Still-births among the offspring of male radiation workers at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant: detailed results and statistical aspects

Summary. This study investigates whether there was evidence of increasing risk of still-birth with increasing paternal exposure to ionizing radiation received during employment at the Sellafield nuclear installation before the child was conceived. A significant positive association is found between the total paternal preconceptional exposure to external ionizing radiation and the risk of still-birth (after adjustment for year of birth, social class, birth order and paternal age, odds ratio at 100 mSv 1.24 (95% confidence interval 1.04–1.45)). A summary of the principal scientific findings of this study has been published in the Lancet . This paper describes in detail the statistical methods that were used in the investigation and presents the results in full.     

Knowledge,power, and ethics in qualitative social research

Philadelphia, then and still one of the worst governed of America’s badly governed cities, was having one of its periodic spasms of reform. A thorough study of causes was called for. Not but what the underlining cause was evident to most white Philadelphians: the corrupt semi-criminal vote of the Negro Seventh Ward…. Would it not be well, to elucidate the known causes by a scientific investigation?… With my bride of three months, I settled in one room over a cafeteria run by a College Settlement, in the worst part of the Seventh Ward. We lived there a year, in the midst of an atmosphere of dirt, drunkenness, poverty and crime. Murder sat on our doorstep, police were our government, and philanthropy dropped in with periodic advice. (DuBois, 1968/1975: 194–5 also in Logan, ed. 1944: 42) What had been borne into me during my book studies was my utter ignorance of the manual-working class, that is, of four-fifths of my countrymen…. How was I to get an opportunity of watching, day by day, in their homes and in their workshops, a sufficient number of normal manual-working families to enable me to visualize the class as a whole; to understand what was meant by chronic poverty and insecurity of livelihood. (Webb, 1926: 146–7)     

The calibration of P-values,posterior Bayes factors and the AIC from the posterior distribution of the likelihood

The posterior distribution of the likelihood is used to interpret the evidential meaning of P-values, posterior Bayes factors and Akaike's information criterion when comparing point null hypotheses with composite alternatives. Asymptotic arguments lead to simple re-calibrations of these criteria in terms of posterior tail probabilities of the likelihood ratio. (Prior) Bayes factors cannot be calibrated in this way as they are model-specific.     

Medical Students' Attitudes and Opinions About Human Sexual Behaviour

In their professional capacities doctors are often confronted with clients who present with psycho-sexual problems. At the present time Australian medical students are provided with very little instruction in the areas of human sexual behaviour. This paper examines the attitudes and amount of information possessed by a cohort of second year medical students compared with groups of first and fifth year students; these attitudes and levels of information are then related to students' sex, religious affiliation, strength of religious conviction, where this is seen to be relevant. It is shown that some areas of ignorance exist. The paper concludes by outlining some aspects relevant to courses in human sexual behaviour.     

Housing Conditions of Nuclear and Extended Households in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale Area

Arrivals of new immigrants into the south Florida area have put increased pressure on housing markets and fostered renewed efforts to provide more affordable housing. Many view household extension largely as a response to the lack of a sufficient amount of affordable housing. This paper examines the nature, proportion and housing condition of nuclear and extended households in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area. The study also investigates how the incidence and housing situation of extended households has changed during the period from 1986 to 1990. This study illustrates that extended families in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area are not uniformly worse off than nuclear families, given ethnicity and income level. While the area's housing problems require attention, some of that attention should be focused on removing institutional barriers to household extension and to providing broader housing choices for minority ethnic groups.     

Making Sense of the Census: Why Sampling Might Not Be so Simple

Population and Environment -