Evidence for the Absence of Stimulus Quality Differences in Tests of the Accuracy of Sexual Orientation Judgments: A Reply to Cox,Devine, Bischmann,and Hyde (2016)

An article recently published in this journal (Cox, Devine, Bischmann, &; Hyde, 2016) questioned the validity of existing research on the accurate judgment of sexual orientation from photographs of faces. Specifically, those authors reported a confound in their stimuli whereby the photos of sexual minorities (gay men and lesbians) were of higher quality than the photos of heterosexuals. Based on this finding, they concluded that the accuracy in judging sexual orientation from faces demonstrated in the broader literature is an artifact of stimulus quality differences. Here, we addressed this claim by systematically testing the numerous photo sets that we have used in 61 studies documenting accurate judgments of sexual orientation from facial cues published since 2007. Contrary to their claim, the overwhelming majority of studies (93%) showed no significant differences in photo quality according to sexual orientation. Of those that did show differences, most revealed that heterosexual targets’ photos were actually of higher quality than sexual minority targets’ photos – opposite of what Cox et al. found. In addition, we highlight additional research using stimuli equated for quality differences overlooked in the recent article by Cox et al., lending further support to the conclusion that sexual orientation is legible from multiple sensory cues.     

PRODUCING ARTISTIC VALUE:

Cultural forms gain artistic recognition when their producers of meaning "prove" that they (a) contain "serious" meanings and aesthetic genuineness; (b) they are produced by a definable creative entity and (c) the creative entity is autonomous, producing its works for their own sake. Since the 1960's, critics have claimed artistic recognition for rock music. They have done so by stressing the "subversive" meaning of rock, by identifying the rock-group and the rock individual-musician as autonomous creative entities, by consecrating a body of albums as the "masterpieces" of rock and by defining several sonic components as rock's genuine aesthetic language. Although the realization of this claim remains partial, it demonstrates that the belief in artistic cultural hierarchies is a structuring force in contemporary culture.     

Opposition to gender-sensitive development. Learning to answer back

Opposition to gender-sensitive development policies can arise within the very development agencies charged with implementing the policies. Agencies may maintain that policies on equality for women are unnecessary because development is concerned with improving welfare in general. This can be refuted by referring to the literature which points out that failure to address the specific needs of women means their exclusion from the development process. Agencies may argue that women's equality is a political rather than a developmental issue. This is countered by the fact that the "Forward-Looking Strategies" define women's development, equality, and empowerment as intertwined processes. Agencies may say that promoting women's equality constitutes undue interference in a country's internal affairs. This is wrong because aid programs should not be supported in countries which do not support women's rights. Agencies may claim that they must work within the existing laws and policies of a developing country. This is partly correct, but the point must be limited because policies and laws may be "given," but they are not fixed. An agency may state that they have no business seeking or promoting change in existing social and customary practices. This is wrong where such practices stand in the way of development and because any development project is by definition a social and economic intervention. Agencies may consider their policy on women an inappropriate imposition of Western ideas. This is wrong because international conventions place a concern for women's rights on a level with a concern for human rights. Finally, agencies may maintain that women in developing countries do not desire equality with men. While it may be true that women accept their subordinate position, this does not offset issues of human rights and equal development. Oppressed women may be very silent; given the opportunity, they generally have a great deal to say.     

A new political economy of youth reprised: rejoinder to France and Threadgold

In a previous issue of this journal, France and Threadgold [2015. “Youth and Political Economy: Towards a Bourdieusian Approach.” Journal of Youth Studies doi:10.1080/13676261.2015.1098779] claim that they ‘strongly believe that a political economy perspective remains vital for understanding macro-structural power’ (8), yet they reject key aspects of the version I recommended in an earlier issue of this journal [Côté. J. E. 2014a.“Towards a New Political Economy of Youth.” Journal of Youth Studies 17 (4): 527–543]. They also present a Bourdieusian framework, asserting that it provides a better understanding of the effects of political and the economic forces on the lives of young people. In this article, I show how their rejection of the political-economy-of-youth perspective is based on their misunderstandings of some of the fundamental concepts of that perspective, as well as their misrepresentations of what I recommend to the youth studies community concerning that perspective. Consequently, although their Bourdieusian framework may be useful in illuminating certain aspects of the problem, their attempt to promote their framework as a better approach to the political economy of youth is based on unfounded claims. I use their errors to illustrate several metatheoretical principles that can help researchers to be less imperialistic in their claims, and I offer an analysis of how this dispute reflects the current fragmented nature of the field of youth studies.     

Immigrants,Natives and Social Assistance: Comparable Take‐Up Under Comparable Circumstances

Are immigrants on welfare because they are more likely to be eligible or because they are more likely to claim benefits for which they are eligible? The answer is politically important, but because most current research on immigration and welfare is based on data from the United States, the answer is difficult due to the complexities of the transfer system which make eligibility determinations difficult. In Germany, by contrast, eligibility for the main cash transfer program, Sozialhilfe (Social Assistance), is determined by a comparatively simple nationwide formula. We use data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel to test whether immigrants to Germany are more likely than natives to claim welfare benefits for which they are eligible. We find that immigrants are more likely than native Germans to receive welfare, both because immigrants are more likely to be eligible and because they are more likely, when eligible, to claim their benefits. However, we also find that this greater propensity to take‐up benefits is not related to immigrant status per se: when other sociodemographic factors are accounted for in an appropriate manner, immigrant households are no more likely to take‐up benefits than native households.     

A social comparison perspective of treatment seeking by the homeless

The homeless will readily list ailments they claim to have, yet they will also claim that such ailments are not a problem and do not warrant treatment. In an attempt to understand this apparentparadox, data from a sample of homeless individuals were re-analyzed from a social comparison perspective. It was hypothesized that increased entrenchment in homelessness (increased isolation from nonhomeless environments and further involvement in the homeless environment)—operationalized by longer time spent on the street and a greater number of street friends—would lead homeless individuals to alter their perceptions of what constitutes a problem worthy of treatment. Results supported this hypothesis, in direction, and in almost all tests conducted. The involvement of adaptation level theory in such a social comparison process and the implications for intervention and treatment are discussed.     

Establishing self and meaning in low back pain narratives

Pain narratives encounter the problem of verbalising private and internalised experiences. Words appear to fall short of giving meaning to the feelings and impact of pain. In this paper we report on how people describe their low back pain and the way in which they claim to present this to clinicians. In the research interviews they need to establish themselves as believable narrators and provide accounts of how they legitimise their pain in clinical encounters. As a result, the interviews provide complex and layered narratives of pain and its representation.     

Qualitative Cowboy or Qualitative Dude: An Impasse of Validity,Politics, and Ethics?

Sociological theorists' recent critique of foundationalism, the notion that observers can accurately represent a single, objective reality, has led to calls for sociology to abandon its claim to epistemic privilege. A related debate has ensued among qualitative sociologists over ethnography's claim to produce objective, authoritative accounts of field realities. This debate over "the crisis of representation" has apparently reached an epistemological impasse, as both "modernist" and "postmodernist" participants draw on a conceptual dichotomy inherited from correspondence models of science. The impasse is ethical as well, as participants "talk past one another" as they debate the appropriate responsibilities of sociologists. A pragmatist solution to this dilemma has been offered, but gives insufficient attention to the politics that shape the criteria to be used in judging the validity of accounts in local contexts. Drawing upon "modernist" discussions of field methods and an empirical case of "studying up" in Mondragón, Spain, this paper argues that a more politically attentive pragmatism could contribute to research practice that is both epistemologically and empirically defensible.     

RIDING THE WAVE AND CLAIMING OWNERSHIP OVER ISSUES: THE JOINT EFFECTS OF ADVERTISING AND NEWS COVERAGE IN CAMPAIGNS

Using a realistic experimental design, this article tests twohypotheses concerning the relative effectiveness of campaignadvertising. The first (issue-ownership) hypothesis predictsthat candidates gain the most from advertising on issues overwhich they can claim "ownership." The second (riding-the-wave)hypothesis predicts that candidates are better off when theysynchronize their advertising with news coverage. Our two studiesyield support for the issue-ownership hypothesis, but no evidenceof interactive effects between advertising and news.     

Moral Identity in Friendships between Gay,Lesbian, and Bisexual Students and Straight Students in College

People construct moral identities for being a supportive affiliate of stigmatized groups. To extend past research that focused on such identities within formal organizations, this study seeks to identify the process of moral identity construction in a personal setting—friendships between gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) people and straight people. Analyzing data from in‐depth interviews with college students, we show that straight students claim moral worth by emphasizing their deliberate decisions to develop and sustain friendships with GLB people and by highlighting how the friendships led them to personal enlightenment and political engagement. GLB students, as a stigmatized group, also claim moral worth by emphasizing their ability to transcend the community boundary and to be accepted in the larger society. Students make such claims as they strategically link these aspects of cross‐orientation friendships to existing moral discourses in the larger society and draw on resources available in the organizational and life course contexts.     

Sticks,Stones and Semantics: The Ivory Tower Bully's Vocabulary of Motives

This ethnography focuses on the techniques of normalization used by university professors who are accused by their colleagues of bullying behavior. We examine how the organizational structure and institutional values of the university provide protective coloration for academic intimidation and discourage both the detection and effective labeling of such behavior. In noting that attempts to label bullying behavior frequently fail because the judgments are seen as mere matters of opinion in an environment whose principal currency of exchange is opinion itself, we modify and extend Sykes and Matza's discussion of neutralization techniques to academic settings. While we cannot speak to the presence or absence of guilt feelings on the part of alleged academic bullies, or to whether neutralization techniques successfully assuage such feelings, we can nevertheless discern the operation of these techniques to resist the imputation of unflattering social identities and/or to lay claim to public identities that are highly esteemed within the academy. Moreover, we identify three additional techniques of normalization that are employed by alleged ivory tower bullies: appropriation and inversion, in which accused bullies claim victim status for themselves; evidentiary solipsism, in which alleged bullies portray themselves as uniquely capable of divining and defining the true meaning-structure of events; and emotional obfuscation, which takes the form of employing symbols and imagery that are chosen for their perceived ability to elicit an emotional response on the part of an academic audience.     

Does class analysis still have anything to contribute to the study of politics? — comments

Conclusion We can accept Michael Mann's recent claim that in their endless debates about the social and political importance of class, sociologists are sometimes guilty of engaging in what he calls classrurbation. Far from being an intellectually immature activity, classturbation — to apply the former U.S. Surgeon General's remarks to a novel context — is in reality a safe and productive outlet for healthy questions about the linkages between inequalities and political alignments. We recognize, as does every serious contemporary class analyst we have ever read, that a class-analytic framework can shed light on some types of social phenomena, but not others. It certainly is true that class analysis no longer has any claim, if it ever did, to a privileged position in the development of a critical sociology. But we firmly reject PW's claims that for class to matter in understanding political behavior, its effects must necessarily be larger than that of all other salient cleavages for every time and place. Not only have class analyses of political behavior progressed well beyond dated and misleading conceptualizations, they provide no evidence for a universal pattern of class dealignment.

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Representation Beyond the State: Towards Transnational Democratic Non-state Politics

The crises of representative democracy and of state-based politics have been declared many times and ‘participation’ is often advocated as a remedy for the shortcomings of both. While the literature has extensively discussed representative practices in relation to territorial states, we argue in this article that more attention should be paid to the question of representation within transnational social movements striving for a politics that transcends current territorially bounded representative democracy. Analysing the World Social Forum and West African participatory trade policy-making, we find that as transnational social movements aiming at democratic goals deepen their interactions, they can face demanding questions such as: who or what has a right to be made present in a given political process and how is this established? We claim that avoiding the question of representation in transnational non-state-centred politics leaves power too many places to hide.     

Reevaluating the Concrete–Explanatory Animation Creation as a Digital Catalyst for Cross-Modal Cognition

This article explores the relationship between abstract and concrete as categories of knowledge and Wilensky’s (1991) theory that all ideas are abstract until they become concrete. Dewey (1910/1997) made a similar claim by suggesting that ideas are initially beyond our comprehension until they have become consolidated. This article documents the evolving mental models of 11- and 12-year-old children as they designed and made explanatory animations for the sake of their own learning. The conclusion from this research is that transferring ideas from thought to word, word to image, or transmediation of any kind, is a semiotic tool for cross-modal cognition.     

The Collegiate Learning Assessment: facts and fantasies

The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is a computer administered, open-ended (as opposed to multiple-choice) test of analytic reasoning, critical thinking, problem solving, and written communication skills. Because the CLA has been endorsed by several national higher education commissions, it has come under intense scrutiny by faculty members, college administrators, testing experts, legislators, and others. This article describes the CLA's measures and what they do and do not assess, how dependably they measure what they claim to measure, and how CLA scores differ from those on other direct and indirect measures of college student learning. For instance, analyses are conducted at the school rather than the student level and results are adjusted for input to assess whether the progress students are making at their school is better or worse than what would be expected given the progress of "similarly situated" students (in terms of incoming ability) at other colleges.     

Settlement has many faces: physicians, attorneys and medical malpractice

We conduct an analysis of the jurisdictional dispute over the management of medical malpractice lawsuits, focusing on the process through which liability is defined. We utilize a North Carolina sample of physicians who have been sued, their defense counsel, and counsel for the plaintiff in the case. A comparison of the perspectives of these three parties reveals that over half of the physicians who settle perceive themselves as not liable. Defense counsel are more adept at predicting both negotiated resolutions and whether or not money will be paid than either plaintiffs' counsel or physicians. Almost two-thirds of physicians who thought they were not liable expressed a desire for vindication. Almost half the time when the physicians denied liability money was nonetheless paid to resolve the claim. Physician responses to the outcome of their cases focus on the need for reform, especially in terms of a call for peer or expert review. We identify and discuss culture conflict between law and medicine. For lawyers "settlement" is not a negative thing, but for physicians it implies fault. We challenge existing literature which analyzes the settlement of medical malpractice claims solely in terms of rational economic models, and we argue that social psychological variables are equally important.     

Analysing Competence: Gender and Identity at Work

Competence approaches are among the techniques that claim to measure the behaviour, skills, knowledge and understanding crucial to effective managerial performance. It is claimed that competence approaches empower and develop managers while enabling them to meet organizational objectives. Since the bases for the techniques are avowedly scientific, they are said to provide organizations with a gender neutral form of assessment. In this paper we construct a theoretical framework in terms of which these claims can be analysed and assessed. Using this framework, we examine the competence approach as it has been implemented in six organizations in relation to the claim to objectivity.     

Reply to Sloan [on proxies for birth control

Sloan (1984) argues that annual changes in marital fertility of Swedish wives aged 35-39 between 1911 and 1974 is not a result of annual changes in the use of birth control, but is due to changes in health conditions that increase or decrease marital fertility. As evidence of the lack of effect of contraceptive practice on fertility Sloan cites a study published in 1916 whose author concluded that contraceptive use or nonuse had no effect on family size. Sloan is unaware of the shroud of ignorance that blinded such research in the distant past. There was no accepted methodology to determine contraceptive effectiveness until the 1930s, and scientists did not know key elemental facts about human reproduction. For example, the relationship of ovulation to the risk of pregnancy was unknown in 1916, and was to remain a mystery for more than a decade thereafter. Sloan's "declining health" explanation of low fertility in the West is merely a variant of an older attempt to explain low fertility as a result of high protein intake. Sloan's view that modern couples do not contracept to reach a desired family size and that changes in family size preference will not affect birth control practice among older (or younger it appears as well) couples seems to us to be an idiosyncratic view at best and directly opposed by all survey research. Couples do contracept most effectively when they are trying to prevent an additional birth. The view that failure of some Western couples to reproductively compensate for their child deaths as explained by poor reproductive health seems to assume that couples in non-Western population do so compensate, but this is wrong. The idea that such bereaved couples should have another child is so insensitive to tragedy as to defy further reply. Sloan's acceptance and use of reports that some couples say they wanted more children than they had ignores massive research findings of unwanted fertility among couples in populations with long histories of birth control practice. Further, it is difficult to have much faith in such responses since about 1/2 the couples in the Whelpton el al. study cited by Sloan also said they were fecund. These responses mean that couples may say that they want more than they actually had, but they deliberately did not have such a large and "ideal" family size because of other factors not considered by Sloan. Since it appears that Sloan was unable to find another authority, he cites a 3 page comment of his own in support of the hypothesis of deteriorating environment. He does not actually empirically link age patterns of chronic disease with fecundity loss; his view also ignores research indicating improved health conditions, at least among US women, after the mid-1930s that increased fecundity and then fertility. Thus, his argument that factors other than voluntary birth control could explain annual change in Swedish marital fertility among older couples is unsupported by empirical evidence. His remarks are also irrelevant to the use made in the author's article concerning marital fertility rates as a proxy for the use of annual birth control change among younger unmarried women. The marital rate varies, as does the illegitimacy rate. Annual increases in marital fertility are related to annual increases in illegitimacy; annual declines in marital rates to annual declines in illegitimacy. Sloan's hypothetical trends in fecundity have no bearing on our empirical study of annual change in Swedish illegitimacy rates. Finally, Sloan's claim that social demographers do not view a changing environment as problematic is unsupported and unjustified.     

Going Home to Pakistan: Identity and Its Discontents in Southeastern Europe

In this article I explore the claim that post-independence Macedonia is a cornerstone of European civilization (a traditional Greek claim) and analyze efforts to assert the country's position in the international arena as a “modern” and authentically Western state deserving of membership in the European Union. Such efforts involve the establishment of ties between Macedonians and the Hunzukuts, who live on the remote Hindu Kush Mountains in Pakistan and claim to be descendants of Alexander the Great. I also analyze comparable initiatives, sponsored in recent years by the Greek state, to prove ties between Greeks and the Kalasha, who also live in remote areas of Pakistan and believe that they are descended from Alexander the Great. Greece and post-independence Macedonia offer us insights into the populist underpinnings of the nationalist promotion of a European identity presented as rooted in the East.