Teaching Family Therapy: Ten Key Questions for Understanding the Family as Patient

This paper presents ten questions for understanding family functioning as a format for teaching one important aspect of family therapy. These self-asked questions are then illustrated with a large, overly-close family.     

Aesthetic Identity,Race, and American Folk Music

This article uses the concept of aesthetic identity to interrogate the relationship among musical genres, social movements and racial identity. American folk music has at some times subverted and other times reinforced the categorical boundaries between blacks and whites in twentieth-century United States. Aesthetic identity is the cultural alignment of artistic genres to social groups by which groups come to feel that genres represent our or their art, music, and literature. Genre boundaries then become social boundaries. Folk music inverts the usual relationship of genre and social boundaries. Folk music is always the culture of some other, either racial, regional, class, or national. Before it was called folk music, American vernacular music was much more racially integrated than the society around it, creolized across a spectrum from predominantly European to predominantly African- influenced, but with most exhibiting both. Before the era of commercial recording, black and white musicians sang the same music, learned techniques and songs from each other, and shared a social world of performance. The concept of folk music was created by academic elites, but remained unfamiliar to most people until the organized left took it on as a cultural project in the late 1930s and 1940s. Both academic elites and political activists constructed the genre as an alternative to the racialized genres that the commercial recording industry had dubbed race records and hillbilly music. American communists and their allies were especially self-conscious about using folk music as an instrument of racial solidarity in a particularly racially polarized era. Submerged by McCarthyism until the 1960s, folk music was revived as a racially unified genre, but quickly became whitened. My explanation for why the folk revival was so white revolves around three factors: the continuing legacy of commercial racial categories, the failure of the New Left to control music through a cultural infrastructure as effectively as had the old left, and the cultural momentum of an understanding of folk music as the music of the other at a time when blacks were trying to enter a system that white middle-class youth were rejecting.     

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.     

Global benefit-risk assessment in designing clinical trials and some statistical considerations of the method

When characterizing a therapy, the efficacy and the safety are two major aspects under consideration. In prescribing a therapy to a patient, a clinician puts the two aspects together and makes a decision based on a consolidated thought process. The global benefit-risk (GBR) measures proposed by Chuang-Stein et al. (Stat. Med. 1991; 10:1349-1359) are useful in facilitating the thinking, and creating the framework for making statistical comparisons based on benefit-risk point of view. This article describes how a GBR linear score was defined and used as the primary outcome measure in a clinical trial design. The robustness of the definitions of 'benefit' and 'risk' are evaluated using different criteria. The sensitivity of the pre-specified weights is also analyzed using alternative weights; one of those was determined by the relative to an identified distribution integral transformation approach (Biometrics 1958; 14:18-38). Statistical considerations are illustrated using pooled data from clinical trials studying antidepressant. The pros and cons for using GBR assessments in the setting of clinical trials are discussed.     

A natural lead-in approach to response-adaptive allocation for continuous outcomes

Response-adaptive (RA) allocation designs can skew the allocation of incoming subjects toward the better performing treatment group based on the previously accrued responses. While unstable estimators and increased variability can adversely affect adaptation in early trial stages, Bayesian methods can be implemented with decreasingly informative priors (DIP) to overcome these difficulties. DIPs have been previously used for binary outcomes to constrain adaptation early in the trial, yet gradually increase adaptation as subjects accrue. We extend the DIP approach to RA designs for continuous outcomes, primarily in the normal conjugate family by functionalizing the prior effective sample size to equal the unobserved sample size. We compare this effective sample size DIP approach to other DIP formulations. Further, we considered various allocation equations and assessed their behavior utilizing DIPs. Simulated clinical trials comparing the behavior of these approaches with traditional Frequentist and Bayesian RA as well as balanced designs show that the natural lead-in approaches maintain improved treatment with lower variability and greater power.     

Passion for poker and the relationship with gambling problems: a cross-sectional study

Previous research has shown that poker players spend significant time, large amounts of money and have a high prevalence of gambling problems. While some studies have examined the association between gambling behaviours and passion, none have explored this association specifically among poker players. This study aims to examine the relationships between two types of passion (i.e. harmonious and obsessive) and severity of gambling problems among poker players. A sample of 159 poker players was recruited from across Quebec, Canada. The outcome variable of interest was participants’ scores on the Canadian Pathological Gambling Index and the predictive variable was the Gambling Passion Scale. Multiple logistic regression analyses were conducted to identify independent risk factors of at-risk poker players. Severity of gambling problems is positively associated with obsessive passion (p < .05). However, harmonious passion is not associated with gambling problems. These results align with previous findings obtained for other gambling activities. Thus, passion could be considered a useful tool when approaching players to talk about risk-taking.     

Advanced Placement Statistics: Expanding the Scope of Statistics Education

A list of consequential developments in the field of statistics for the past quarter-century must include the creation and implementation of the Advanced Placement (AP) program in Statistics. This program has introduced millions of high school students to our discipline over the past 18 years, contributing to the large increase in the number of undergraduate students pursuing statistics as their major in college. ASA members and leaders have played a substantial role in shaping this program and furthering its success.