Integrating Individual Differences in Career Assessment: The Atlas Model of Individual Differences and the Strong Ring

Career assessment methods often include measures of individual differences constructs, such as interests, personality, abilities, and values. Although many researchers have recently called for the development of integrated models, career counseling professionals have long faced the challenge of integrating this information into their practice. The authors examine the use of integrated models to enhance the career counseling process, including Armstrong, Day, McVay, and Rounds's (2008) RIASEC‐based Atlas Model of Individual Differences (using Holland's 1997, typology of 6 interest types: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional [RIASEC]) and Armstrong, Smith, Donnay, and Rounds's (2004) basic interests‐based Strong Ring. These models provide a structured framework for presenting clients with assessment feedback that emphasizes connections between interests, personality, and abilities.     

Discourse Analysis in Career Counseling and Development

Discourse analysis can be used to understand and interpret culturally and socially produced meanings regarding work and to outline how specific rules and conventions can configure meaning production of work in context. The implications of some core concepts in discourse analysis pertinent to career counseling are explored, including discourse, deconstruction, power/knowledge, psy‐complex, ideology, and identity. Such an exploration has the potential to initiate a process of critical self‐reflection in career counseling and development so as to enhance ethical, fair, and inclusive practices in the field.     

Efficiency Bounds for Missing Data Models With Semiparametric Restrictions

This paper shows that the semiparametric efficiency bound for a parameter identified by an unconditional moment restriction with data missing at random (MAR) coincides with that of a particular augmented moment condition problem. The augmented system consists of the inverse probability weighted (IPW) original moment restriction and an additional conditional moment restriction which exhausts all other implications of the MAR assumption. The paper also investigates the value of additional semiparametric restrictions on the conditional expectation function (CEF) of the original moment function given always observed covariates. In the program evaluation context, for example, such restrictions are implied by semiparametric models for the potential outcome CEFs given baseline covariates. The efficiency bound associated with this model is shown to also coincide with that of a particular moment condition problem. Some implications of these results for estimation are briefly discussed.     

This Harlem life: black families and everyday life in the 1920s and 1930s

This article uses Probation Department files to reconstruct the lives of five ordinary residents of Harlem. It highlights what that black metropolis offered those outside the political and cultural elite, who have dominated historical scholarship, showing how ordinary blacks negotiated the challenges of life in northern neighborhoods, and drew on institutions and organizations, to establish and sustain new lives. We offer the kind of individualized perspective on everyday life that other scholars have provided for high culture, but which does not exist for other realms of existence in Harlem, even in early twentieth century sociological studies of black life. Where scholars seeking to distinguish the neighborhood from a slum have pointed to the prevailing pride and self-confidence of its residents, this article directs attention to more immediate, concrete supports that sustained and enriched life in Harlem. Relationships with spouses, children, siblings and cousins sustained individuals faced with the social reality of living in overcrowded, deteriorating, disease infested housing, subject to the racism of white police, politicians and employers; so too did friendships made in nightclubs, speakeasies, dances and movie theatres, and membership of churches, fraternal organizations, social clubs, and sports clubs and teams.     

Best Nonparametric Bounds on Demand Responses

This paper uses revealed preference inequalities to provide the tightest possible (best) nonparametric bounds on predicted consumer responses to price changes using consumer‐level data over a finite set of relative price changes. These responses are allowed to vary nonparametrically across the income distribution. This is achieved by combining the theory of revealed preference with the semiparametric estimation of consumer expansion paths (Engel curves). We label these expansion path based bounds on demand responses as E‐bounds. Deviations from revealed preference restrictions are measured by preference perturbations which are shown to usefully characterize taste change and to provide a stochastic environment within which violations of revealed preference inequalities can be assessed.     

Estimating Consumer Exposure to PFOS and PFOA

Perfluorinated compounds have been used for more than 50 years as process aids, surfactants, and for surface protection. This study is a comprehensive assessment of consumer exposure to perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) from a variety of environmental and product-related sources. To identify relevant pathways leading to consumer exposure to PFOS and PFOA a scenario-based approach has been applied. Scenarios represent realistic situations where age- and gender-specific exposure occurs in the everyday life of consumers. We find that North American and European consumers are likely to experience ubiquitous and long-term uptake doses of PFOS and PFOA in the range of 3 to 220 ng per kg body weight per day (ng/kg_bw/day) and 1 to 130 ng/kg_bw/day, respectively. The greatest portion of the chronic exposure to PFOS and PFOA is likely to result from the intake of contaminated foods, including drinking water. Consumer products cause a minor portion of the consumer exposure to PFOS and PFOA. Of these, it is mainly impregnation sprays, treated carpets in homes, and coated food contact materials that may lead to consumer exposure to PFOS and PFOA. Children tend to experience higher total uptake doses (on a body weight basis) than teenagers and adults because of higher relative uptake via food consumption and hand-to-mouth transfer of chemical from treated carpets and ingestion of dust. The uptake estimates based on scenarios are within the range of values derived from blood serum data by applying a one-compartment pharmacokinetic model.     

SCALING GOVERNMENTALITY

This article explores contemporary uses of museum co-production for public policy through a sustained theoretical engagement with Tony Bennett's work on museums as an ‘object of government’. The specific focus is a theoretical discussion of the ‘logic of culture’ as it relates to new UK policy uses of participants' ‘experience’ as the desired site of authenticity at the very same time as the process of expressing this authenticity is located as a site for reform. It is argued that Bennett mobilizes two techniques of scale (fixing the analytic lens of governmentality and drawing on a strong scalar correspondence of power) in order to secure a relatively disciplinary reading of governmentality and to foreclose the resistant possibilities of cultural politics. Drawing on the differences between practices associated in UK museums with ‘access’ (which works through the dis-intensification of the difference between the museum and everyday life) and with ‘social impact’ (which requires a re-intensification of this difference in order to increase the visibility of effect), this article concludes by countering Bennett's more disciplinary uses of Foucault with the Foucault of ‘The Subject and Power’. It is argued that the ‘logic of culture’ can be calibrated to varying intensities in considering the coming-into-relationship between the museums and those-to-be-involved. It is specifically argued – following Foucault's spatializaton of ‘thought’ as distance (limit-attitude) and ‘counter-conduct’ as proximity – that the ‘logic of culture’ might be actively re-calibrated to use the spatialized dynamic of distance and proximity to create spaces which might allow the museum and its associated policy – not just those involved – to be affected by the co-production encounter.     

Applying Relational Models to the Graduation of Disability Schedules

Age-specific rates of particular disability types are important for planning purposes and are a valuable input to estimates and projections of populations with different disabilities. However, survey estimates of schedules of disability rates display evidence of sampling variability and sub-national disability schedules are often unavailable for reasons of disclosure protection. This paper develops and evaluates a method to smooth sampling variability in national schedules of disability using a technique that has applicability to sub-national estimation of age-specific disability rates. Relational models are used to adjust the limiting long-term illness schedule for England (Census 2001) to represent different disability schedules (Health Survey for England 2000/2001) smoothing sampling fluctuations. For hearing disability a simple Brass relational model involving two parameters provides a good fit. For other disability types a modified version of the Ewbank relational model with three parameters is required. This paper illustrates that relational models can accurately capture the relationship between age-specific rates of limiting long-term illness and various disability types.     

Infants' Transitions out of a Fussing/Crying State Are Modifiable and Are Related to Weight Status

Currently, about 10% of infants have a weight for length greater than the 95th percentile for their age and sex, which puts them at risk for obesity as they grow. In a pilot obesity prevention study, primiparous mothers and their newborn infants were randomly assigned to a control group or a Soothe/Sleep intervention. Previously, it has been demonstrated that this intervention contributed to lower weight‐for‐length percentiles at 1 year; the aim of the present study was to examine infant behavior diary data collected during the intervention. Markov modeling was used to characterize infants' patterns of behavioral transitions at ages 3 and 16 weeks. Results showed that heavier mothers were more likely to follow their infants' fussing/crying episodes with a feeding. The intervention increased infants' likelihood of transitioning from a fussing/crying state to an awake/calm state. A shorter latency to feed in response to fussing/crying was associated with a higher subsequent weight status. This study provides preliminary evidence that infants' transitions out of fussing/crying are characterized by inter‐individual differences, are modifiable, and are linked to weight outcomes, suggesting that they may be promising targets for early behavioral obesity interventions, and highlighting the methodology used in this study as an appropriate and innovative tool to assess the impact of such interventions.