Knowledge of professionals from public service on oral health promotion for babies

Health promotion seeks to integrate oral health practices to other public health, by building healthy public policy and the development of strategies directed to all people in the community. This study aimed to analyze the knowledge and actions on the infants’ oral health promotion by dentists, pediatricians and nurses. Were interviewed dentists (n=34), pediatricians (n=31) and nurses (n=26) from Basic Health Units, Family Health Units and Centers for Education and Recreation in Araraquara - SP about knowledge and actions on oral health promotion for infants, by filling out a pre-tested questionnaire. Data were analyzed by association tests. Generally, the professionals are aware of and perform actions on oral health promotion for infants. Most participants were female; mean age of 39.9 years, worked in Basic Health Units, had over 10 years of graduation, demonstrated knowledge on and considered oral health promotion in infants very important. The time since graduation and actions on oral health promotion for infants were associated (p<0.05) with issues concerning the use of dental floss. That most of the professionals who participated in this study know about, take actions on oral health promotion for infants and consider them crucial.

Essays in policy evaluation

This dissertation consists of three empirical studies that aim at providing new evidence in the field of public policy evaluation. In particular, the first two chapters focus on the effects of the European cohesion policy, while the third chapter assesses the effectiveness of Italian labour market incentives in reducing long-term unemployment. The first study analyses the effect of EU funds on life satisfaction across European regions , under the assumption that projects financed by structural funds in the fields of employment, education, health and environment may affect the overall quality of life in recipient regions. Using regional data from the European Social Survey in 2002-2006, it resorts to a regression discontinuity design, where the discontinuity is provided by the institutional framework of the policy. The second study aims at estimating the impact of large transfers from a centralized authority to a local administration on the incidence of white collar crimes. It merges a unique dataset on crimes committed in Italian municipalities between 2007 and 2011 with information on the disbursement of EU structural funds in 2007-2013 programming period, employing an instrumental variable estimation strategy that exploits the variation in the electoral cycle at local level. The third study analyses the impact of an Italian labour market policy that allowed firms to cut their labour costs on open-ended job contracts when hiring long-term unemployed workers. It takes advantage of a unique dataset that draws information from the unemployment lists in Veneto region and it resorts to a regression discontinuity approach to estimate the effect of the policy on the job finding rate of long-term unemployed workers.

Switzerland: Think Tanks and Vested Interests in Swiss Policy Making

This paper analyses the role of think tanks in Swiss policy making. Starting from the relationship between interest groups and the state, which has been shaping Swiss policy making for a long time, we hypothesize that these structures offer good possibilities for scientific arguments and ideas to influence the process of policy making. Our observations from a recent example indeed illustrates that think tanks can use the same channels as vested interests to bring in their know-how. Furthermore, we conclude that the characteristics of the political system, e.g. direct democracy and the consensual alignment particularly influence the chances of think tanks to intervene. In this exchange vested interests and think tanks do not really interfere with each other, but rather they complement each other both having.

Public participation in Michigan mining policy : the Kennecott Eagle Project case

Public participation is an important component of Michigan’s Part 632 Nonferrous Mining law and is identified by researchers as important to decision-making processes. The Kennecott Eagle Project, which is located near Marquette, Michigan, is the first mine permitted under Michigan’s new mining regulation, and this research examines how public participation is structured in regulations, how the permitting process occurred during the permitting of the Eagle Project, and how participants in the permitting process perceived their participation. To understand these issues, this research implemented a review of existing mining policy and public participation policy literature, examination of documents related to the Kennecott Eagle Project and completion of semi-structured, ethnographic interviews with participants in the decision-making process. Interviewees identified issues with the structure of participation, the technical nature of the permitting process, concerns about the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) handling of mine permitting, and trust among participants. This research found that the permitting of the Kennecott Eagle Mine progressed as structured by regulation and collected technical input on the mine permit application, but did not meet the expectations of some participants who opposed the project. Findings from this research indicated that current mining regulation in Michigan is resilient to public opposition, there is need for more transparency from the Michigan DEQ during the permitting process, and current participatory structures limit the opportunities for some stakeholder groups to influence decision-making.

Education and Ideologies of the Knowledge Economy: Europe and the Politics of Emulation

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously proposed a style of philosophy that was directed against certain pictures [bild] that tacitly direct our language and forms of life. His aim was to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle and to fight against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 1953, 115). In this context Wittgenstein is talking of philosophical pictures, deep metaphors that have structured our language but he does also use the term picture in other contexts (see Owen 2003, 83). I want to appeal to Wittgenstein in my use of the term ideology to refer to the way in which powerful underlying metaphors in neoclassical economics have a strong rhetorical and constitutive force at the level of public policy. Indeed, I am specifically speaking of the notion of ‘the performative’ in Wittgenstein and Austin. The notion of the knowledge economy has a prehistory in Hayek (1937; 1945) who founded the economics of knowledge in the 1930s, in Machlup (1962; 1970), who mapped the emerging employment shift to the US service economy in the early 1960s, and to sociologists Bell (1973) and Touraine (1974) who began to tease out the consequences of these changes for social structure in the post-industrial society in the early 1970s. The term has been taken up since by economists, sociologists, futurists and policy experts recently to explain the transition to the so-called ‘new economy’. It is not just a matter of noting these discursive strands in the genealogy of the ‘knowledge economy’ and related or cognate terms. We can also make a number of observations on the basis of this brief analysis. First, there has been a succession of terms like ‘postindustrial economy’, ‘information economy’, ‘knowledge economy’, ‘learning economy’, each with a set of related concepts emphasising its social, political, management or educational aspects. Often these literatures are not cross-threading and tend to focus on only one aspect of phenomena leading to classic dichotomies such as that between economy and society, knowledge and information. Second, these terms and their family concepts are discursive, historical and ideological products in the sense that they create their own meanings and often lead to constitutive effects at the level of policy. Third, while there is some empirical evidence to support claims concerning these terms, at the level of public policy these claims are empirically underdetermined and contain an integrating, visionary or futures component, which necessarily remains untested and is, perhaps, in principle untestable.

The direct-democratic challenge to evidence-based policy making: Questioning the governmental PISA narrative in Swiss school policy

The democratic deficit of evidence-based policymaking and the little attention the approach pays to values and norms have repeatedly been criticized. This article argues that direct-democratic campaigns may provide an arena for citizens and stakeholders to debate the belief systems inherent to evidence. The study is based on a narrative analysis of Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reports, as well as of newspaper coverage and governmental information referring to PISA in Swiss direct-democratic campaigns on a variety of school policy issues. The findings show that PISA reports are discursive instruments rather than ‘objective evidence’. The reports promote a narrative of economic progress through educational evidence that is adopted without scrutiny by governmental coalitions in direct-democratic campaigns to justify school policy reforms. Yet, the dominant PISA narrative is contested in two counter-narratives, one endorsed by numerous citizens, the other by a group of experts. These counter-narratives question how PISA is used by an ‘expertocracy’ to prescribe reforms, as well as the performance ideology inherent to. Overall, these findings suggest that direct-democratic campaigns may make more transparent how evidence is produced and used according to existing belief systems. Evidence, on the other hand, may be a stimulus for democratic discourse by feeding the debate with potential policy problems and solution. Thus, direct-democratic debates may reconcile normative positions of citizens with the desire to base decisions on empirical evidence.

Does a reference to evaluations contribute to discourse quality? The case of Swiss direct-democratic campaigns on school policy: a conceptual framework

This article examines how references to evaluations in school policy debates contribute to discourse quality. The article consists of two parts: First, it presents a descriptive overview of the references to evidence in direct-democratic campaigns. These results are based on a quantitative content analysis of the newspaper coverage and governmental information documents of 103 direct-democratic Swiss school policy votes. In a second step, it discusses these findings in view of the question of whether the incorporation of evaluation results in policy debates contributes to discourse quality. It presents a conceptual framework, including hypotheses and a research design to answer this question.

A practice-based culminating experience: Writing a HRSA grant application with Texas Organ Sharing Alliance for public education efforts to increase solid organ donation

In November 2010, nearly 110,000 people in the United States were waiting for organs for transplantation. Despite the fact that the organ donor registration rate has doubled in the last year, Texas has the lowest registration rate in the nation. Due to the need for improved registration rates in Texas, this practice-based culminating experience was to write an application for federal funding for the central Texas organ procurement organization, Texas Organ Sharing Alliance. The culminating experience has two levels of significance for public health – (1) to engage in an activity to promote organ donation registration, and (2) to provide professional experience in grant writing. ^ The process began with a literature review. The review was to identify successful intervention activities in motivating organ donation registration that could be used in intervention design for the grant application. Conclusions derived from the literature review included (1) the need to specifically encourage family discussions, (2) religious and community leaders can be leveraged to facilitate organ donation conversations in families, (3) communication content must be culturally sensitive and (4) ethnic disparities in transplantation must be acknowledged and discussed.^ Post the literature review; the experience followed a five step process of developing the grant application. The steps included securing permission to proceed, assembling a project team, creation of a project plan and timeline, writing each element of the grant application including the design of proposed intervention activities, and completion of the federal grant application. ^ After the grant application was written, an evaluation of the grant writing process was conducted. Opportunities for improvement were identified. The first opportunity was the need for better timeline management to allow for review of the application by an independent party, iterative development of the budget proposal, and development of collaborative partnerships. Another improvement opportunity was the management of conflict regarding the design of the intervention that stemmed from marketing versus evidence-based approaches. The most important improvement opportunity was the need to develop a more exhaustive evaluation plan.^ Eight supplementary files are attached to appendices: Feasibility Discussion in Appendix 1, Grant Guidance and Workshop Notes in Appendix 2, Presentation to Texas Organ Sharing Alliance in Appendix 3, Team Recruitment Presentation in Appendix 5, Grant Project Narrative in Appendix 7, Federal Application Form in Appendix 8, and Budget Workbook with Budget Narrative in Appendix 9.^

Why so few students do maths and science. CEPS Policy Brief No. 313, 10 January 2014

Policy-makers often fret about the low number of university graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Proposed solutions often focus on providing better information for students and parents about the employability or average wages of different fields to emphasise that STEM professions pay. This paper argues that, from a personal point of view, students are actually making rational decisions, if all benefits and costs are factored into the equation. The authors conclude, therefore, that public policy needs to change the incentives to induce students to enter these fields and not just provide information about them.