Evaluation of an educational intervention upon knowledge, attitudes, and behavior concerning drinking/drugged driving.

The Contra Costa County educational program for juveniles found guilty of driving under the influence (DUI) was evaluated. Over 600 juveniles convicted of DUI from 1983 to 1988 formed the study group for this research and of these over 100 participated in the educational program. Assessment of program participants was conducted for knowledge, attitudes and behavior. Participants demonstrated increased knowledge, stronger attitudes against driving under the influence, and less risky alcohol and automobile related behaviors. County juvenile records analyzed by the logit procedure showed that class participants had a significantly lower number of repeat offenses compared to non-program participants that could not be explained by race, offense severity, age or gender.     

DRUG POLICY IN THE TIME OF AIDS:

In 1985, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded an ethnographic research project in San Francisco to study the needle sharing behavior of injection drug users (IDUs). The goal of the research was to develop a strategy to slow the spread of HIV among this hidden and hard to reach population of drug users and their sexual partners. This small-scale project grew into a model intervention in which bleach, condoms, and street-based education by outreach workers were employed to inform IDUs of the risk of AIDS and of methods for protecting themselves. The "reach and teach bleach" model was adopted by NIDA and implemented in a number of American cities. This study describes the development of the model intervention, the adoption of the model by NIDA as part of its National AIDS Demonstration Research (NADR) project, and the political circumstances under which the city of San Francisco applied for the NADR grant. Drawing on Social Worlds/Arena theory, and based on extensive interviews and participant observation, a sociohistorical analysis examines the initial development, implementation, and disintegration of the model outreach project and the impact of the program on drug policy in the city of San Francisco.     

School governing bodies: Reshaping education in their own image?

Recent educational reforms in England have given considerable responsibilities for the overall administration of schools to governing bodies largely comprised of lay people. The paper explores the knowledge of education possessed by lay governors. Issues considered include: the systematicity of that knowledge; its possible sources, and how gender, ethnicity and social class influence the knowledge held and used by governors. Also examined are the question of whether governors are always knowledgeable actors within the context of education and the implications of this for schools and democratic participation in their governance. Data is derived from a four year qualitative multi-site case study of ten school governing bodies in two English local education authorities undertaken by the authors between 1988 and 1992.     

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE IRISH QUESTION:

This article builds on theoretical work in the social movements literature that uses "master frames" (Snow and Benford 1992) to account for the cyclical clustering of social movement activity within certain historical periods. I identify "master frame alignment" as the dynamic process by which social movement actors rhetorically transform the master frames within a cycle of protest to make them resonate more clearly with a movement's unique social and historical situation. Just as frame alignment processes serve to link a movement organization's activities, goals, and ideology with those of a potential group of adherents, master frame alignment processes link the activities, goals, and ideology of a movement organization with those espoused within the broader symbolic atmosphere of the social movement. I present historical data from Irish newspapers and political documents to show how the Irish Sinn Féin movement, seeking self-determination during the early twentieth century, rhetorically reconstructed the master frames generated by the League of Nations in order to better exploit this particular window of political opportunity.     

Estimation of noncentrality parameters

We propose some estimators of noncentrality parameters which improve upon usual unbiased estimators under quadratic loss. The distributions we consider are the noncentral chi-square and the noncentral F. However, we give more general results for the family of elliptically contoured distributions and propose a robust dominating estimator.     

Erroneous perceptions and arousal among regular and occasional video poker players

This study investigated the relationship between the level of arousal (Heart Rate) and the number of erroneous perceptions among video poker players. Twelve regular and twelve occasional gamblers participated in a gambling session conducted in a natural environment. It was hypothesised that 1) a significant positive correlation would be observed between arousal and the number of erroneous verbalizations, 2) regular players would show a higher level of arousal than occasional players, and 3) they would emit more erroneous verbalizations. Results showed that hypotheses one and three were confirmed. Theoretical and practical implications of these results for the psychology of gambling are discussed.This study was supported by a grant from Loto-Québec.     

ANOTHER LOOK AT THE STRATIFICATION OF EDUCATIONAL TRANSITIONS: THE LOGISTIC RESPONSE MODEL WITH PARTIAL PROPORTIONALITY CONSTRAINTS

In this paper we reanalyze Robert D. Mare's highly influential work on educational transitions among American men born in the first half of the 20th century. Contrary to previous belief, Mare found that the effects of socioeconomic background variables decline regularly across educational transitions in conditional logistic regression analyses. We have reconfirmed Mare's findings and tested them by introducing a modified logistic response model that constrains selected social background effects to vary proportionally across educational transitions. We refer to our preferred model as the logistic response model with partial proportionality constraints (LRPPC). The model can easily be estimated in Stata or using other standard statistical software. Partial proportionality constraints may also prove useful in interpopulation comparisons based on other linear models.     

BAYESIAN SUBSET SELECTION AND MODEL AVERAGING USING A CENTRED AND DISPERSED PRIOR FOR THE ERROR VARIANCE

This article proposes a new data‐based prior distribution for the error variance in a Gaussian linear regression model, when the model is used for Bayesian variable selection and model averaging. For a given subset of variables in the model, this prior has a mode that is an unbiased estimator of the error variance but is suitably dispersed to make it uninformative relative to the marginal likelihood. The advantage of this empirical Bayes prior for the error variance is that it is centred and dispersed sensibly and avoids the arbitrary specification of hyperparameters. The performance of the new prior is compared to that of a prior proposed previously in the literature using several simulated examples and two loss functions. For each example our paper also reports results for the model that orthogonalizes the predictor variables before performing subset selection. A real example is also investigated. The empirical results suggest that for both the simulated and real data, the performance of the estimators based on the prior proposed in our article compares favourably with that of a prior used previously in the literature.