CALIBRATING MEASURES OF FAMILY ACTIVITIES BETWEEN LARGE- AND SMALL-SCALE DATA SETS

Two studies of working families are combined to demonstrate a strategy for producing reliable estimates from the combination of self-reported (large N) and observational (small N) data. Both studies examine where and how dual-career families spend time at home. The 500 Family Study is sociological and uses self-reported time diary data from a national sample; the CELF study is anthropological and uses observational scan sampling data from a regional sample of 32 families. The data are combined as if they constitute one sample, and an analytic solution for establishing the reliability of the resulting composite estimates of time use is provided. Merging the data sets provides validation for each study, neither of which is without potential methodological weaknesses. The advantages of combining data from the independent data collection methods are discussed, and selected substantive findings on families' activities are highlighted, illustrating similarities and differences between findings in the independent and combined data sets. Results show that working families spend significant time in a small spectrum of home spaces, particularly kitchens and living rooms, with leisure activities prevailing, but mothers, fathers, and children differ in where and how they spend their time. Overall, a template for merging data from different disciplines and methods is provided.     

LAST OF THE DINOSAURS? BIG WEAPONS,BIG SCIENCE,AND THE AMERICAN STATE FROM HIROSHIMA TO THE END OF THE COLD WAR

This article examines the origins and recent crises in linkages between big science, big weapons, and the U.S. state during and after the cold war. We examine the sources of legitimacy of military dominance of U.S. research and development (R&D) in the first decades of the cold war and argue that the exigencies of a nuclear arms race between two superpowers gave the military an unprecedented peacetime claim on science and technology resources. We argue that economic crises, political challenges by peace movements, and technological exhaustion of the nuclear arms race in the 1980s weakened military claims to science and technology leadership, but that the 1991 Persian Gulf war deflected what might have been a major shift in U.S. R&D priorities. We conclude by examining U.S. post-cold war R&D policy and find that military priorities remain preeminent.     

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND THE CHARACTER OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE

The paper deals with the basic features of the life-space created by contemporary information industry,and with the dominant attitudes towards the opportunities and limitations information technology offers and imposes. We consider the problem of information glut, the quality of public discourse, the question of privacy and technological alienation. Concerning the basic attitudes, we discuss the aesthetic, the moral and the religious views, considered in the context of the present life-space pervaded and shaped by information technology. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possible consequences of global homogenization and of the cultural ahistoricity that are being created by the massive use of information technology. Among the positive aspects of this new 'global culture of the present' we point out the possible increase of global human solidarity; among the negative ones, we point out the flattening and shrinking of the space of human experience, which this uniform culture of the present imposes.     

STANDARDS-MAKING ORGANIZATIONS AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF AMERICAN LIFE

Standards for products and procedures shape every facet of contemporary American life. Yet despite their pervasiveness and their centrality to the process of rationalization, standards have been virtually ignored by sociologists. This paper argues that the evolution of standards promulgating organizations and their struggle for control of the standards-making process is a neglected feature of societal rationalization. Specifically, the history of ANSI and other standards-making organizations illustrates how a shift in the engine of organizational rationalization may have taken place and how, as part of that shift, the "power to set premises" was successfully claimed by the private sector.     

GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION,LAND MARKET,AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT: EVIDENCE FROM CHINESE CITIES

This article investigates how government intervention in land market affects China's urban development, using data from prefecture‐level cities between 2000 and 2010. We find that government intervention enlarges the impact of positive productivity shocks on housing price appreciation, through mainly the government control over residential land supply. However, we find no significant evidence that high government intervention constrains population growth and leads to wage increase. Such patterns of urban dynamics can be explained by the fact that migrant workers are the driving force behind China's urbanization, but they have limited housing demand and are not well compensated. (JEL P52, R12, H11)     

INFORMATION AND THE LIFE CYCLE CONSUMPTION OF HAZARDOUS GOODS

Safety is a major area of public concern. The fact that people take risky occupations, smoke or fail to use seat belts often provokes a regulatory response designed to either protect people from the risks directly or to provide them with more information on the hazards involved. Such policy is often based on the view that risk-taking behavior is irrational or ill-advised. This paper develops life cycle models of the decision to consume hazardous goods. A particular focus of the analysis is to consider the rational response to information about hazards. Rational consumption of a hazardous good is shown to depend on such factors as the nature of the hazard, age, life expectancy, age at which information on the hazard was received and, of course, the underlying value of the good itself.     

DISCURSIVE FORMATION, LIFE STORIES, AND THE EMERGENCE OF CO-DEPENDENCY:

Following Foucault, this article argues that current research on life stories can be enriched by treating them as "discursive formations." The analysis undertakes a streamlined "archaeology" and "genealogy" to examine the emergence of co-dependency as one such formation. Various co-dependency "theorists" illustrate the ways that rules for true statements in co-dependency discourse contradict those of its psychological and addictive predecessors. These rules produce a unique discursive formation and different life stories. Moreover, Foucault's approach stresses the role of "power/knowledge" in the construction of the co-dependency canon, deepening understanding of life stories as forms of both empowerment and subjection to alternative forms of authority.     

AN EMPIRICAL TEST OF RESPONDENT-DRIVEN SAMPLING: POINT ESTIMATES, VARIANCE, DEGREE MEASURES, AND OUT-OF-EQUILIBRIUM DATA

This paper, which is the first large-scale application of respondent-driven sampling (RDS) to nonhidden populations, tests three factors related to RDS estimation against institutional data using two WebRDS samples of university undergraduates. First, two methods of calculating RDS point estimates are compared. RDS estimates calculated using both methods coincide closely, but variance estimation, especially for small groups, is problematic for both methods. In one method, the bootstrap algorithm used to generate confidence intervals is found to underestimate variance. In the other method, where analytical variance estimation is possible, confidence intervals tend to overestimate variance. Second, RDS estimates are found to be robust against varying measures of individual degree. Results suggest the standard degree measure currently employed in most RDS studies is among the best-performing degree measures. Finally, RDS is found to be robust against the inclusion of out-of-equilibrium data. The results show that valid point estimates can be generated with RDS analysis using real data, but that further research is needed to improve variance estimation techniques.     

RECONSTRUCTING DAILY LIFE IN THE PAST: AN HERMENEUTICAL APPROACH TO ETHNOGRAPHIC DATA

Traditional sources of sociohistorical data capture only a narrow sense of past lifeworlds. Ethnographic accounts often preserve greater details of social practice but have less clear guidelines for use as data. We evaluate the use of hermeneutical theory as providing guidelines for a method by which ethnographies may be used as sociohistorical data. Hermeneutical analysis of ethnographic "texts" is used to reconstruct patterns of daily life in early-twentieth-century rural Appalachia. This method involves: (1) concept-critique to separate observations from the theoretical framework of the ethnographic account, and (2) validation through a logic of internal consistency and comparison. Through hermeneutical analysis, ethnographics can be made to yield observations of social relations not otherwise available. Our analysis suggests benefits and drawbacks of hermeneutical analysis of ethnographic texts.     

THE BRIDLED BRIDE OF PALESTINE: ORIENTALISM,ZIONISM, AND THE TROUBLED URBAN IMAGINATION

Through ethnographic and archival research centered in Jaffa, this article analyzes how the image of the Jewish-Arab mixed city has been represented and (re)produced in the Zionist historical imagination since the establishment of the state of Israel to the present. Vacillating between romantic historicity and political violence, the image of Jaffa poses a political and hermeneutic challenge to the territorial project of urban Judaization, which ultimately failed to define and establish the national-cum-cultural identity of this “New-Old” city. This failure, I argue, results in a persistent pattern of semiotic ambivalence which, from the Jewish-Israeli point of view, positions Jaffa both as a source of identity and longing (in the distant past) as well as a symbol of alterity and enmity (in the recent past)— an object of desire and fear alike. As such, Jaffa and other ethnically mixed towns (including Ramle, Lydda, Haifa, and Acre) occupy a problematic place in Israeli and Palestinian political and cultural imagination. A bi-national borderland in which Arabs and Jews live de facto together, these cities bring to the fore, on the one hand, the paradox of Palestinian citizens in a fundamentally Jewish state, while simultaneously suggesting, by the very spatial and social realization of “mixed-ness,” the potential imaginary of its solution. Unfolding through four distinct historical modalities of urban Orientalism, this article historicizes the highly politicized image of the Jewish-Arab city and the discourse on its future. These discursive formations reconfigured the public space that enabled, paradoxically since the October 2000 events, new political claims for equal citizenship, bi-national cooperation, and Palestinian presence.     

THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE: A REVIEW OF THE MODELS

This paper reviews four consumer maximization models where the probability of premature death enters as a variable that is both known to the consumer and under his control. These models generate a number of interesting results with respect to a person's willingness to pay for an increased chance of living. The most useful to the cost-benefit analyst is the derived relationship between this willingness-to-pay value and a person's lifetime earnings, and thus the relationship between the theoretically correct willingness-to-pay approach to the valuation of life-saving programs and the widely-used human-capital approach. However, the conclusions of the reviewed models are in this regard conflicting. Two of the models establish a theoretical basis for investigating the correlation of these two measures; however, this basis is shown to follow from an unrealistic assumption concerning the person's lifetime utility function. The remaining two models, although based upon more realistic assumptions, do not claim to provide theoretical grounds for making such investigations. The conclusion of this review is that in the absence of available data on personal demand for increased survival probability it is impossible to determine the relationship between the willingness-to-pay and the human-capital approaches to placing a value on human life .     

RESPONSE RATES AND QUALITY OF DATA: A RE-EXAMINATION OF THE MAIL QUESTIONNAIRE*

Traditionnellement, dans les sciences sociales on a été préoccupé par les techniques destinées à accoître les taux de réponse aux questionnaires distribués par la poste. Ce n'est que rarement qu'on a essayé de déterminer si des taux de réponse élevés avait une relation avec la qualité des données obtenues. Si on considère les taux de réponse d'envinon 60 pour cent obtenus dans les enquêtes faites par entrevues par les centres de recherche commerciaux, on doit réexaminer le problème de l'utilisation des questionnaires en voyés par la poste comme une alternative, même si on ne prend pas en considération la grande différence de coût par sujet entre les entrevues et les questionnaires envoyés par la poste. Dans la recherche discutée ici, le même questionnaire a été envoyé par la poste, dans des conditions différentes, à trois échantillons tirés au hasard. Le taux de réponse pour les trois Cchantillons variaient de 33 à 48 pour cent, mais les données obtenues dans chaque échantillon étaient pratiquement équivalentes. Pour controler ce resultat, un questionnaire semblable a été envoyéà un échantillon tiré d'une autre population. Le taux de réponse à ce questionnaire était juste inférieur à 90 pour cent, mais les données obtenues des premiers et des derniers sujets étaient généralement équivalentes. Traditionally, social scientists have been preoccupied with techniques for increasing response rates to mail questionnaires. Only rarely have there been attempts to ascertain whether high response rates are related to the quality of data obtained. Given current completion rates of about 60 per cent for interviews by commercial survey research centres, the issue of using mail questionnaires as an alternative data-gathering technique requires re-examination, even apart from any consideration of the wide differential between interviews and mail questionnaires in cost per respondent. In the current research, the same questionnaire was mailed under varying conditions to three independent random samples. The response rates for the three samples varied from 33 to 48 percent, but the data obtained from each sample were basically equivalent. As a further check on this finding, an overlapping questionnaire was sent to a sample from another population. The response rate to this questionnaire was just under 90 per cent, but the data from earlier and later respondents were generally equivalent.     

SOCIAL ISOLATION OF THE URBAN POOR:

We focus on the effects of race, class, and neighborhood on social isolation. Using data from households in Atlanta, Georgia, we compare poor and nonpoor African Americans to nonpoor whites on two types of social ties and the social resources inherent in those ties. We find that poverty has an important influence on the social resources available to African Americans in and outside of their household. Poor blacks are less likely than other blacks and nonpoor whites to live with another adult, to have even one person outside the household with whom they discuss important matters (a discussion partner), or to have a college-educated person in their discussion network. Higher neighborhood poverty reduces the size of the discussion network for whites and blacks and affects the probabilities of having any kind of social contacts. Important for the social isolation thesis is our finding that among African Americans, living in a very poor neighborhood increases social isolation and reduces access to social resources via one's network of close ties.     

THE URBAN CONTEXT OF HISTORICAL ACTIVISM:

This article examines the contextual determinants of two types of NAACP activism between 1930 and 1939. They are the justice-oriented outreach of insurgency (e.g., a civil rights rally), and chapter-building activities (e.g., electing committee chairpersons). Activism is analyzed using a more diverse set of factors than previous research on the sociopolitical context of social movements. Specifically, I examine historical urbanization and prior racial institutional development in 136 urban counties of the United States, about 95% of the 1930 African American urban system. WLS regression is used to provide a strong statistical basis for understanding the structural power and liberation context of these two distinct types of activism during the uniquely constrained Depression Era. Both insurgency and chapter-building activities increased due to the expanding non-southern location of African Americans and the effects of WWI-era declines in the population of foreign-born hites. They declined as a result of extreme racial-occupational segregation in the local area and being distant from a predominantly African American county. The factors shaping the two types of activism were not equal, in part due to both shared and non-shared determinants. A particularly instructive finding was that wage growth served as a lever of social control, being negatively related to insurgency. Viewed together, the findings clearly point to the joint influence of economic and noneconomic factors in shaping NAACP activism during the 1930s, and enhance our understanding of the broader determinants of Africans activism generally.     

TEXTURES OF THE MODERN: VIENNESE CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL HISTORY AND URBAN STUDIES

The following essay recapitulates the findings of a research project on Viennese modernity, which since 1995 has involved a group of historians, political scientists, literary scholars and sociologists examining the different phases in the history of the city in the twentieth century from a transdisciplinary perspective. The point of departure for the project was its participants' dissatisfaction with a myopic image of twentieth-century Vienna increasingly constricted to literary and aesthetic practices, which has focused on the ‘golden age’ of high culture in the Habsburg capital of the fin-de-siècle while omitting crucial periods of the city's history, in particular the political and cultural crisis between 1918 and 1938, and the phase of material and cultural reconstruction after the ‘collapse of civilization’ that was Nazism.     

LIMITATIONS OF EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE FOR SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION: UNPACKING THE COMPLEXITY

Abstract

64 students in their first semester of a four year BA program in social work were found to have social attitudes and occupational values that differed significantly from those of their contemporaries who majored in the social sciences (N = 75). The study attempted to determine whether social background, individual occupational choice or institutional selection could account for these differences.

The attitudes of the social work students were practically identical to those of a comparison group (N = 58) of unsuccessful applicants for the same school of social work. Therefore institutional selection procedures could not account for the differences between the social work and the social science students. It was found that the differences in attitudes between social work students and candidates on the one hand and social science majors on the other hand persisted when differences in social background and previous work experience were statistically controlled. It was therefore concluded that individual occupational choice was the main source of the attitude differences found.