Sex Ratio Effects on Marital Formation and Dissolution, 1980–2000

Although marriage market characteristics are often used to explain in–out marriage transitions, Guttentag and Secord's sex ratio thesis provides a unique theoretical framework by which to elucidate marriage and divorce. The theory emphasizes the availability of “opposite” sex partners as an important factor, but hypothesized outcomes assume a gendered marriage market whereby males are more socioeconomically powerful than females. Using geographically standardized census tract data (N = 65,443), I examine the theory empirically across three decennial time points. After establishing that males, on average, hold a disproportionate amount of socioeconomic power, I conduct cross‐sectional regression analyses of marriage and divorce from 1980 to 2000. Results partially support the theory. While female marriage is consistently related to sex ratios as expected, sex ratios influence male marriage as expected only in some time periods and female and male divorce do not operate as expected in any time point. The findings imply that marriage entry and dissolution have distinctive causal mechanisms, suggesting the need for further theorization and research.     

Homogeneity test for functional data

In the context of functional data analysis, we propose new sample tests for homogeneity. Based on some well-known depth measures, we construct four different statistics in order to measure distance between the two samples. A simulation study is performed to check the efficiency of the tests when confronted with shape and magnitude perturbation. Finally, we apply these tools to measure the homogeneity in some samples of real data, and we obtain good results using this new method.     

On correcting measurement error in the persistence rate estimator

In the field of education, it is often of great interest to estimate the percentage of students who start out in the top test quantile at time 1 and who remain there at time 2, which is termed as “persistence rate,” to measure the students’ academic growth. One common difficulty is that students’ performance may be subject to measurement errors. We therefore considered a correlation calibration method and the simulation–extrapolation (SIMEX) method for correcting the measurement errors. Simulation studies are presented to compare various measurement error correction methods in estimating the persistence rate.     

A Bayesian method for safety signal detection in ongoing blinded randomised controlled trials

Sponsors have a responsibility to minimise risk to participants in clinical studies through safety monitoring. The FDA Final Rule for IND Safety Reporting requires routine aggregate safety evaluation, including in ongoing blinded studies. We are interested in estimating the probability that the true adverse event rate in the experimental arm exceeds that in the control arm. We developed a Bayesian approach that specifies an informative meta-analytic predictive prior on the event probability in the control arm and an uninformative prior on that in the experimental arm. We combined these priors with a mixture likelihood that considers each patient in the ongoing blinded study may belong to the experimental or control arm. This allowed us to estimate the quantity of interest without unblinding. We evaluated our method by simulation, pairing scenarios that differed only in whether a safety signal was present or missing, and quantifying the ability of our model to discriminate using signal detection theory. Our approach shows benefit. It detects safety signals more reliably with greater sample sizes and for common rather than rare events. Performance does not deteriorate markedly when historical studies exhibit heterogeneous hazards or non-constant hazards. Our method will allow us to monitor safety signals in ongoing blinded studies with the goal of earlier identification and risk mitigation. Our method could be adapted to use informative priors on both arms or predictive covariates where pertinent data exist. We stress that ongoing safety monitoring should involve a multi-disciplinary team where statistical methods are paired with medical judgement.     

Undoing raciolinguistics

In this commentary, we discuss common pitfalls associated with the study of race and language, focusing specifically on the recent emergence of raciolinguistics as a frame for these efforts. We examine how raciolinguistics can be taken up in ways that silo discussions of race from the rest of linguistics—as something that the “raciolinguists” do—such that careful study of issues including colonialism, power, and societal hierarchies is perpetually pushed to the margins of the field. We also consider how the nominalization of raciolinguistics can suggest that race and language are agreed upon objects in ways that reproduce troublesome essentializations. We show how a raciolinguistic perspective can resist such tendencies by continually interrogating the colonial reproduction and transformation of modern knowledge projects and lifeways across societal contexts, as well as by continually examining the fundamental nature of language, race, and power. We end with what we see as the implications of a raciolinguistic perspective for all of linguistics.