Chilling out in ‘cosmopolitan country’: Urban/rural hybridity and the construction of Daylesford as a ‘lesbian and gay rural idyll’

This paper advances scholarship on ‘lesbian and gay rural idylls’. A growing literature examines how ‘lesbian and gay rural idylls’ are not only produced in opposition to the urban, but are themselves urban constructs. We extend these contentions by exploring the processes of idyllisation suffusing lesbian and gay festival tourism in Daylesford, a town in non-metropolitan Victoria, Australia. We find that Daylesford’s idyllisation by the lesbian and gay tourism industry blurs the urban/rural binary, and instead hybridises rurality and urbanity in the tourism images and practices of ‘cosmopolitan country’ associated with the town. Research findings from Daylesford are analysed to examine how the dynamics of tourism marketing and festival attendance help produce and articulate this hybrid variant of the ‘lesbian and gay rural idyll’. We utilise two sets of mostly qualitative data for this inquiry: travel commentaries in the news media, and a survey conducted in Daylesford at the 2006 ChillOut Festival, Australia’s largest lesbian and gay rural festival.     

Risk Factors for Problem Gambling Among Indigenous Australians: An Empirical Study

Despite a long history of gambling amongst many Indigenous peoples, knowledge about contemporary Indigenous gambling is sparse. In Australia, previous studies of Indigenous gambling have been severely limited in number, scope and rigour. The research reported in this paper is based on the first Indigenous-specific quantitative gambling research undertaken in Australia since 1996 and draws on the largest sample to date. This study examined numerous aspects of gambling among Indigenous Australians. After appropriate consultations and permission, the study collected surveys from 1,259 self-selected Indigenous adults in 2011 at three Indigenous festivals, online and in several Indigenous communities. This paper draws on these data to identify problem gambling risk factors by comparing selected socio-demographic characteristics, early exposure to gambling, gambling motivations, gambling behaviour, gambling cognitions, and substance use while gambling, amongst non-problem, low risk, moderate risk and problem gamblers. A logistic regression investigated the difference between problem gamblers and all other PGSI groups. Risk factors associated with being a problem gambler were: being older, commencing gambling when under 10 years old, always being exposed to adults gambling as a child, using alcohol and/or drugs while gambling, having family and friends who gamble, having an addiction to gambling and not gambling to socialise, having a high expenditure on commercial gambling, and living in a state or territory other than NSW or QLD. Public health measures to address these risk factors are identified.     

Slavery and redemption in the Catholic missions of the Upper Congo, 1878–1909

The French Catholic Société des missionnaires d’Alger, also known as the White Fathers, sought to abolish slavery in the Upper Congo by creating mission outposts of liberated slaves. The missionaries purchased (‘redeemed’) young African slaves, captives, and dependents, and placed them in mission orphanages. The White Fathers claimed to have liberated these redeemed orphans, even while they ensured, often through force, that they remained alienated from their natal communities and subjugated dependents. In much the same fashion as domestic and Islamic slavery in the immediate environs, the slow integration of these orphans drove the expansion of Catholic mission communities. Through studying Catholic mission slave redemptions at the end of the nineteenth century, this article explores the interactions and development of pre-colonial African, Zanzibar Islamic, and European Christian ideas of slavery and freedom.     

ANOVA models for Brownian motion

We investigate longitudinal models having Brownian-motion covariance structure. We show that any such model can be viewed as arising from a related “timeless” classical linear model where sample sizes correspond to longitudinal observation times. This relationship is of practical impact when there are closed-form ANOVA tables for the related classical model. Such tables can be directly transformed into the analogous tables for the original longitudinal model. We in particular provide complete results for one-way fixed and random effects ANOVA on the drift parameter in Brownian motion, and illustrate its use in estimating heterogeneity in tumor growth rates.     

Social choice,optimal inference and figure skating

We approach the social choice problem as one of optimal statistical inference. If individual voters or judges observe the true order on a set of alternatives with error, then it is possible to use the set of individual rankings to make probability statements about the correct social order. Given the posterior distribution for orders and a suitably chosen loss function, an optimal order is one that minimises expected posterior loss. The paper develops a statistical model describing the behaviour of judges, and discusses Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation. We also discuss criteria for choosing the appropriate loss functions. We apply our methods to a well-known problem: determining the correct ranking for figure skaters competing at the Olympic Games.     

Perfectionism,Coping, and Quality of Intimate Relationships

The present study examined the associations among perfectionism, marital coping, and marital functioning in a community sample of 76 couples. A theoretical model was tested in which maladaptive coping mediates the relationship between trait perfectionism and poorer marital functioning. As predicted, one of the interpersonal dimensions of perfectionism, socially prescribed perfectionism, was associated with maladaptive marital coping and poorer marital adjustment for both the self and the partner, even after controlling for depression and neuroticism. Finally, the use of negative coping strategies mediated the relationship between socially prescribed perfectionism and poorer marital functioning for both the self and the partner. Overall, this study highlights the importance of spouse‐specific forms of perfectionism in marital adjustment.     

Community Differences in the Association Between Parenting Practices and Child Conduct Problems

Various hypotheses were identified regarding the manner in which community context might influence the association between two dimensions of parenting—control and corporal punishment—on child conduct problems. The authors used hierarchical linear modeling with a sample of 841 African American families to test these hypotheses. Consistent with the evaporation hypothesis, the results indicated that the deterrent effect of caretaker control on conduct problems becomes smaller as deviant behavior becomes more widespread within a community. The findings for corporal punishment supported the normative parenting argument. Although there was a positive relationship between caretaker corporal punishment and child conduct problems in communities where physical discipline was rare, there was no association between the two variables in communities where physical discipline was widely prevalent. These results suggest that a particular parenting strategy may be more effective in some neighborhood environments than others. The theoretical implications of this view are discussed.