Sexual agreements and intimate-partner violence among male couples

Objectives: In the United States, HIV continues to disproportionately affect men who have sex with men. One promising area of research that may inform the development of behavioral interventions among male–male couples is within the realm of sexual agreements. Methods: The purpose of our analysis was to determine whether respondents who report having an open agreement or an agreement breakage also report a higher incidence of recent (within the previous 12 months) intimate-partner violence (IPV) compared to respondents who report having a monogamous agreement or no agreement breakage after controlling for demographic variables. Results: Results showed that men who have an open agreement are less likely to report recent physical IPV. Conclusions: The results highlight the need to develop dyadic behavior interventions that address sexual agreements and stress management.     

Spatial variation in soil inorganic nitrogen across an arid urban ecosystem

We explored variations in inorganic soil nitrogen (N) concentrations across metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona, and the surrounding desert using a probability-based synoptic survey. Data were examined using spatial statistics on the entire region, as well as for the desert and urban sites separately. Concentrations of both NO₃-N and NH₄-N were markedly higher and more heterogeneous amongst urban compared to desert soils. Regional variation in soil NO₃-N concentration was best explained by latitude, land use history, population density, along with percent cover of impervious surfaces and lawn, whereas soil NH₄-N concentrations were related to only latitude and population density. Within the urban area, patterns in both soil NO₃-N and NH₄-N were best predicted by elevation, population density and type of irrigation in the surrounding neighborhood. Spatial autocorrelation of soil NO₃-N concentrations explained 49% of variation among desert sites but was absent between urban sites. We suggest that inorganic soil N concentrations are controlled by a number of ‘local’ or ‘neighborhood’ human-related drivers in the city, rather than factors related to an urban-rural gradient.     

Bankrupt Rhetoric: How Misleading Information Affects Knowledge about Social Security

Most citizens know little about politics. Scholars often attributepolitical ignorance to individual-level factors, but we concentrateon the quality of the information environment. Employing a combinationof experimental methods and content analysis, we code statementsfrom the 1998–99 debate over Social Security reform aseither misleading or not misleading. Then, using surveys conductedduring the debate, we examine the impact of individual- andenvironmental-level variables on political knowledge about theprogram’s future. We show that misleading statements aboutSocial Security’s future cause some citizens to get animportant fact about the program wrong. More precisely, manycitizens mistakenly believe that Social Security will run outof money because political elites occasionally use words thatlead to overly pessimistic assessments of the program’sfinancial future. Our findings have important implications forpolicymakers who are attempting to remake America’s largestfederal program, scholars who study citizen competence, andcitizens in a representative democracy.     

A simple estimator for a shared frailty regression model

Summary. We propose a simple estimation procedure for a proportional hazards frailty regression model for clustered survival data in which the dependence is generated by a positive stable distribution. Inferences for the frailty parameter can be obtained by using output from Cox regression analyses. The computational burden is substantially less than that of the other approaches to estimation. The large sample behaviour of the estimator is studied and simulations show that the approximations are appropriate for use with realistic sample sizes. The methods are motivated by studies of familial associations in the natural history of diseases. Their practical utility is illustrated with sib pair data from Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.     

African Americans and municipal employment: A test of two perspectives

A survey of the extant literature addressing the factors that drive African American municipal employment offers two broad types of explanations: (1) Black political power and (2) institutional. A comparative assessment of the performance of each of these explanations fills a gap in the literature by illuminating the differences of these distinct perspectives when it comes to employment of Blacks in the public sector. Focusing on six Florida cities from 1960 to 2000, this study tests the predictive power of each of these explanations comparatively for four city departments. The findings indicate that the Black political power explanation performs better than the institutional explanation as a predictor of Black employment.