Yvonne Parry

Eileen Willis

Providing timely and appropriate primary health care after-hours is a major policy issue confronting many Western governments. Increasingly, consumers are seeking care from emergency departments, for health problems that would be better serviced by a primary care professional. Mindful of this issue both State and Federal government in Australia have established and funded General Practice Super Clinics to provide after-hours care in low socioeconomic areas for vulnerable populations. A key policy requirement of funding is the provision of after-hours care. This paper takes a case study of parents seeking afterhours, non-emergency care for their sick child. This study illustrates the way in which GP Super Clinics provide an appropriate response to this issue, but the analysis questions whether or not this can be achieved under the current arrangements.

Corey Bunje Bower

Many studies examine the nature of teacher retention in schools, but any effect of teacher retention on the performance of schools receives less focus. While teacher attrition may not pose a large problem in many schools within the United States, turnover in high-poverty urban schools is about twice the national average. Using school-level data from New York City, I find a positive relationship between retention rates and student achievement in high-poverty middle schools, but the nature of this relationship is up for debate: does low turnover reflect high performance, or does low turnover raise schools’ performance (or both)?

Michael J. Leitner

Yair Galily

Pini Shimon

Utilizing sports and other recreational activities to foster peaceful relations and coexistence is an idea that has gained popularity in recent years, particularly in Israel. Pretest questionnaires were administered in Arabic to Israeli Arab and Palestinian youth and in Hebrew to Jewish Israeli youth participating in Peres Center for Peace sports programs in the fall of 2011. In June 2012, posttest questionnaires were administered in Arabic to Israeli Arab and Palestinian youth and in Hebrew to Jewish Israeli youth who participated in Peres Center sports programs during the year. Pretest and posttest questionnaires results were compared. Many positive changes in attitudes occurred during the year among the Israeli Arab and Palestinian youth, as well as some positive changes in attitudes among the Jewish Israeli youth. There were positive changes in attitudes found in all of the items on the questionnaire. These results give strong support to the stated goal of the Peres Center sports programs that bringing people together to play sports can promote peaceful relations and coexistence.

Nguon Sokcheng

In view of the problems facing education in developing countries, educational researchers have explored policy options for financing education in those countries. One of the policy options is to get parents and community members involved in funding and managing their own schools, which is presumed to make significant contribution to improving children’s schooling. For the past decade, researchers have documented the effects of community involvement on education access and quality in developing countries, but no research has explored the mechanisms that account for this contribution. Drawing upon the data from questionnaire surveys with a total of 573 school support committee members, school principals, and teachers in 65 primary schools, this paper examines the relative effect of school support committee involvement on educational inputs in Cambodian primary schools. Ordinary least squares multiple regression analysis suggests that school support committees’ efforts in funding and managing public schooling contribute to increasing the availability of educational inputs. Broader policy implications of the findings are discussed.

UI Research Center

1ST Untested Ideas International Research Conference
June 28 – 30, 2013
Niagara Falls, USA

UI Research Center

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With the goal of advancing research in the social sciences, Untested Ideas (UI) Research Center provides the researchers and scholars worldwide with resources, grants, and academic exchange platforms and channels through research interest groups, memberships, funded research projects, annual conferences, training workshops, and publications. The mission of UI Research Center is to serve the social sciences researchers and scholars in the world and aim to promote advanced and cutting-edge research methodology, publish investigations on new and untested ideas, and disseminate research findings that make original and significant contributions to the social sciences.