OBJECTIVE: The authors compared data from psychiatrists and psychologists in California to determine whether long-standing differences in clinical practice remain after the introduction of managed care and other changes in mental service delivery.

METHODS: Responses from practicing clinicians in California who participated in the 1998 National Survey of Psychiatric Practice and the 2000 California Survey of Psychological Practice were compared on items related to patient caseload, practice profile, and insurance or reimbursement arrangements.

RESULTS: Data from 97 psychiatrists and 395 psychologists were available for the study. Psychiatrists reported spending more hours on most aspects of practice and working more total hours per week than psychologists. The weekly caseloads reported by psychiatrists included a greater percentage of persons treated for psychotic conditions than did the caseloads of psychologists. Psychologists reported that their weekly caseloads included a greater percentage of persons treated for anxiety disorders, personality disorders, and other disorders. Psychiatrists reported receiving a greater average payment for services from public insurance, and psychologists reported treating a greater average percentage of patients who did not have insurance coverage. Significant differences in income sources and fee arrangements were observed, and the net reported income of psychiatrists was nearly 80 percent greater than that of psychologists.

CONCLUSIONS: Long-standing differences in clinical practice patterns remain between psychiatrists and psychologists despite managed care staffing arrangements and treatment strategies that streamline the practices of both provider groups. The significant income and wage differences between psychiatrists and psychologists may be partly due to supply dynamics of the mental health workforce that adversely affect psychologists.

According to many seasoned survey researchers, offering a no-opinion option should reduce the pressure to give substantive responses felt by respondents who have no true opinions. By contrast, the survey satisficing perspective suggests that no-opinion options may discourage some respondents from doing the cognitive work necessary to report the true opinions they do have. We address these arguments using
data from nine experiments carried out in three household surveys. Attraction to no-opinion options was found to be greatest among respondents lowest in cognitive skills (as measured by educational attainment), among respondents answering secretly instead of orally, for questions asked later in a survey, and among respondents who devoted little effort to the reporting process. The quality of attitude reports obtained (as measured by over-time consistency and responsiveness to a question manipulation) was not compromised by the omission of noopinion options. These results suggest that inclusion of no-opinion options in attitude measures may not enhance data quality and instead may
preclude measurement of some meaningful opinions.

The world now has a century of experience with refined cocaine and heroin and has observed their consequences. For most of that century, as many citizens in the industrialized nations experimented with those drugs, their governments experimented with various forms of legal prohibition. A few countries—most notably the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Switzerland—have been willing to test a wide range of control strategies. Most others—including the United States—have generally tinkered at the margins of a narrow criminal justice model, perhaps augmented with minimal provision of public drug treatment.

Some foreign experiences have long been a staple of the American drug debate—most notably the British experience with prescription heroin in the mid-twentieth century and Dutch de facto cannabis legalization since the late 1970s.In the absence of careful scholarly description,U.S.observers have been free to characterize such experiences in whichever way serves their rhetorical purposes. For example, a rapid increase in the minimal base rate of heroin use in Britain in the late 1960s became the basis for a charge that the British system of heroin prescription had failed; we discuss below a more reasonable interpretation of this experience.

Only recently have scholars,policy analysts,and policy makers from different nations begun to look outside their own boundaries to see what might be learned from experiences abroad (e.g., Estievenart 1995; MacCoun and Reuter 2001a, 2001b; Reuband 1995).

This special issue describes the experiences of eleven nations: Australia, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Iran, Jamaica, Mexico, Portugal, Russia, and Sweden. Each of these countries is confronting the various public health and public safety problems caused both by domestic drug consumption and by the legal prohibition of these substances. Some countries confront a second drug problem as well, one that can dwarf the first: they are home to major drug trafficking organizations. And several of these countries must contend with the direct and indirect effects of an aggressive U.S. campaign to stem the flow of drugs.

This paper aims to provide an objective history of electricity restructuring in California from the mid-1990s to the immediate end of the “California Energy Crisis” in June 2001. We discuss the restructuring debate that led to the restructuring law (AB1890), and describe how the new structure worked after it took effect in April 1998. We discuss the course of events during the crisis, and factors contributing to it, including the supply-demand balance in California and in the West, rising gas prices, the complexity of the market design, market power, and the regulatory decision to cap retail but not wholesale prices.

In this article Wells, Slayton, and Scott draw on data from their charter school research to question the extent to which “democratic” and “market-based” schools are dichotomous. They argue that in the current political and economic climate, free-market and deregulatory educational reforms such as charter school laws are perceived to be highly “democratic” by their neoliberal advocates and by many of the suburban school board members and superintendents in their case studies. Thus the authors call on progressive supporters of charter schools and public schools to couch their arguments for democratic schooling in a call for social justice and equity as opposed to greater “liberty”