Religion and the Representative Anecdote: Replacement and Revenge in AMC’s The Walking Dead

The current study examines how the horror-based AMC television series The Walking Dead portrays religion in terms of a reframing of the role, if any, of faith in a higher power, and the portrayal of the faithful. The religious-themed discourse of this highly successful story about survivors of a zombie apocalypse as presented through dialogic and visual imagery serves as the text analyzed here; specifically, related episodes set in churches at two separate points in the series that combine to offer a metaphor of “structure” used to disassemble and reconstruct the role of religion. These episodes interlace religious themes to develop an overarching message that forms a representative anecdote of replacement in which the notion of “faith” becomes redefined.     

Hard thresholding regression

In this paper, we propose the hard thresholding regression (HTR) for estimating high‐dimensional sparse linear regression models. HTR uses a two‐stage convex algorithm to approximate the ?₀‐penalized regression: The first stage calculates a coarse initial estimator, and the second stage identifies the oracle estimator by borrowing information from the first one. Theoretically, the HTR estimator achieves the strong oracle property over a wide range of regularization parameters. Numerical examples and a real data example lend further support to our proposed methodology.     

Relationships of Online Social Comparison and Parenting Satisfaction among New Mothers: The Mediating Roles of Belonging and Emotion

New mothers frequently seek information and community on social networking sites as they seek to establish their parenting practices. As social networking sites for mothers (SNSM) present an environmental influence on the family system, a mother’s experience with social comparison, belonging, and emotion on SNSM can bear significant influence over her satisfaction with her parenting. The present study utilized survey methods to explore mothers’ (n= 336) reported experiences of these variables. We use structural equation modeling to specify a model with good fit, which indicated that greater downward comparison directly related to greater parenting satisfaction, with belonging and negative emotion as mediating indirect relationships. Implications for family communication and mothers’ SNSM practices are discussed.     

Schizotypal Personality Disorder: A Clinical Social Work Perspective

Schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) is considered to be a “schizophrenia spectrum disorder” as evidenced in part by its cross-listing in that chapter of the DSM-5. SPD is considered to be a condition with limited potential for positive change because one of its major features is the presence of a biologically based cognitive deficit. This assumption, however, is an example of the medical model’s creating a bias against psychosocial features that are always involved in character development. The social work profession’s bio-psycho-social perspectives focus more comprehensively on all features of the condition and promote a more optimistic view of clients’ change potentials. The purposes of this paper are to examine SPD from a social work perspective and to demonstrate, with a case example, how effective intervention can be organized and delivered.     

Cigarette Smoking and All-Cause and Cause-Specific Adult Mortality in the United States

This study illuminates the association between cigarette smoking and adult mortality in the contemporary United States. Recent studies have estimated smoking-attributable mortality using indirect approaches or with sample data that are not nationally representative and that lack key confounders. We use the 1990–2011 National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality Files to estimate relative risks of all-cause and cause-specific mortality for current and former smokers compared with never smokers. We examine causes of death established as attributable to smoking as well as additional causes that appear to be linked to smoking but have not yet been declared by the U.S. Surgeon General to be caused by smoking. Mortality risk is substantially elevated among smokers for established causes and moderately elevated for additional causes. We also decompose the mortality disadvantage among smokers by cause of death and estimate the number of smoking-attributable deaths for the U.S. adult population ages 35+, net of sociodemographic and behavioral confounders. The elevated risks translate to 481,887 excess deaths per year among current and former smokers compared with never smokers, 14 % to 15 % of which are due to the additional causes. The additional causes of death contribute to the health burden of smoking and should be considered in future studies of smoking-attributable mortality. This study demonstrates that smoking-attributable mortality must remain a top population health priority in the United States and makes several contributions to further underscore the human costs of this tragedy that has ravaged American society for more than a century.     

Residential Remittances and Food Security in the Upper West Region of Ghana

In recent years, out migration from the Upper West Region to the southern belt of Ghana for farming has become commonplace. The natural question that has arisen is: what is the potential impact of remittances from this migration pattern on food security in the region? Using multivariate ordered logistic regression this study assesses the linkage between remittances and household food security (derived using the HFIAS) among urban and rural households (n=1,438) in the region. The findings show that urban remittance‐receiving households and rural remittance and non‐remittance receiving households were more likely (OR=2.44, p<0.05; OR=2.46, p<0.001; and OR=1.49, p<0.1, respectively) to report being more severely food‐insecure than urban non‐remittance receiving households. The findings demonstrate that household strategies such as migration and remittances on their own are not sufficient to ameliorate the precarious food insecurity situation of the region. The study calls for development of alternative livelihoods in the region.     

Does the retirement consumption puzzle differ across the distribution?

Previous research has repeatedly found a puzzling one-time drop in the mean and median of consumption at retirement, contrary to the predictions of the life-cycle hypothesis. However, very little is known as to whether these effects vary across the consumption distribution. This study expands upon the previous work by examining changes in the consumption distribution between the non-retired and the retired using quantile regression techniques on pseudo-cohorts from the cross-sectional data of the 1990–2007 Consumer Expenditure Survey. The results indicate that there are insignificant changes between these groups at the lower end of the consumption distribution, while there are significant decreases at the higher end of this distribution. In addition, these changes in the distribution are gradually larger in magnitude when moving from the lower end to the higher end, which is found using several different measures of consumption. Work-related expenditures are instead shown to decrease uniformly across the consumption distribution. This evidence reveals that there is a progressive distributional component to the retirement consumption puzzle.