Not without my sister(s)

Less than two months after 11 September 2001, and a few weeks after the beginning of the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush made an urgent plea to see Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar. Not only did the President want to see Kandahar; he encouraged US citizens to view it as well. This article offers two readings of Kandahar – the first suggestive of what its filmmaker Makhmalbaf saw in Afghanistan and the second suggestive of what Bush saw (or hoped to see) in Makhmalbaf's Afghanistan. In particular, this article focuses on how the Bush administration – against the intentions of Kandahar's director and star – propelled occidental subjects to ‘lift the veil’ on Afghanistan and on Afghan women by viewing Kandahar as if it positioned the feminine as a needy and willing object of US rescue. It was in part by laying this particular claim to the separated sisters of Kandahar that the Bush administration constructed a humanitarian US ‘we’ as among the foundations of its ‘moral grammar of war’ in the war on terror.     

Do the DSM-5 diagnostic revisions affect the psychometric properties of the Brief Biosocial Gambling Screen?

Several significant changes in the diagnostic criteria for gambling disorder occurred with the newest revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The changes aim to simplify and streamline the diagnosis without compromising its validity. Yet many of the tools used to screen and diagnose the disorder are based upon the prior fourth edition of the DSM, and it is unclear how they perform with the revised diagnostic criteria. The aim of this study is to examine the psychometric properties of a common pathological gambling screen, the Brief Biosocial Gambling Screen (BBGS; Gebauer, LaBrie, & Shaffer, 2010), in the context of DSM-5 criteria within a help-seeking sample. Gamblers calling a helpline (N = 2750) completed a semi-structured interview assessing DSM-IV past-year pathological gambling criteria with a trained clinician. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value and differences by sex were examined. The BBGS had high sensitivity as well as positive and negative predictive values. In light of the revisions made to the diagnostic criteria in DSM-5, the BBGS remains a psychometrically supported instrument for gambling disorder.     

Survey item nonresponse and its treatment

Summary One of the most salient data problems empirical researchers face is the lack of informative responses in survey data. This contribution briefly surveys the literature on item nonresponse behavior and its determinants before it describes four approaches to address item nonresponse problems: Casewise deletion of observations, weighting, imputation, and model-based procedures. We describe the basic approaches, their strengths and weaknesses and illustrate some of their effects using a simulation study. The paper concludes with some recommendations for the applied researcher. We are grateful to an anonymous referee who provided helpful comments. Also we like to thank Donald B. Rubin for helpful comments and always motivating discussions as well as Ralf Münnich for inspiring discussions about raking procedures.     

Personal-und Organisationsentwicklung im Schul-, Sozial-und Bildungs-Sektor durch Formen dyadischer Intervision

Zusammenfassung Personalentwicklungs-und Coachingprozesse müssen und sollten sich nicht auf hergebrachte Lehrer-Lerner-Modelle begrenzen. In vielf?ltigen Lernkontexten und insbesondere in der Didaktik haben reziprok angelegte Lernpartnerschaften zwischen zwei Personen auf Zeit lange Tradition. Zentrale Erwartungen richten sich in der Regel einerseits auf die ?konomie entsprechender Settings, andererseits auf die Nachhaltigkeit und Ganzheitlichkeit einer Unterstützung, die im Medium ?hnlicher Position, ?hnlicher Erfahrung und der Gegenseitigkeit der Supportbeziehung entsteht. Diese Erwartungsbündel gelten als Unterscheidungskriterien gegenüber expertengestützten Lehrer-Lerner-Modellen. Im folgenden wird das Konzept einer Lernpartnerschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit im Kontext der Führungskr?fteentwicklung er?rtert. Nachdem seit einiger Zeit „Tandem“-Ans?tze im Profit-Bereich in ersten Projekten erprobt werden,¹ geht es in diesem Beitrag nicht zuletzt um überlegungen, die sich auf die Eignung für den Bereich der Non-Profit-Organisationen (NPO; vgl. als überblick Badelt, 2002) sozialer Dienstleistungen beziehen, da eine übertragbarkeit angesichts der historischen und systematischen Spezifika im NPO-Bereich nicht umstandslos gegeben sein muss. Wirkungen werden wesentlich im Referenzrahmen sozialer Unterstützung thematisiert, der in besonderem Ma?e geeignet scheint, die auf Austauschprozessen beruhenden Effekte zu begreifen. Zu den Autoren Ulrich Otto, Dr. rer. soc. habil, Dipl.-P?d., Univ.-Prof. für Sozialmanagement am Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft der Friedrich-Schiller-Universit?t Jena. Arbeitsschwerpunkte: Netzwerk-und Unterstützungsforschung, Theorie sozialp?dagogischer Hilfe, soziale Dienstleistungen im Welfare-mix Susanne Vespermann, Dipl.-P?d., Tübingen, freiberufliche Organisationsberaterin und Coach www.tandem-coaching.de     

What are the chances of young Turks and Italians for equal education and employment in Germany? The role of objective and subjective indicators

As the recent OECD PISA studies have shown, social background plays a greater role for achieving a solid education in Germany than in most other developed countries; this is especially so for migrant youths. This paper deals with the question, which level education and qualification migrants in Germany achieve, and how their chances for achieving qualifications and positions are compared to Germans. First, an overview over results of studies on educational participation, degrees, and social inequality among migrants is given. Then I show, using data from the 2000 BiB-Integration Survey, that young Turks and Italians have achieved notably lower levels of education than Germans. Finally, I discuss possible reasons and agencies that might cause these findings, which then are scrutinised by empirical analyses. It can be found that the marked under-representation with regard to higher educational and professional degrees of young Italians and Turks is clearly related to the low educational level of their parents, as well as factors of integration and attitudes. It does become obvious, however, that Turks have lower chances that cannot be explained by their parents’ qualification or other factors. This is also the case for the second immigrant generation.     

Financial Variables and the Simulated Out-of-Sample Forecastability of U.S. Output Growth Since 1985: An Encompassing Approach

We reconsider the out-of-sample forecasting ability of a large number of financial variables with respect to real output growth over the 1985:1–1999:4 period. We show that models including financial variables display almost no forecasting ability relative to an autoregressive benchmark model over this period according to a mean squared forecast error metric. However, tests based on forecast encompassing indicate that many financial variables do, in fact, contain information that is useful for forecasting real output growth over the 1985:1–1999:4 out-of-sample period. Our results suggest that the extant literature exaggerates the demise of the forecasting power of financial variables with respect to real activity since the mid-1980s.