Children's involvement in their parents' divorce: implications for practice

The paper reports findings from a research study that explored children's experience of divorce. It shows that children experience parental divorce as a crisis in their lives but that they are able to mobilise internal and external resources to regain a new point of balance. In doing so, children demonstrate the degree to which they are active and competent participants in the process of family dissolution. The implications of the data are then considered in relation to engaging with children involved in divorce and in relation to some of the cultural presumptions that might militate against hearing what they have to say about their experiences. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The crisis of 'identity' in high modernity

The concept of 'identity' is central to much contemporary sociology, reflecting a crisis that manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, there is a view that identity is both vital and problematic in this period of high modernity. Secondly, while this awareness is reflected in sociology, its accounts of identity are inconsistent, under-theorized and incapable of bearing the analytical load required. As a result, there is an inherent contradiction between a valuing of identity as so fundamental as to be crucial to personal well-being, and a theorization of 'identity' that sees it as something constructed, fluid, multiple, impermanent and fragmentary. The contemporary crisis of identity thus expresses itself as both a crisis of society, and a crisis of theory. This paper explores the diverse ways in which 'identity' is deployed before turning to case-studies of its use by Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells. This strategy demonstrates the widespread and diverse concern with identity before exploring how problematic it has become, even in the work of two of the world's leading sociologists.     

Bayesian Approaches to Nonparametric Estimation of Densities on the Unit Interval

This paper investigates nonparametric estimation of density on [0, 1]. The kernel estimator of density on [0, 1] has been found to be sensitive to both bandwidth and kernel. This paper proposes a unified Bayesian framework for choosing both the bandwidth and kernel function. In a simulation study, the Bayesian bandwidth estimator performed better than others, and kernel estimators were sensitive to the choice of the kernel and the shapes of the population densities on [0, 1]. The simulation and empirical results demonstrate that the methods proposed in this paper can improve the way the probability densities on [0, 1] are presently estimated.     

Asymptotic tests and monte carlo studies associated with the multiplicative interaction model

Several authors have proposed approximations to percentage points required for testing certain hypotheses associated with the multiplicative interaction model. Alternative approximations based on the asymptotic joint distribution of the characteristic roots of a noncentral Wishart matrix are proposed in this paper. The type I error rates of the resulting tests and the existing procedures are then compared using Monte Carlo methods.     

SEMIPARAMETRIC ESTIMATION OF THE ERROR DISTRIBUTION IN MULTIVARIATE REGRESSION USING COPULAS

A semiparametric method is developed to estimate the dependence parameter and the joint distribution of the error term in the multivariate linear regression model. The nonparametric part of the method treats the marginal distributions of the error term as unknown, and estimates them using suitable empirical distribution functions. Then the dependence parameter is estimated by either maximizing a pseudolikelihood or solving an estimating equation. It is shown that this estimator is asymptotically normal, and a consistent estimator of its large sample variance is given. A simulation study shows that the proposed semiparametric method is better than the parametric ones available when the error distribution is unknown, which is almost always the case in practice. It turns out that there is no loss of asymptotic efficiency as a result of the estimation of regression parameters. An empirical example on portfolio management is used to illustrate the method.     

On the symmetry of m-estimators computed by the huber-dutter algorithm

An M-estimator of the Linear regression parameter computed by the Huber and Dutter (1974) algorithm is summetrically distributed about the true value, under reasonably mild conditions.     

A note on some conditions for optimality of certain ridge estimators

Consider the linear regression model, y = Xβ + ε in the usual notation with X'X being in the correlation form. Galpin(1980) claimed that the ridge estimators of Hoerl, Kennard and Baldwin(1975) and Lawless and Wang(1976) give guaranteed lower mean squared error than the least squares estimator when X'X has at least two very small eigen values. We show that the arguments of Galpin(1980) leading to the above claim are incorrect, and hence the claim itself is unsubstantited. A Monte Carlo study shows that Galpin's claim is not correct in general.     

Direct methods for generating extreme characteristic roots of certain random matrices

Computer generation of extreme characteristic roots of random matrices is considered. The usual approach in Monte-Carlo applications is to randomly generate the matrix and then compute desired characteristic roots. There are, however, theoretical results about the distribution of individual characteristic roots which might be used as a basis for computing algorithms. This alternative approach is considered for the Wishart and Beta matrices.     

The contemporary episteme of death

Abstract

The twentieth century saw the emergence of a new episteme of death that fundamentally revolutionized values relating to mortality and life. Previously this revolution has been seen primarily in terms of the sequestration and denial of death, but it is necessary to go farther and recognize that these are really just an aspect of the industrialization ‐the Fordism ‐ of death. This takes two major institutional forms: the militarization, and the medicalization of death. Both ensure that death is administered on an industrial scale and in accord with institutional and bureaucratic imperatives and values. The total mobilization of the Great War was the prototype that revealed the potential of this approach. With the subsequent medical revolution of the middle decades of the century the approach was quickly rationalized and refined into a new episteme of administered death, with ‘administer’ being understood in its twin senses of ‘to manage’ and ‘to dispense’ — the two characteristic orientations to death in contemporary society. This new episteme quickly displaced traditional values derived predominantly from religious, philosophical, mythological and traditional sources and has advanced far beyond their responsive capacity, as the many interminable debates around issues of bioethics reveal. While this new episteme might enhance the human condition, it also has great potential for the impoverishment of the human spirit, and for the further reduction of human beings to the status of mere components and functions to be administered within medico‐technological systems that are themselves parts of an increasingly globalized economic system.