Sexual violence at first intercourse against women in Moshi, northern Tanzania: prevalence, risk factors, and consequences

To explore the relationship between sexual violence at first intercourse and later sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in Moshi, Tanzania, we analysed data from a representative household survey that comprised face-to-face interviews with 1,835 women and tests for six STIs on biological samples from 1,235 of these women. Overall, 10.9 per cent report forced first intercourse and 15.3 per cent report unwanted first intercourse. Unadjusted analysis shows a relationship between forced first intercourse and STIs (OR: 1.72, 95 per cent CI: 1.19-2.51). Life-course variables mediate this relationship. Significant predictors of having an STI include older age, more sexual partners, and a partner who has children with other women. Coerced first intercourse appears to be associated with changes in the life course of women and with a heightened risk of contracting an STI.     

Predicting marital satisfaction using prepare: a replication study*

This study clearly replicated the previous findings which demonstrated the predictive validity of PREPARE. Like the previous study, this longitudinal study was a 3-year follow-up of 179 couples who took PREPARE during their engagement. As in the initial longitudinal study, PREPARE predicted, with about 80% accuracy, couples who got divorced from those that were happily married. Also, the same linear trend in PREPARE scores was found (highest to lowest scores): happily married, unhappily married, cancelled/delayed marriage, and separated/divorced. This study further indicates the importance of the premarital period as the foundation for marriage and the ability of PREPARE to identify high-risk premarital couples who could benefit from premarital counseling. Premarital counseling could potentially help these high risk couples develop a more satisfying marriage.     

Method Madness

I caution you not to expect a cookbook solution to your difficulty. I cannot tell you what to do in ten easy steps. Precious few successful career searches are conducted in so mechanical a fashion. You must decide the best sequence of events for yourself. —Howard Figler, The Complete Job Search Handbook     

A Mathematical Approach to Categorization and Labeling of Qualitative Data: the Latent Categorization Method

As text databases increasingly become available to researchers, the limits to human cognition are rapidly reached. Focusing on examining objective realities, this paper introduces the latent categorization method, a novel new research method for analysis of large and midsize data sets. This method clusters text artifacts and extracts the words that were most important in creating the clusters. Further, it demonstrates a set of techniques for extracting knowledge from a representative data set involving 6135 abstracts from a variety of business‐related journals .     

Structural unemployment. An analysis of recruitment and selection mechanisms based on panel data among Danish long-term unemployed

The perception of structural unemployment – summarised in the notion of 'Eurosclerosis'– became almost hegemonic during the 1990s. Policy makers all over Europe tried, by means of supply-side policies, to counteract the lack of incentives in the developed European welfare states, the lack of qualification on the post-industrial labour markets and the personal decay due to long-term unemployment. However, based on the critical case of Denmark, this article challenges the perception of structural unemployment and suggests an alternative business cycle/barrier perception. At the macro level it is difficult to explain the Danish decline in unemployment from 1994 to 2000 within the structure perception. The lack of explanatory power of the structure perception is further highlighted in micro-level analyses conducted on a panel study of long-term unemployed. Based on the unemployed's own assessments, we find no indications of supply-side problems. These results are supported by analyses of actual labour market integration of the long-term unemployed in the period between 1994 and 1999, which show that education level and previous unemployment had no noteworthy influence on labour market integration, whereas age had a decisive influence. These surprising results further undermine the perception of structural unemployment and the supply-side policies rooted in this 'mistaken' problem definition.     

Maximum Likelihood Inference for Multivariate Frailty Models Using an Automated Monte Carlo EM Algorithm

We present a maximum likelihood estimation procedure for the multivariate frailty model. The estimation is based on a Monte Carlo EM algorithm. The expectation step is approximated by averaging over random samples drawn from the posterior distribution of the frailties using rejection sampling. The maximization step reduces to a standard partial likelihood maximization. We also propose a simple rule based on the relative change in the parameter estimates to decide on sample size in each iteration and a stopping time for the algorithm. An important new concept is acquiring absolute convergence of the algorithm through sample size determination and an efficient sampling technique. The method is illustrated using a rat carcinogenesis dataset and data on vase lifetimes of cut roses. The estimation results are compared with approximate inference based on penalized partial likelihood using these two examples. Unlike the penalized partial likelihood estimation, the proposed full maximum likelihood estimation method accounts for all the uncertainty while estimating standard errors for the parameters.