A place of our own: a narrative review of the family housing services literature

The problem of family homelessness has been widely recognized by both policymakers and social service providers. What is not clear, however, is the overall effectiveness of housing intervention services provided to homeless families. This narrative review of the literature discusses 10 studies from 1991 to 2013 on both transitional and supportive housing in order to assess under what conditions and for whom these interventions are most effective. More specifically this review evaluates the research regarding which elements of intervention services are most helpful to families, the outcomes associated with these programmes, and the short‐ and long‐term effectiveness of housing interventions. Evidence suggests that while these programmes produce positive outcomes for families, a one‐size‐fits‐all model of housing may not be effective for all families. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.     

Race and the Religious Contexts of Violence: Linking Religion and White,Black, and Latino Violent Crime

Research has demonstrated that concentrated disadvantage and other measures are strongly associated with aggregate‐level rates of violence, including across racial and ethnic groups. Less studied is the impact of cultural factors, including religious contextual measures. The current study addresses several key gaps in prior literature by utilizing race/ethnic‐specific arrest data from California, New York, and Texas paired with religious contextual data from the Religious Congregations and Memberships Survey. Results suggest that, net of important controls, (1) religious contextual measures have significant crime‐reducing associations with violence; (2) these associations are race/ethnic specific; and (3) religious contextual measures moderate the criminogenic association between disadvantage and violence for blacks. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Motivational interviewing as a pregroup intervention for partner-violent men

This study investigated the effects of a pregroup motivational intervention for domestic abuse perpetrators. Men presenting for treatment at a community domestic violence agency (N = 108) were assigned to receive either a two-session intake using the techniques of motivational interviewing (MI) or a structured intake (SI) control. All participants were then referred to a cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT) program in groups homogeneous with respect to intake condition. The motivational intake led to more constructive in-session behavior during the early phase of group CBT, greater compliance with group CBT homework assignments, higher late session therapist ratings of the working alliance, and more help seeking outside of the domestic violence program. No significant effects of intake condition were found on session attendance, self-reports of readiness to change abusive behavior, or client reports of the working alliance. Partner reports of abusive behavior outcomes during the 6 months after group CBT revealed a marginal effect favoring the MI condition on physical assault. The findings suggest that motivational interviewing can increase receptivity to partner violence interventions.     

A Sales Forecast Model for Short‐Life‐Cycle Products: New Releases at Blockbuster

We develop, in this article, a sales model for movie and game products at Blockbuster. The model assumes that there are three sales components: the first is from consumers who have already committed to purchasing (or renting) a product (e.g., based on promotion of, or exposure to, the product prior to its launch); the second comes from consumers who are potential buyers of the product; and the third comes from either a networking effect on closely tied (as in a social group) potential buyers from previous buyers (in the case of movie rental and all retail products) or re‐rents (in the case of game rental). In addition, we explicitly formulate into our model dynamic interactions between these sales components, both within and across sales periods. This important feature is motivated by realism, and it significantly contributes to the accuracy of our model. The model is thoroughly tested against sales data for rental and retail products from Blockbuster. Our empirical results show that the model offers excellent fit to actual sales activity. We also demonstrate that the model is capable of delivering reasonable sales forecasts based solely on environmental data (e.g., theatrical sales, studio, genre, MPAA ratings, etc.) and actual first‐period sales. Accurate sales forecasts can lead to significant cost savings. In particular, it can improve the retail operations at Blockbuster by determining appropriate order quantities of products, which is critical in effective inventory management (i.e., it can reduce the extent of over‐stocking and under‐stocking). While our model is developed specifically for product sales at Blockbuster, we believe that with context‐dependent modifications, our modeling approach could also provide a reasonable basis for the study of sales for other short‐Life‐Cycle products.     

‘Wishing to go it alone’: the complicated interplay of independence,interdependence and agency

Some individuals with disabilities for whom verbal speech is not reliable use facilitated communication to express thoughts and ideas. While they may require intensive physical support initially, the goal is independent typing. However, this emphasis on fading support and independence bears consideration. We utilize a Disability Studies lens to frame practices around independence and the complicated interplay between interdependence, agency and voice. Based on qualitative analysis of communication training sessions, we present four findings: the complexity of the message versus fading of physical support, the emotional dimensions of independence, the facilitator’s navigation of multiple roles, and the importance of facilitating agency. We also share implications of reframing independence and facilitating agency for the communication training process.     

Alienation in the United States: Uniform or Group-Specific Change?

“Alienation,” in the sense of disenchantment with core institutions of society, increased after the mid-1960s. Most accounts hold that the rise in alienation was uniform across all groups. This paper evaluates the hypothesis of uniform change using data from the Harris Polls. We find evidence of both short-term and long-term shifts in patterns of alienation. Blacks and low-income people are less alienated under Democratic than under Republican administrations. Over the long term, increases in alienation have been larger among women and people without a college degree.

A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting Reproducibility,Best Practices,and Theory‐Building

The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline‐specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and promoting replicability in infancy research: large‐scale, multi‐laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less‐biased estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be used for later study planning, and a series of best‐practices blueprints for future infancy research.     

Beyond Clinical Complexity: Nonmedical Barriers to Nursing Home Care for Rural Residents

We conducted a qualitative content analysis of barriers to nursing home admission for rural residents. Data came from semi-structured interviews with 23 rural hospital discharge planners across five states (Georgia, Idaho, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). From those, we identified four themes around nonmedical barriers to rural nursing home placement with particular salience in rural areas: financial issues, transportation, nursing home availability and infrastructure, and timeliness. We also identified policy and programmatic interventions across four themes: loosen bureaucratic requirements, improve communication between facilities, increase rural long-term care capacity, and address underlying social determinants of health.     

Attrition rate in infant fNIRS research: A meta-analysis

Understanding the trends and predictors of attrition rate, or the proportion of collected data that is excluded from the final analyses, is important for accurate research planning, assessing data integrity, and ensuring generalizability. In this pre-registered meta-analysis, we reviewed 182 publications in infant (0–24 months) functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) research published from 1998 to April 9, 2020, and investigated the trends and predictors of attrition. The average attrition rate was 34.23% among 272 experiments across all 182 publications. Among a subset of 136 experiments that reported the specific reasons for subject exclusion, 21.50% of the attrition was infant-driven, while 14.21% was signal-driven. Subject characteristics (e.g., age) and study design (e.g., fNIRS cap configuration, block/trial design, and stimulus type) predicted the total and subject-driven attrition rates, suggesting that modifying the recruitment pool or the study design can meaningfully reduce the attrition rate in infant fNIRS research. Based on the findings, we established guidelines for reporting the attrition rate for scientific transparency and made recommendations to minimize the attrition rates. This research can facilitate developmental cognitive neuroscientists in their quest toward increasingly rigorous and representative research.