How Too Little Can Give You a Little Too Much: Determining the Number of Household Phone Lines in RDD Surveys

Accurately assessing the number of household phone lines inrandom-digit dialed (RDD) surveys for use in weighting has becomemore complicated over time. This study evaluates phone lineweighting by asking an in-depth battery of seven questions designedto measure the number of available land lines in the home moreprecisely. The results show that this weighting correction isnot so simple, and that inadequately parsing the type and useof household phone numbers produces an inaccurate weight. Failingexplicitly to remove irrelevant phone numbers, especially cellphones, produces a larger-than-appropriate weighting adjustment.Potentially more important on a practical level is that, whendone correctly, and even when "overdone," phone line weightinghad little impact across a diverse set of opinion and demographicvariables.     

Using Neural Networks to Model the Behavior and Decisions of Gamblers,in Particular,Cyber-Gamblers

This article describes the use of neural networks (a type of artificial intelligence) and an empirical data sample of, inter alia, the amounts of bets laid and the winnings/losses made in successive games by a number of cyber-gamblers to longitudinally model gamblers’ behavior and decisions as to such bet amounts and the temporal trajectory of winnings/losses. The data was collected by videoing Texas Holdem gamblers at a cyber-gambling website. Six “persistent” gamblers were identified, totaling 675 games. The neural networks on average were able to predict bet amounts and cumulative winnings/losses in successive games accurately to three decimal places of the dollar. A more important conclusion is that the influence of a gambler’s skills, strategies, and personality on his/her successive bet amounts and cumulative winnings/losses is almost totally reflected by the pattern(s) of his/her winnings/losses in the few initial games and his/her gambling account balance. This partially invalidates gamblers’ illusions and fallacies that they can outperform others or even bankers. For government policy-makers, gambling industry operators, economists, sociologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists, this article provides models for gamblers’ behavior and decisions. It also explores and exemplifies the usefulness of neural networks and artificial intelligence at large in the research on gambling.     

Determinants of Retirement Timing Expectations in the United States and Australia: A Cross-National Comparison of the Effects of Health and Retirement Benefit Policies on Retirement Timing Decisions

Data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (N = 2,589) and the Australian Household Income and Labour Dynamics survey (N = 1,760) were used to compare the macro-level policy frameworks on individual retirement timing expectations for pre–baby boomers (61+ years) and early baby boomers (45 to 60 years). Australian workers reported younger expected age of retirement compared to the U.S. sample. Reporting poor health was more strongly associated with younger expected retirement age in the United States than in Australia. Cohort and gender differences in the United States were found for the effect of private health insurance on younger expected age at retirement. Our results draw attention to how cross-national comparisons can inform us on the effects of policies on retirement expectations among older workers.     

Symbolic Power and the Institutional Response to Rape: Uncovering the Cultural Dynamics of a Forensic Technology*

Dans plusieurs juridictions, la réponse médicolégal au viol est axée sur l'utilisation d'une des versions de ce qu'on appelle communément une « trousse de prélèvement dans les cas de viol >>. De telles trousses sont utilisées par des professionnels de la santé dans le but de recueillir des preuves corroborantes sur le corps des femmes victimes d'agression sexuelle. L'usage de cette trousse se fonde sur l'hypothèse qu'elle peut conduire à la production de preuves techniques sur la véracité de l'allégation d'une femme. Dans cette étude, nous nous sommes servies des données d'enquêtes, d'interviews et de recherches effectuées auprès des groupes cibles de professionnels spécialisés dans l'agression sexuelle en Ontario, pour étudier comment les interprétations et les valeurs sociétales dominantes et spécifiquement professionnelles peuvent se conjuguer à l'utilisation régulariséd de la trousse provinciale d'examen consécutif à une agression sexuelle pour preuves judiciaires.
Across many jurisdictions, the medico-legal response to rape is centred on the use of what is commonly known as a "rape kit." These are administered by health professionals to sexually assaulted women for the purpose of collecting corroborating evidence from their bodies. The assumption is that the use of this kit can lead to the production of technical facts about the truth of a woman's allegation. We drew on data from survey, interview and focus group research with sexual assault professionals in Ontario to explore how dominant societal and narrow profession-specific values and interpretations may be intertwined with the regularized use of the provincial Sexual Assault Evidence Kit.     

Determinants of opposition to abortion: an analysis of the hard and soft scales

This study investigates the differences between the hard and soft scales of the General Social Survey (GSS) which analyzes attitudes toward abortion. Hard reasons for supporting abortion include such considerations as health of mother, deformed child, rape, and incest. Soft reasons might be low income, unmarried mother, and attainment of desired family size. Data was obtained from the 1982 National Opinion Research Center (NORC) GSS, a 6 item questionnaire on attitudes toward abortion. Demographic variables and their interactions, 4 attitudinal scales, and 3 abortion scales--hard, soft, and a diffference scale--were used in the analysis. A multiple regression analysis was performed. Variation between the hard and soft scales, while significant, was not large and could be explained in terms of different sensitivities to different types of information. The soft scale, for example, was found to be more strongly related than the hard to demographic and attitudinal variables. It also showed greater variation than did the hard. Items such as religiosity and residence showed a strong affect on both scales. Yet interactions produce the strongest responses for or against abortion. For instance, age and religious preference interact; older Catholics and Baptists are more opposed to abortion than their younger counterparts. The authors conclude that the primary causes of each scale are the same and that 1 scale measuring the 6 abortion items would be the most balanced way to analyze abortion attitudes and their underlying reasons.     

Testing an Economic Model of Nonprofit Growth: Analyzing the Behaviors and Decisions of Nonprofit Organizations,Private Donors,and Governments

This study draws an economic model of the growth of nonprofit organizations by analyzing the behaviors of three major actors—nonprofit organizations, private donors, and governments—in making decisions on the allocation of limited resources for nonprofit services. Since decisions made by each actor affect resource allocation, it is important to understand what drives these decisions. The model was tested using an unbalanced, 463 panel dataset collected from 28 OECD countries over a 23-year period. The results indicated that macro- and micro-economic trends and government policies framed the decision premises of the three major actors, which led them to leverage the supply and demand for goods and services and, in turn, determined how they allocated limited resources for nonprofit services. This result implies that understanding the interdependencies of all sectors of the economy is critical to comprehending the size and development of the nonprofit sector. Effective management of micro-economic policies and macro-economic stability is necessary. More important, however, is understanding how a decision in one part of the economy will have intended and unintended effects on the nonprofit sector.     

‘A Pest to Society’: The Charity Organisation Society's Domiciliary Assessments into the Circumstances of Poor Families and Children

This article examines the work of the Charity Organisation Society (COS) in assessing applications for children's admission to care in the late nineteenth‐century. It is based on an archive study of records kept by the ‘Waifs and Strays’ Society in England and Wales between 1882 and 1899, in particular 270 family assessments conducted by the COS. The focus was on parental behaviour rather than children's needs, with a strong narrative of taking children away to relieve parents of a burden. The research illuminates contested assumptions about childhood in the period, with resonance for current issues in policy and practice.     

How Cuba burned with the ghosts of British slavery: race,abolition and the Escalera

In the antebellum period, a system of slave trials operated in Virginia that was entirely at odds with the common law practices that governed the trial of most defendants, free and enslaved, throughout the southern states. This article examines the operation and implications of this system in Richmond, Virginia, between 1830 and 1861 and argues that the absence of due process protections for slaves enabled the legal system to better serve the interests of the slaveholding class than in common law jurisdictions. This was particularly significant in Richmond, as urban-industrial conditions made slaveholders extremely dependent on the law to combat slave crime. By the 1850s, however, the conflict between Virginia's slave trial system and Anglo-American common law culture, as well as between slaveholder and nonslaveholder interests, had resulted in adjustments to the system that signalled the start of its decline.     

Unifying and Decomposing Building Types: How to Analyze the Change of Use of Sacred Buildings

What do churches do? What do mosques do? Constructivist sociology has usually argued that buildings do not do anything, but are enacted by users. Conversely, actor-network theory has interpreted buildings as actants that are stabilized by architect-controlled networks. In this article, I argue for a differential theory of objects, which conceives of the specific agency of different kinds of objects. Buildings can be understood as mutable immobiles, objects that are immovable and thus likely to be changed on the level of their social classification, or in architectural terms, their building type. Drawing on fieldwork in and around Berlin, Germany, I use two different kinds of change of use to show the agency of buildings as mutable immobiles. First, I show that in the case of churches that are changed to other uses, the church attempts to discursively associate the buildings to religion primarily and then uses large scale interventions to preserve the unity of the church if change of use cannot be avoided. Second, I show that in the case of factories that are turned into mosques, very small material interventions with furniture change the buildings.     

How to Become a Forgotten Intellectual: Intellectual Movements and the Rise and Fall of Erich Fromm

The ideas and reputational history of German psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm are examined as a case study in the sociology of knowledge that explores how intellectual boundaries are constructed within and between disciplines in the modem academy, psychoanalytic institutes, and the journal and book reading publics and among the intellectual elite. The rise and fall of Erich Fromm is narrated using the foil of Michèle Lament's analysis of how Derrida became a dominant philosopher and influence on literary criticism. The example of how Fromm became a forgotten intellectual is used to examine various models of how reputations are constructed. My analysis highlights the importance of the sectlike culture of psychoanalysis and Marxism as well as the boundary-maintaining processes of academic disciplines, schools of thought, and intellectual traditions, and suggests a research agenda on orthodoxies and revisionism within intellectual movements more generally.     

Inequality,Health Infrastructure,and Spatial Context: Understanding Pathways to Variations in the Causal Determinants of Race-Specific Mortality Rates

Previous research examines the ecological relationship between income inequality and mortality, and results are inconclusive. This analysis builds upon these findings by implementing a spatially weighted path analysis to better understand the mediating relationships of economic and social inequality, health infrastructure, and mortality. In the analysis, overall and race-specific mortality rates are combined with local health infrastructure data, income inequality and racial segregation data, and a series of ecological controls to undertake this examination. Ultimately, findings show that income inequality is a stronger determinant of mortality than is segregation, for whites and blacks, regardless of the existing health infrastructure. We also find racial disparities in the direct effect of local health infrastructure on mortality. In contrast to previous literature suggesting no association between income inequality and mortality after accounting for race and model sophistication, we argue that the significance of the relationship persists using race-specific, spatially weighted path models.     

From blindness to visual impairment: terminological typology and the Social Model of Disability

The Social Model of Disability holds that persons are impaired for a number of reasons, but that it is only by society that they are disabled. As a product of that disabling society and a key component in psychocultural representation, it is terminology on which the paper focuses. Consisting of ableism, disablement and impairment, a tripartite typology is proposed, the first phase of which is rendered outmoded, the second regressive and the third progressive. This hierarchical categorisation provides a basis for the suggestion that terminology like blindness and the blind might be rejected in favour of that which denotes only visual impairment, the progressive terminology that corresponds with insights gained from the Social Model of Disability.     

The terrible twos: How children cope with frustration and tantrums and the effect of maternal and paternal behaviors

Experimental Frustration Procedures with 158 children (15–39 months) of two-parent families were conducted, with each parent separately involved. We examined diverse characteristics of children's frustration and focused on specific behaviors of how children coped and parents supported them. In addition, external observers measured child attachment security (via Attachment Q Sort) toward the mother and the father during two home visits. Children with high attachment security became frustrated later and for a shorter time, and fathers, as compared to mothers, relieved these frustration patterns and reduced them. Although 22.2% children exhibited intense frustration responses up to tantrums, levels remained unaffected by child gender, but decreased with child age. Time-lag analyses revealed that children's self-comforting behaviors reduced frustration responses only by around 20%, but self-distracting (in younger children) and pretend-playing (in older children) by around 50% and 70%. Of the parent behaviors, demonstrating reduced children's frustration by up to 40% whereas distracting and reframing by around 60% (mothers) and 80% (fathers). In general, mothers tended to protect the child from distress, whereas fathers assisted the child in coping with frustration. However, if mothers soothed and fathers encouraged, children's frustration intensified.     

How user diversity and country of origin impact the readiness to adopt E-health technologies: an intercultural comparison

In recent years, due to the demographical change and the resulting overload of healthcare systems, there has been an increasing interest focusing on the global proliferation of assistive medical technologies (=E-health) in home environments. The present study examines how users' diversity influences the readiness to adopt novel medical technologies, comparing users' attitudes in terms of perceived advantages and disadvantages in three technically and culturally different countries: Germany, Poland and Turkey. This investigation also intended to verify if acceptance of information and communication technologies is associated with the sensitive acceptance of E-health. Results revealed overall a considerably higher motivation to use medical technology compared to perceived barriers, with Polish users more willing to use E-health, higher than German or Turkish ones. Older participants showed a highly positive attitude, comparable to young and middle-aged respondents' receptiveness, differing from the latter in terms of greater appreciation of the advantage of higher independency when being supported by medical technology. With respect to gender, woman showed higher motivation to use E-health technology than men, although utilization barriers were not gendered. Following these results, an unconditional transfer of acceptance from information and communication to medical technology is not justified.     

租让结合:土地有偿使用的新模式--关于大冶市商住综合用地实行租让模式的调查与研究

新<土地管理法>实施以后,我国土地有偿使用制度改革又大大向前推进了一步,特别是出让、租赁、作价出资(或入股)等形式的法定化,更使土地有偿使用的创新工作增添了新的内涵.从调查中得知湖北大冶市创制了一种新的有偿使用方式--租让式,这对盘活存量土地、激活土地市场、增加土地收益、扩大就业机会等都发挥了十分重要的作用.     

Addiction Treatment with Deaf and Hard of Hearing People: An Application of the CENAPS Model

ABSTRACT

Alcohol and drug addiction is a significant problem among deaf and hard of hearing people. Looking through a Deaf culture lens, treatment for alcohol and drug addiction is key for providing care for deaf and hard of hearing clients. Using the CENAPS model, an applied cognitive-behavioral therapy program is recommended for addiction treatment. The CENAPS model provides clinicians with tools for stabilizing deaf and hard of hearing clients, supporting their transition to early recovery. Educating the client about the stages of relapse and the stages of recovery, clinicians using this model can better treat and prepare deaf and hard of hearing clients for long-term recovery.