Risk Factors for Problem Gambling Among Indigenous Australians: An Empirical Study

Despite a long history of gambling amongst many Indigenous peoples, knowledge about contemporary Indigenous gambling is sparse. In Australia, previous studies of Indigenous gambling have been severely limited in number, scope and rigour. The research reported in this paper is based on the first Indigenous-specific quantitative gambling research undertaken in Australia since 1996 and draws on the largest sample to date. This study examined numerous aspects of gambling among Indigenous Australians. After appropriate consultations and permission, the study collected surveys from 1,259 self-selected Indigenous adults in 2011 at three Indigenous festivals, online and in several Indigenous communities. This paper draws on these data to identify problem gambling risk factors by comparing selected socio-demographic characteristics, early exposure to gambling, gambling motivations, gambling behaviour, gambling cognitions, and substance use while gambling, amongst non-problem, low risk, moderate risk and problem gamblers. A logistic regression investigated the difference between problem gamblers and all other PGSI groups. Risk factors associated with being a problem gambler were: being older, commencing gambling when under 10 years old, always being exposed to adults gambling as a child, using alcohol and/or drugs while gambling, having family and friends who gamble, having an addiction to gambling and not gambling to socialise, having a high expenditure on commercial gambling, and living in a state or territory other than NSW or QLD. Public health measures to address these risk factors are identified.     

Emergency departments and street-involved youth: factors influencing utilization

Homeless youth often have untreated health problems and experience barriers to care. Existing evidence suggests that homeless youth use emergency departments (EDs) more frequently than other youth. We hypothesized that street youth with access to primary care services would be less likely to utilize EDs for health care. Data were drawn from a study of housing security and changes to it over time among 150 youth (16–20 years) recruited from service agencies for street-involved youth. Our findings show that those with access to primary care were actually more likely to use the ED, suggesting that access may encourage further engagement with the health care system. Findings support the need to better understand why access to primary care increases ED use and what could be done to change this pattern.     

Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work,Gender, and Beauty

Amid the growing literature on the costs and rewards of physical appearance for labor market outcomes, an economistic emphasis on looks as an investment strategy has gained prominence. The concept of aesthetic labor is a useful sociological intervention for understanding how the value of certain looks is constructed, and how looks matter for social stratification. Aesthetic labor is the practice of screening, managing, and controlling workers on the basis of their physical appearance. The concept advances research on the service economy by moving beyond a focus on emotions to emphasize worker corporeality. This article first untangles aesthetic labor from related concepts, including body work, emotional labor, and embodied cultural capital. Next is a review of three contexts in which scholars have applied aesthetic labor to the workplace: the organization, freelance labor, and the market. Because it situates the value of beauty in context, aesthetic labor foregrounds those power relations that define aesthetics, such as class, race, and gender. The concept incorporates insights from field theories of bodily capital, such that aesthetic labor denaturalizes beauty and seeks to explain the processes through which looks translate into economic and symbolic rewards.     

The contemporary foreclosure crisis and US crime rates

Foreclosure rates in America reached unprecedented levels during the last half of the 2000s, and many observers have speculated that elevated crime rates were one of the probable negative collateral consequences of this trend. We examine this issue with a comprehensive county-level analysis of the role of foreclosure in shaping contemporary crime patterns, highlighting the possibility of theoretically informed non-linear and conditional relationships. Multivariate regression models that account for the well-documented spatial autocorrelation of crime rates and the possible endogeneity of foreclosure reveal a positive association between rates of foreclosure and property crime that accelerates significantly once foreclosure rates attain historically high levels. Multiplicative models indicate that this pattern holds for burglary across diverse county conditions, but the observed non-linear effect of foreclosure on robbery rates is limited primarily to areas that also exhibit relatively high levels of resource deprivation and limited new housing construction.     

Same-Sex Attracted,Not LGBQ: The Associations of Sexual Identity Labeling on Religiousness,Sexuality, and Health Among Mormons

ABSTRACT

In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS church), beliefs about same-sex sexual attraction are carefully differentiated from beliefs about same-sex sexual behavior and identity, leading some to reject a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer (LGBQ) identity label in favor of declining a sexual identity or describing themselves as experiencing same-sex attraction (SSA). Using data from 1,128 sexual minority Mormons recruited from both politically conservative and liberal circles, we examined the relationship between rejecting an LGBQ identity and religiousness, attitudes toward sexuality, and health outcomes. We found that Mormons who reject an LGBQ identity were significantly more religious and less content with their sexuality but had similar health outcomes relative to LGBQ Mormons. We posit that these differences are best understood by differences in group affiliation and support, intersectional experiences with minority stressors, and the lack of generalizability of LGBQ constructs to those who reject an LGBQ identity.     

Assessing habitat requirements of pond-breeding amphibians in a highly urbanized landscape: implications for management

Urban Ecosystems - Management of urban aquatic habitats for native wildlife, such as amphibians, is an important contemporary goal for many municipalities. However, our understanding of how local...     

On the Optimal Use of Suboptimal Forecasts of Explanatory Variables

Ashley (1983) gave a simple condition for determining when a forecast of an explanatory variable (X_t ) is sufficiently inaccurate that direct replacement of X_t by the forecast yields worse forecasts of the dependent variable than does respecification of the equation to omit X_t . Many available macroeconomic forecasts were shown to be of limited usefulness in direct replacement. Direct replacement, however, is not optimal if the forecast's distribution is known. Here optimal linear forms in commercial forecasts of several macroeconomic variables are obtained by using estimates of their distributions. Although they are an improvement on the raw forecasts (direct replacement), these optimal forms are still too inaccurate to be useful in replacing the actual explanatory variables in forecasting models. The results strongly indicate that optimal forms involving several commercial forecasts will not be very useful either. Thus Ashley's (1983) sufficient condition retains its value in gauging the usefulness of a forecast of an explanatory variable in a forecasting model, even though it focuses on direct replacement.