (2008) strategic-relational approach to theorizing about the state, this paper focuses on the perspective that the structure of the state is both an outcome of prior social struggles and a structuring mechanism for the social actors that attempt to enact political and economic reforms.

After demonstrating what this has historically meant for the types of state that have existed in Latin America during the past century by reviewing some of the literature on the corporatist and bureaucratic-authoritarian states and clientelism, this paper argues that the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s constituted a new type of state – the Latin American neoliberal state. This analysis is then focused on the literature that seeks to describe the new lefts in the region, while continuing to focus on the role of the neoliberal state in structuring these new lefts’ terrain of struggle.

Understanding the new lefts in Latin America and the types of reforms that they are capable of making requires that we better understand this new type of state. Due to the structural limitations imposed by the neoliberal state, the lefts are not able to radically alter the region’s political economy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine tourist behavior regarding changes in privacy issues and the advent of mobile technology, based on theoretical foundations and empirical testing.

A conceptual framework was developed based on a “three-pronged approach” to cross-validate results from both qualitative (literature reviews and expert interviews) and quantitative (field survey) approaches. Structural equation modeling was used to test the conceptual framework and hypotheses.

According to the findings, tourists perceived advertising via mobile technology as an informative source. New findings emerged apart from the literature in which advertising value was found to drive attitude, perceived behavioral control and subjective norms. Moreover, tourists’ intention to give permission via mobile technology was driven by advertising value via attitude and subjective norms.

This study is limited to Thailand tourism context. Further, conceptual framework generalization should be taken into account as future research in other considerable context.

The results provide useful information for both government and tourism-related businesses in planning effective marketing communications strategies.

The conceptual framework in this study was developed based on theoretical foundations, along with both quantitative and qualitative methodologies (that is, using a “three-pronged approach”). This study is among the first in Thailand tourism context that demonstrated an extension of the academic perspective by integrating two important theoretical foundations.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selective review of current research and practice on user feedback in academic libraries. By dividing user feedback studies into four categories: Library as Place, Navigation, Satisfaction, and User Experience, it aims to provide a framework for academic libraries embarking on a process of systematic user feedback.

By reviewing the literature on user feedback activities undertaken by several academic libraries, this paper offers insights into how users experience library services, collections, and space.

User feedback activities, particularly concerning noise and seating, are widespread in academic libraries.

The studies reviewed in this paper may be replicated by other libraries and used as a tool for managerial decision making.

The review is valuable for its analysis of the recent contributions to user feedback practice, as well as its description of the different methodologies employed and changes implemented.

Cross‐cultural studies show that most, but not all, human societies engage in warfare. Some non‐warring societies cluster as peace systems. The existence of peace systems, and non‐warring societies more generally, shows that warfare is not an inevitable feature of human social life. This article considers three peace systems in some detail: Brazil's Upper Xingu River basin tribes, Aboriginal Australians, and the European Union. A primary goal is to explore features that contribute to peace in each of the three non‐warring systems. What do these peace systems suggest about how to prevent war? Provisionally, key elements would seem to be the promotion of interdependence among the units of the peace system, creation of cross‐cutting links among them, the existence of conflict resolution procedures, and belief systems (including attitudes and values) that are anti‐war and pro‐peace.

Did the expansion of democratic institutions play a role in determining central government spending behavior in the 19th and 20th centuries? The link between democracy and increased central government spending is well established for the post-Second World War period, but has never been explored during the first “wave of democracy” and its subsequent reversal, that is 1870–1938. The main contribution of this paper is the compilation of a dataset covering 24 countries over this period to begin to address this question. Utilizing various descriptive techniques, including panel data regressions, we explore correlations between central government spending and the institutional characteristics of regimes. We find that the data are consistent with the hypothesis that democracies have a broader need for legitimization than autocracies as various measures of democracy are associated with higher central government spending. Our results indicate that the extension of franchise had a slight positive impact on central government spending levels, as did a few of the other democracy variables. We also find that early liberal democracies spent less and monarchies more than other regimes; debt increases spending; and participation in the Gold Standard reduced government spending substantially.