A descriptive analysis of family discussions about everyday problems and decisions

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1957) and “An operant analysis of problem solving” (1966) were used to develop a coding system to analyze the...     

Class conflict and racist ideology in the formation of modern Guyanese society

Pendant toute l'histoire coloniale de la Guyane, la classe dirigeante a imposé de façon disproportionnée une politique de répartition de bénéfices et de charges économiques aux divers groupes ethniques subordonnés. Cette politique se justifiait en termes des stéréotypes raciales des indoguyanais et des afro-guyanais de la part de la classe dirigeante, ce qui avait comme résultat une disparité sociale et économique entre les deux groupes. Bien qu'une coöpération ait existé périodiquement entre les travailleurs indo-guyanais et afro-guyanais dans la lutte contre la classe dirigeante, ils se sont souvent servis des mêmes stéréotypes raciales que la classe dirigeante dans une tentative d'affermir leurs situations sociales et économiques les uns vis-à-vis des autres. Les études pluralistes et culturelles-écologiques de la société guyanaise tiennent rarement compte de ces procédés.
Throughout Guyanese colonial history, the ruling class applied a policy of disproportionate allocation of economic benefits and burdens to different subordinated ethnic groups. This policy was justified in terms of ruling-class racial sterotypes of Indo- and Afro-Guyanese, and resulted in social and economic disparities between these groups. Although there was periodic cooperation between Indo- and Afro-Guyanese workers in struggles against the ruling class, they often used ruling-class racial stereotypes in attempts to strengthen their social and economic positions vis-à-vis each other. Pluralist and cultural-ecological approaches to Guyanese society seldom take these processes into account.     

The social bases of declining infant mortality: Lessons from a nineteenth-century Italian town

Studies of the historical decline of infant mortality in the West have relied mainly on aggregate-level data. We use the Italian population register and related sources to look more directly at the social forces bearing on declining infant mortality. We focus on the town of Casalecchio di Reno, an agricultural community near Bologna, for a period (1865–1921) in which the town shifted from sharecropping to a wage-labour economy, and mortality rates declined sharply. The implications of various social and demographic factors for the likelihood of infant death are examined and related to explanations of the historical decline in infant mortality.     

The impact of legislator and constituency ideology on voting on the assault weapons ban

Using variables that represent a legislator's entire legal constituency, previous research by social scientists has concluded that views of the legislator's constituency have little effect on how legislators vote. This question is reexamined by defining constituency as those voters most likely to vote for the legislator (i.e., members of the legislator's own political party and independents). Furthermore, instead of measuring constituency by either a demographic or vote-based measure, a survey measure of the ideological identification of voters (i.e., the voter's self-identification as liberal, moderate, or conservative) is introduced. It is found that the ideology of a senator's electoral constituency was an important factor on the recent U.S. Senate vote to ban 19 semi-automatic assault weapons. The findings have important implications for how social scientists conceptualize and measure constituency.     

Elderly migration and its implications for service provision in rural communities: an Ontario perspective

Following a discussion of the role of migration in the aging of rural populations and of consequent implications for service provision in rural communities, a case study featuring demographic and service use data for Grey County, Ontario, is presented. Cohort Survival Analysis of census data for the period 1971–1986 indicates a consistent net in-migration of elderly into the county and a complex but predictable pattern of elderly relocation from townships to villages and towns within Grey. The demographic analysis is complemented and extended by the examination of survey data on the residential history and service use of a sample of elderly residents drawn from two communities in Grey County. The survey results provide valuable clues for the interpretation of the demographic analysis and reveal residential history to be a potentially important pre-condition of dependence on formal services intended for the maintenance of elderly persons in the community. The paper concludes with a discussion of the need for local analysis of migration impacts and of the relationship between such impacts and longstanding problems of rural service provision.     

MEASURING THE NOMINAL VALUE OF FINANCIAL SERVICES IN THE NATIONAL INCOME ACCOUNTS

The recent growth in the U. S. financial service sector has resurrected the controversy over the treatment of financial services in the national income accounts. The main points of contention are the treatment of interest payments and the valuation of "free" financial services provided by banks. To examine different treatments of financial services, we employ a financial firm model that links financial service prices to the user cost of money. We show that our approach subsumes both the Department of Commerce and the U. N. Statistical Office approaches and thereby provides a heretofore absent economic foundation for their methods.     

Public planning and political strategy

Planning theory and practice derived from corporate experience, management science and rational decision theory have had little influence on decision-making in the public sector. The political environment and organizational complexity of public decision making render conventional approaches to objective, rational, comprehensive planning of limited value in government agencies and in private corporations involved in public policy making. A more effective approach to strategic planning and management must be based on an understanding of the political dynamics through which policies are made. It must adopt a variety of styles directly related to major functions in the policy making process and use a variety of political intervention and influence techniques that facilitate the implementation of plans and policies.     

Supersaturated designs with high searching probability

A supersaturated design is essentially a fractional factorial design whose number of experimental variables is greater than or equal to its number of experimental runs. Under the effect sparsity assumption, a supersaturated design can be very cost-effective. In this paper, our prime objective is to compare the existing two-level supersaturated designs for the noisy case through the probability of correct searching—a powerful criterion proposed by Shirakura et al. [1996. Searching probabilities for nonzeroeffects in search designs for the noisy case. Ann. Statist. 24, 2560–2568]. An algorithm is proposed to construct supersaturated designs with high probability of correct searching. Examples are given for illustration.