Can one TV show make a difference? Will & Grace and the Parasocial Contact Hypothesis

Television has an opportunity to influence beliefs about groups with which individuals typically may have little direct social contact. This study describes a synthesis of the Contact Hypothesis and the concept of Parasocial Interaction to pose what we call the Parasocial Contact Hypothesis to test whether exposure to gay men on Will & Grace can influence attitudes toward gay men in general. Based on a study of 245 university students, this study examines the relationships among number and intimacy of gay social contacts, parasocial interaction, viewing frequency of Will & Grace, and scores on Herek's Attitudes Toward Gay Men and Lesbians scale. Increased viewing frequency and parasocial interaction were found to correlate with lower levels of sexual prejudice-a relationship that was most pronounced for those with the least amount of social contact with lesbians and gay men.     

Optimal population and exhaustible resource constraints

A large literature considers the optimal size and growth rate of the human population, trading off the utility value of additional people with the costs of a larger population. In this literature, an important parameter is the social weight placed on population size; a standard result is that a planner with a larger weight on population chooses larger population levels and growth rates. We demonstrate that this result is conditionally overturned when an exhaustible resource constraint is introduced: if the discount rate is small enough, the optimal population today decreases with the welfare weight on population size. That is, a more total-utilitarian social planner could prefer a smaller population today than a more average-utilitarian social planner. We also present a numerical illustration applied to the case of climate change, where we show that under plausible real-world parameter values, our result matters for the direction and magnitude of optimal population policy.     

我国人口态势与消费模式对碳排放的影响分析

本文应用STIRPAT扩展模型,考察近30年来我国人口规模、人口结构、居民消费及技术进步因素对碳排放的影响。研究发现,居民消费与人口结构变化对我国碳排放的影响已超过人口规模的单一影响力。居民消费水平提高与碳排放增长高度相关,居民消费模式变化正在成为我国碳排放的新的增长点;人口结构因素中,人口城镇化率的提高通过对化石能源消费、水泥制造及土地利用变化等的影响导致碳排放增长;人口年龄结构变化对生产的影响大于对消费的影响,其对碳排放影响的主要途径是生产领域劳动力的丰富供应;家庭户规模减小导致人均消费支出的增加及总户数消费规模的扩张,以家庭户为分析单位考察其对碳排放的影响具有较高的解释力。针对分析结果,探讨了未来我国低碳社会发展的相关应对之策。     

Twenty-third conference and general assembly of the European Society for Population Economics, London, 2008

Report

Twenty-third conference and general assembly of the European Society for Population Economics, London, 2008     

Knowledge translation efforts in child and youth mental health: a systematic review

The availability of knowledge translation strategies that have been empirically studied and proven useful is a critical prerequisite to narrowing the research-to-practice gap in child and youth mental health. Through this review the authors sought to determine the current state of scientific knowledge of the effectiveness of knowledge translation approaches in child and youth mental health by conducting a systematic review of the research evidence. The findings and quality of the 12 included studies are discussed. Future work of high methodological quality that explores a broader range of knowledge translation strategies and practitioners to which they are applied and that also attends to implementation process is recommended.     

A Brief History of the Pacific Sociological Association

Founded in 1929 by Emory S. Bogardus, the PSA is the oldest regional sociological association. During its 85-year history, the association has steadily increased in membership, participation, registration and size of its annual meeting, complexity of organizational structure, and has moved from a gemeinshaft to a gesellshaft culture and to a more inclusive and democratic association. Much of this change has mirrored the growth of sociology in general and of higher educational institutions in U.S. and has been made possible essentially through the work and effort of volunteers.     

The implications of mean scaling for the calculation of aggregate consumer elasticities

Mean scaling is a common assumption in the estimation of aggregate consumer elasticities—in particular, expenditure elasticities, but also (implicitly) compensated price elasticities. The assumption is that each household’s income changes in the same proportion as aggregate income. If correct, that implies no bias in the use of aggregate data for estimation of expenditure elasticities. If incorrect, though, there may be substantial bias, especially if there is a high degree of inequality in the underlying income distribution, and regardless of whether one uses micro or aggregate data. We explore this issue, both theoretically and illustratively, using realistic (empirically derived) elasticity estimates coupled with relatively high and low degrees of income inequality.     

What is society? Social thought and the arts of government

Following conservative politicians, neoliberal philosophers and radical critics, different strands of social science, including those using Foucault's governmentality approach, joined the questioning of the salience of 'society' and ideas of 'the social' over the last decades. When the social reappeared, it was often in the moral domains of community and civil society. This argument re-evaluates the contribution of Foucauldian histories, or 'genealogies', of the social to these fundamental questions. Drawing upon them, it attends to their arguments concerning the place of social thought on the modern episteme in relation to economics, the emergence of the idea of 'society' with the modern arts of government of the state, and the formation of the 'social question'. The argument here allows that preconditions of formation of 'society' lie in the legal and political techniques of the territorial sovereign state. However, the literature under investigation indicates the implicit normativity of an idea of 'society' as a 'problematic unity' and the enduring necessity of a social domain in a law-governed state with a relatively independent economic sphere. This discussion thus seeks to contribute to the wider revaluation and redeployment of these terms in today's context.     

Rank-based test procedures for interaction in the two-way layout with one observation per cell

New aligned-rank test procedures for the composite null hypothesis of no interaction effects (without placing restrictions on the two main effects) against appropriate composite general alternatives are developed for the standard two-way layout with a single observation per cell. Relative power performances of the two new aligned-rank procedures and existing tests due to Tukey (1949) and to de Kroon & van der Laan (1981) are examined via Monte Carlo simulation. Extensive power studies conducted on the 5 × 6 and 5 × 9 two-way layouts with one observation per cell show superior performance of the new procedures for a variety of interaction effects. Simulated critical values for the new procedures are provided in settings where the number of levels for each of the factors is between 3 and 9, inclusive.