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Secure children’s homes (SCHs) restrict the liberty of young people considered to be a danger to themselves or others. However, not all young people referred to SCHs find a placement, and little is known about the outcomes of the young person after an SCH or alternative placement. The purpose of this paper is to understand which characteristics most likely predict allocation to an SCH placement, and to explore the outcomes of the young people in the year after referral.

A retrospective electronic cohort study was conducted using linked social care data sets in England. The study population was all young people from England referred to SCHs for welfare reasons between 1st October 2016 to 31st March 2018 (n = 527). Logistic regression tested for differences in characteristics of SCH placement allocation and outcomes in the year after referral.

In total, 60% of young people referred to an SCH were allocated a place. Factors predicting successful or unsuccessful SCH allocation were previous placement in an SCH (OR = 2.12, p = 0.01); being female (OR = 2.26, p = 0.001); older age (OR = 0.75, p = 0.001); and a history of challenging behaviour (OR = 0.34, p = 0.01). In the year after referral, there were little differences in outcomes between young people placed in a SCH versus alternative accommodation.

The study raised concerns about the capacity of current services to recognise and meet the needs of this complex and vulnerable group of young people and highlights the necessity to explore and evaluate alternatives to SCHs.

Comedy and parody in rock and metal music have been around since the genre's inception. The Italian comedic music genre known as rock demenziale employs the use of nonsense and surrealism which turns conventions upside down. The demenziale has also attracted a slew of bands that employ this humour within the heavy metal genre, most famous of which is the Roman band Nanowar of Steel. With their jabs at Manowar and power metal bands, they place mundane activities and characters into the grandiose medievalist and fantasy worlds commonly used by those bands to the point of absurdity. However, with humour being deeply culture-specific, jokes that draw from a country's pop culture and makes extensive use of puns may be lost to an audience not familiar with that culture. Nanowar of Steel's unique position of having songs written in seven languages, primarily English and Italian, allows us to take a deeper look at how language and humour interfaces with the local and global metal scenes.

A Community Studies tradition based on the theory and methods of a functionalist social anthropology has since the 1930's been the dominant one in both characterising the social structure of rural Ireland and in theorising social change in Ireland in general. This social anthropological method, while of possible utility in the study of primitive cultures and peoples, confronts certain difficulties when attempts are made to employ pure ethnographic analysis as a method for studying social change in either urban or rural settings in industrialising societies like Ireland. Despite attempts to do so, the Community Studies tradition has been unable to establish a coherent method for the study of local social systems and their structural relations of dependency on wider social, economic and political forces at play in capitalist social formations. Instead, it has fallen on an isolationist approach to studying local areas. In Irish sociology this abstractionism is inevitably undergirded by some variant of the modernisation thesis in which ‘traditional life and culture’ is progressively ‘threatened’ by the onslaught of urban‐industrial modernity.

Reviews the development of the gay and lesbian movement. The theoretical foundations for gay and lesbian archives and libraries are discussed, together with the way in which their mission statements reflect concerns for their history, heritage and the need to correct the past neglect of the gay and lesbian role in society. The problems faced by the archives and libraries include funding and that they rely mainly on volunteer help. Much of the pre‐1960s material is in danger of deterioration and of being lost since there is not adequate cataloguing and listing of documents. There is a need for national databases of collections, networking, and digitisation.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

This is the second article on Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) databases in a continuing series of articles summarizing and commenting on new database products. Two companion articles covering social sciences, humanities, general, multidisciplinary and news (SSH) and business and law (BSL),will appear in the next two issues of Online & CDROMReview, issues 5 and 6. The articles are based on the newly appearing database products in the Gale Directory of Databases. The Gale Directory of Databases (GDD) was created in January 1993 by merging Computer‐Readable Databases: A Directory and Data Sourcebook (CRD) with the Directory of Online Databases (DOD) and the Directory of Portable Databases (DPD).

Outlines the role of directors and previous research on their selection, reputation, relationship to firm performance and multiple directorships, noting criticism of those who sit on many boards. Develops hypothese on the value directors provide through their time and expertise and tests them on a sample of 121 US firms being targeted for takeover 1989‐1993 to explore the link between pre‐offer and post‐offer firm performance and the number of directorships held by their directors. Presents the results, which suggest that directors with less time (i.e. more directorships) do not necessarily provide worse routine monitoring or lead to lower merger premiums. Recognizes some other factors affecting interpretation and calls for further research.