Refugees: Challenges to Protection

By the end of the year 2000, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees will have been in existence for 50 years – which is probably some sort of record for an organization originally set up with just a three‐year mandate. There were many reasons for so limiting the successor agency to the International Refugee Organization, but it is doubtful whether anyone seriously thought that refugee problems would be resolved so quickly, or indeed that UNHCR would develop into the highly operational, visible and extensively funded entity that we see today. Fifty years of experience nevertheless suggests that it is high time for an audit, for an evaluation of strengths, weaknesses and achievements, and a little strategic thinking about the future.     

The Correspondence Between Fertility Intentions and Behavior in the United States

Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we describe the correspondence between intended family size and observed fertility for US men and women in the 1957–64 birth cohorts. Mean fertility intentions calculated from reports given in the mid‐20s modestly overstate completed fertility. But discrepancies between stated intent and actual fertility are common—the stated intent at age 24 (for both women and men) is more likely to miss than to match completed fertility. We focus on factors that predict which women and men will have fewer or more children than intended. Consistent with life‐course arguments, those unmarried, childless, or (for women) still in school at approximately age 24 were most likely to underachieve their intended parity (i.e., had fewer children than intended at age 24). We discuss how such discrepancies between intentions and behavior may cumulate to produce sizable cross‐group fertility differences.     

Material hardship and self-rated health among low-income households in South Korea

Concerns over poverty and health inequality are growing in South Korea. Using advanced statistical methods including lagged-dependent variable and fixed-effects approaches, we investigated whether experiencing material hardship (MH) was associated with self-rated health (SRH) among low-income households in South Korea. This study found that the experience of MH was positively associated with higher likelihood of reporting poor SRH (OR = 1.42, p < .05) and that experiencing two or more items of MH presented more harmful influence on SRH (OR = 2.02, p < .001). This study also found that the negative association between MH and SRH was stronger among the unemployed households.     

Local efficiency of moment estimators in beta-binomial model

In this paper, the beta-binomial model is introduced as a Markov chain. It is shown that the correlated binomial model of Kupper and Haseman (1978) is identical to the additive binomial model of AItham(1978) and both are a first order approximation of the beta-binomial model. For small γ, the local efficiency of the moment estimators for the mean ρ and the extra-binomial variation γ is examined analytically. It is shown that, locally, the moment estimator for p is efficient up to the second order of y. Exact formulae for the relative efficiency are obtained for both the cases with γ known and unknown. Generalization to the unequal sample size case is also carried out. In particular, the gain in efficiency by using the quasi-likelihood estimator instead of the ratio estimator for p is studied when γ is known. These results are in agreement with the Monte Carlo results of Kleinman(1973) and Crowder(1985).     

Peer modeling and college men's sexually impositional behavior in the laboratory

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of peer modeling on sexually impositional behavior in the laboratory. Male participants with and without a self‐reported history of sexually aggressive behavior viewed video clips depicting nonaggressive and sexually aggressive behavior and then chose one of the clips to show to a female confederate. Half of the participants were first exposed to a male confederate who showed the sexually aggressive video clip to a female confederate. The other half of the participants were exposed to a male confederate who showed a nonaggressive video clip to a female confederate. Exposure to a male confederate who showed a sexually aggressive video clip to a female was associated with participants' choosing to engage in this same behavior. A self‐reported history of sexually aggressive behavior was also associated with participants' showing the sexually aggressive video clip in spite of believing the effect on the female viewer would be negative.     

Union organizing effort and success in the U.S., 1948–2004

While union density in the public sector has increased in recent decades, private sector union density in the U.S. has declined steadily since the mid-1950s. Scholars have evoked a variety of explanations to account for the decline in union membership, but substantially less attention has been devoted to understanding the contribution of the union organizing process as governed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In this paper, we focus on two aspects of this process: union organizing effort (the effort to establish union representation elections to organize non-unionized workers) and union organizing success (success in winning union representation elections). Using annual time series data for the U.S. from 1948 to 2004, we show that there has been a long-term decline in both union organizing effort and union organizing success, which likely contributes to declining union density. We focus on three explanations for these changes: the political–legal environment for unions, deindustrialization and globalization, and employer opposition to unionization efforts. We find that each of these factors contributes to organizing effort and success and conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research for future mobilization efforts.     

Rethinking Gender and Violence: Agency,Heterogeneity, and Intersectionality

This paper is a consideration of the increasing diversity of images of gender violence and its victims, as both the grassroots antiviolence activists, and the scholars of the movements and the violence that inspires the activism, engage with cultural codes and feeling rules that tend to narrow the criteria for what constitutes gender violence and victimization. We are coming to better understand that social location, including but not limited to positions within patriarchal systems of stratification, shapes violence and victimization in many different ways. Since the inception of the women’s movement, the discourse of victimization has grappled with the implications of constructing ‘pure victims’, and despite the tremendous progress in the resources available to survivors of gender violence, we find the tensions between victimization and agency, and between simplicity and complexity, reemerging repeatedly in the stories victims, activists, and scholars tell about this social problem. Below, we review the sociological research and activism, in conjunction with the collective narratives in the social movements against gender violence, to show how the issues of perceptions of women who are framed as victims began and remain central to feminist research in this area. We also explore the newest visions of gender violence, that broaden theorizing and activism to include multiple dimensions of inequality and their intersections. Taken together, these debates reveal multifaceted layers of complexity that inform the contexts and lived experience of violence, and that continue to enter into our storytelling.     

A variable selection approach to monotonic regression with Bernstein polynomials

One of the standard problems in statistics consists of determining the relationship between a response variable and a single predictor variable through a regression function. Background scientific knowledge is often available that suggests that the regression function should have a certain shape (e.g. monotonically increasing or concave) but not necessarily a specific parametric form. Bernstein polynomials have been used to impose certain shape restrictions on regression functions. The Bernstein polynomials are known to provide a smooth estimate over equidistant knots. Bernstein polynomials are used in this paper due to their ease of implementation, continuous differentiability, and theoretical properties. In this work, we demonstrate a connection between the monotonic regression problem and the variable selection problem in the linear model. We develop a Bayesian procedure for fitting the monotonic regression model by adapting currently available variable selection procedures. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through simulations and the analysis of real data.