Climatic change and migration from Oceania: Implications for Australia,New Zealand and the United States of America

It is possible that climatic change may stimulate population movements as people turn to migration as one strategy of adaptation. This paper attempts to assess possible migration flows which may occur, in response to climatic shifts over the next thirty years, from small island states in the south-west Pacific ocean region to the United States, Australia and New Zealand. It is argued that the small island states appear vulnerable to climatic change, with low coral atolls being most at risk. Adverse impacts of climatic change will be one extra pressure on small island states, many of which are already struggling to cope with sustainable management of their natural resources and with the demands of their rapidly growing populations for education, housing and employment. The migration strategy is likely to entail significant medium-term health, psychological and social costs for some Pacific island migrants as they try to move or cope with life in western industrialised societies.     

Delinquent Career-Lines: A Conceptual Link Between Theory and Juvenile Offenses*

Theories of delinquent behavior have failed to adequately explain the seeming lack of specialization or development in the delinquent careers of chronic offenders. The extent to which delinquents specialize in their criminal careers is unclear because of inadequacies in two related areas: the offense typologies or classifications used and the failure to consider in the analysis the entire sequence of crimes. It is argued that both of these areas can benefit from utilization of the “career-line” metaphor from occupational literature. The arrest histories of a sample of 767 juveniles were analyzed with a technique—variance centroid scaling—desirable for the classification or scaling of crime. Four dimensions were discovered. An analysis of 62 careers in the sample reveals that three forms of “developmental” careers are prevalent: careers that move (1) from burglary to serious crimes against persons, (2) from status offenses to auto theft, and (3) from all crimes to drug use. The implications of these results are discussed for issues of specialization and diversity in delinquent careers and the respecification of theories and intervention strategies.     

Bivariate kurtotic distributions of garment fibre data

Summary. A bivariate and unimodal distribution is introduced to model an unconventionally distributed data set collected by the Forensic Science Service. This family of distributions allows for a different kurtosis in each orthogonal direction and has a constructive rather than probability density function definition, making conventional inference impossible. However, the construction and inference work well with a Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis.     

‘Children in Need’: Using Geographical Information Systems to Inform Strategic Planning for Social Service Provision

SUMMARY: Recent legislation, requires local authorities to provide services such as day care for children in need. New computer techniques for geo-spatial analysis—Geographical Information Systems—ore now muck used by local authorities in planning environmental and engineering services. This article explores the extent to which these techniques can be applied to social data and, in particular, whether they are useful for strategic planning of day care and other social service provision.     

Latent Content and Ideology in a Subjective Measure of Alienation

This study examines aspects of a major research tradition in sociology which developed from Seeman's classic work on the meanings of alienation. It argues that the Powerlessness Scale contains an unintended, latent ideological content (one that was excluded in Seeman's delineation of alienation's meanings through his translation of alienation theory into the language of Rotter's social learning theory). However, the Powerlessness Scale that was developed from Seeman's conceptual analysis drew on the person's perception of the nation-state, its functions and legitimacy, thus reintroducing both polemical and political content into the empirical assessment of alienation. Using a panel of expert judges we tested the hypothesis that high-powerlessness statements on this scale are associated with critical perceptions of the nation-state and its functioning while low-powerlessness statements tend to reflect a more conformist perspective (the former being similar to the theoretical assertions of "power elite" theory and the latter to the "pluralist" form of political theory). The data provided by the expert judges are in general agreement with the hypothesis. A critical interpretation of the Powerlessness Scale is suggested in terms of O'Connor's model of the state and its modern functions.