The television archive: A source for the sociological study of culture

In this essay the George Foster Peabody Collection and the WSB Atlanta Television News Archive are described. A discussion of the form, structure and content of the collections reveal that each are ideally suited to visual sociological investigation. In all, the textual body of visual imagery found in the Peabody collection is an important source for the study of culture. The collection offers access to fifty years of award winning audio and video recordings, spanning news, documentary, international, entertainment, public service and childrens program submissions, the WSB collection contains a rich array of materials that service to elaborate on a cultural and historic framework of the new and old south. Hard news stories along with documentaries reveal a variety of public and social rituals of historic importance, the WSB and Peabody collections can be accessed to fulfil a number of scholarly endeavors. Visual sociologists, anthropologists and communication scholars are encouraged to further explore the use of these two electronic media archives.     

Analysis of covariance in mixed models with unequal subclass numbers

Blue of estimable linear functions and exact tests of hypotheses concerning such functions usually do not exist in the covariance model with random factors having unknown variances. This is true even in the equal subclass numbers case. This paper suggests alternative methods for finding linear unbiased estimators and presents methods for computing sampling variances which are linear functions of the unknown parameter variances. Also, higher level covariates are defined and nonestimability problems resulting from association of such covariates with fixed factors are discussed.     

Urbanization,non-familial work,education, and fertility in Taiwan

It is well known, that there is a relationship between the level of development of a society and its level offertility.¹ However, it is not clear which of the complex ofvariables associated with development are primarily associated with the reduction of fertility. Urbanization, female labour force participation and education are three of the variables most commonly cited as bearing a causal relationship to fertility. Urbanization implies a change of environment of a substantial portion of the population which may result in a change in the value placed on large families. This is particularly true when urban mortality is lower than rural, so that more children survive.² However, it has also been argued that urbanization results in a change in family structure from the extended to the nuclear family with a concomitant reduction in the value placed on having many children.³ Additional changes in family patterns which are sometimes said to explain fertility reduction due to urbanization are increases in the proportion of women never marrying and increases in the age at marriage.     

Index to Volume 29

This article measures the efficacy of two approaches to teaching students to assess clients for substance abuse: an alcohol and other drug (AOD) minor program and integration of AOD content into core courses. A quasi-experimental design involved nonrandom assignment to an AOD minors program or to a nonminors curriculum. Both groups reported on their usual AOD assessment and on AOD assessment in their first interview with their most recent client. Self-report outcomes, examined in relation to the number of courses with integrated AOD content taken, suggest that these courses lead to significantly more self-reported assessment for substance abuse.     

The Condensed MFT Core Competencies: A Streamlined Approach for Measuring Student and Supervisee Learning Using the MFT Core Competencies

In this article, the authors present a condensed version of the Marriage and Family Therapy Core Competencies (MFT-CC), collapsing the original 128 MFT-CC to 16 using a qualitative research method. Educators, supervisors, and researchers can more easily and efficiently use the condensed MFT-CC to measure student and supervisee learning for accreditation and training. The 16 Condensed MFT-CC are mapped to the original MFT-CC, COAMFTE's Version 12 Foundational Curriculum Areas and the Association for Marital and Family Therapy Regulatory Boards 6 domains upon which the national exam is predicated.     

1998 Annual Meeting Plenary Session: Assessing and Managing Risks in a Democratic Society

The theme of one of the plenary sessions held at the 1998 annual meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis, 'Assessing and Managing Risks in a Democratic Society,' was chosen to reflect the current debate about the best ways to integrate social, political, economic, and technical issues into fair risk management decisions. In the papers presented here, the three plenary speakers provide their perspectives on how environmental risk management decision making is—or should be—informed by democratic processes.
John D. Graham Making Sense of Risk
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Risk, Democracy, and the Environment
Jason Shogren Markets to Master Health and Environmental Risk
Audience Questions and Answers     

Why Risk Is Not Variance: An Expository Note

Variance (or standard deviation) of return is widely used as a measure of risk in financial investment risk analysis applications, where mean‐variance analysis is applied to calculate efficient frontiers and undominated portfolios. Why, then, do health, safety, and environmental (HS&E) and reliability engineering risk analysts insist on defining risk more flexibly, as being determined by probabilities and consequences, rather than simply by variances? This note suggests an answer by providing a simple proof that mean‐variance decision making violates the principle that a rational decisionmaker should prefer higher to lower probabilities of receiving a fixed gain, all else being equal. Indeed, simply hypothesizing a continuous increasing indifference curve for mean‐variance combinations at the origin is enough to imply that a decisionmaker must find unacceptable some prospects that offer a positive probability of gain and zero probability of loss. Unlike some previous analyses of limitations of variance as a risk metric, this expository note uses only simple mathematics and does not require the additional framework of von Neumann Morgenstern utility theory.