Lying with man as with woman: rethinking the impact of religious discourse on gay community strength

The impact of hostile and neutral or favorable religious discourse on gay community strength, as quantified by the efficiency of six types of gay colonization of public space, was examined in 200 American cities. Baptist and Holiness-Pentecostal membership was negatively correlated with most types of colonization, pro-gay Protestant and Catholic membership was mostly irrelevant, and Jewish membership was positively correlated at significant levels. In a logistic regression on dichotomized strength, only Jewish membership was a significant covariate. Results are discussed in the context of cultural studies and queer theory.     

Why does migration decrease fertility? Evidence from the Philippines

We model the impact of past migration on fertility, assessing the separate effects of relative urbanization of the destination, as a proxy for norms, and post-migration employment, as a proxy for opportunity costs. In the Philippines, we find that large fertility declines accompany post-migration employment. If not followed by work for pay, the estimated fertility impact of migration is small. We find little evidence of migrant selectivity in fertility, and offer speculative evidence that fertility disruption accompanying migration may be large enough to account for much of the apparent effect of normative adaptation.     

Geographical Distribution of Some Young Offenders

Youthful offending rates for municipalities in metropolitan Melbourne have earlier been calculated, and those rates have been interpreted by some as indicating the seriousness of the problem from one municipality to another. However, that approach wrongfully presumes some social uniformity across the municipality. In this paper, three municipalities with quite different offending rates are broken into more socially homogeneous areas, and offending rates are calculated for those smaller areas. Each municipality is shown to have areas of both very high and very low offending rates, plainly indicating that a rate for the municipality alone masks the specific areas where problems may or may not occur. It is suggested that the benefits in providing such specific information based on other than historically determined boundaries, are obvious for social planning and funding purposes.     

Point-of-expansion,structure, and selection in multivariable polynomial regression

This article discusses three issues important in multiple linear regression analysis when a polynomial response function is used. These are (1) the role of the point of expansion, about which the response function is formulated, (2) the effect of polynomial structure among the predictor variables, and (3) the appropriate use of methods for selecting predictors. Two examples are included for illustration.