From the Editor: Peer Reviewing

Sociological Forum -     

Environmental Globalization,Organizational Form,and Expected Benefits from Protected Areas in Central America*

Abstract Environmental globalization has led to the implementation of conservation efforts like the creation of protected areas that often promote the interests of core countries in poorer regions. The creation of protected areas in poor areas frequently creates tensions between human needs like food and shelter and environmental conservation. Support for such conservation efforts partially depends on expectations of benefits by those impacted. This article considers the effects of different organizational models on local expectations of benefits to be derived from protected areas. Our analysis indicates that individuals are more likely to expect that benefits of the park go to other communities or the nation as a whole than to expect direct benefits for themselves. Forms of park organization also impact these expectations. Individuals exposed to the zoned park, as opposed to a conventional, strictly protected park, were more likely to expect benefits from the park regardless of the beneficiary considered. In addition, for those exposed to the zoned park, location of residence is related to expectation that individuals will benefit themselves. However, our interviews with park residents also indicate that the expectations of individual benefits are rarely met, creating potential dissatisfaction and sometimes animosity toward the park administration.     

Question Understanding Aid (QUAID): A Web Facility that Tests Question Comprehensibility

When respondents do not understand the meaning of a survey question,they will not supply valid and reliable answers. Survey methodologistsshould therefore benefit from computer tools and other analyticalschemes that help them identify problems with questions withrespect to comprehension difficulty. We developed a Web facilitycalled Question Understanding Aid (QUAID; www.psyc.memphis.edu/quaid.html)that assists survey methodologists in identifying problems withthe wording, syntax, and semantics of questions on questionnaires.The survey methodologist enters the question into the Web facility,along with any context information and answer alternatives thataccompany the question. QUAID quickly returns a list of potentialproblems with question comprehension, including unfamiliar technicalterms, vague or imprecise relative terms, vague or ambiguousnoun phrases, complex syntax, and working memory overload. Thisarticle describes QUAID and some empirical studies that haveassessed the validity and utility of QUAID’s critiquesof questions. The output of QUAID was compared with the judgmentsof experts in language, discourse, and cognition during thedevelopment of the tool. In one evaluation, expert survey methodologistscritiqued and revised problematic questions, whereas in a secondevaluation survey methodologists evaluated the quality of originalproblematic questions, questions revised with the assistanceof QUAID, and questions revised without QUAID. In a third evaluation,eye-tracking data were collected while respondents read questionson a computer screen and answered questions aloud. Respondentshad a tendency to give up processing difficult questions tooearly (called an early exit), which potentially threatens thevalidity of the respondents’ answers. Survey methodologistsare encouraged to use QUAID and further evaluate its validityand utility.     

Sociology of law in Britain

This article reviews the state of law and society studies in Britain by revisiting the arguments raised by CM. Campbell and Paul Wiles in the late 1970s. It argues that the divide they identified between theoretically-oriented “sociology of law” and a-theoretical or empiricist “socio-legal studies” has widened, discusses some of the cultural and institutional reasons, and makes some practical recommendations.     

Erklärt die Rational Choice Theorie die Ungleichheit der Bildungschancen?

There are several plausible arguments which make it obvious to apply Rational Choice Theory to the process of educational opportunities and equality. Looking more closely at an empirical application or RC theory, several serious problems emerge: They concern the operationalization of the variables, the explanatory power of the central variables related to Subjective Expected Utility, the systematic omission of important variables relating to individual persons and their identity, and to social structural and institutional factors; the latter seem to be much more important than those indicated by RC approaches.     

Risk and Causality in Newspaper Reporting

The study addresses the textual representation of risk and causality in news media reporting. The analytical framework combines two theoretical perspectives: media frame analysis and the philosophy of causality. Empirical data derive from selected newspaper articles on risks in the Göta älv river valley in southwest Sweden from 1994 to 2007. News media content was coded and analyzed with respect to causal explanations of risk issues. At the level of individual articles, this study finds that the media provide simple causal explanations of risks such as water pollution, landslides, and flooding. Furthermore, these explanations are constructed, or framed, in various ways, the same risk being attributed to different causes in different articles. However, the study demonstrates that a fairly complex picture of risks in the media emerges when extensive material is analyzed systematically.     

The influence of load on the lifetime distribution

This paper derives lifetime distributions for components that fail due to overloading. We introduce the notion of energy similarity. This makes it possible to use knowledge about how components behave under different loads in order to establish a probability model. To obtain parametric families, we consider two physically distinct cases: (1) components that function individually and (2) components that function as part of a system. The former leads to univariate and the latter to multivariate models. The results are particularly useful when little or no data is available.