Volume 30

Theory and Society -     

Media Publicity and the Voluntary Sector: The Case of Nonprofit Organizations in New York City

Media publicity is an important resource for contemporary voluntary associations, but very little is actually known about the resources and organizational characteristics that are most important for getting media attention. To address this question, we collected and analyzed data on the organizational attributes and news publicity of 739 nonprofit organizations in New York City. We find that an organization's income, paid staff, membership size, and library resources are significantly related to getting media publicity, whereas the number of chapter affiliations is inversely related to publicity. Association type is also a significant factor that influences an organization's ability to get publicity. We discuss the implications that these findings have for current debates about advocacy and civic engagement in the nonprofit sector.     

Book Review: A Generation Divided: The New Left,The New Right,and the 1960s. By Rebecca E. Klatch. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 386 pages,paperback, ISBN: 0-520-21714-4

Qualitative Sociology -     

Challenges to Connecting Sociology and Service Learning

Service-learning programs are not free from challenges brought about by lack of financial support, lack of widespread commitment from professors, community agencies, and recipients of service, and lack of knowledge and insight in students directly involved in such programs. While service-learning initiatives and programs serve positive functions for organizations and individuals, rhetorical accolades for service learning can distort or omit the realities of program implementation and sustained delivery. This paper specifically explores the following challenges connected to service-learning programs: (1) pedagogical difficulties; (2) student limitations; (3) time constraints; and (4) community cooperation.     

Multiparameter evidence synthesis in epidemiology and medical decision-making: current approaches

Summary.  Alongside the development of meta-analysis as a tool for summarizing research literature, there is renewed interest in broader forms of quantitative synthesis that are aimed at combining evidence from different study designs or evidence on multiple parameters. These have been proposed under various headings: the confidence profile method, cross-design synthesis, hierarchical models and generalized evidence synthesis. Models that are used in health technology assessment are also referred to as representing a synthesis of evidence in a mathematical structure. Here we review alternative approaches to statistical evidence synthesis, and their implications for epidemiology and medical decision-making. The methods include hierarchical models, models informed by evidence on different functions of several parameters and models incorporating both of these features. The need to check for consistency of evidence when using these powerful methods is emphasized. We develop a rationale for evidence synthesis that is based on Bayesian decision modelling and expected value of information theory, which stresses not only the need for a lack of bias in estimates of treatment effects but also a lack of bias in assessments of uncertainty. The increasing reliance of governmental bodies like the UK National Institute for Clinical Excellence on complex evidence synthesis in decision modelling is discussed.     

Netzwerken: Reflexionen und Erfahrungen am Beispiel eines TrainerInnen und BeraterInnen-Netzwerkes

How are social networks organized and how much structure and openess do they have? The ambiguity of networking and the grade of organization are discussed and described theoretically and with an authentic example.     

Führung durch Selbstführung

This paper outlines the conceptual bases, strategies, and psychological attributes of leadership by self-leadership. In addition, relations to other theories of leadership are drawn. Dimensions and correlates of self-leadership competence are described and discussed. Various approaches for developing self-leadership competence are discussed as well.     

Simple detection of outlying short time series

Sets of relatively short time series arise in many situations. One aspect of their analysis may be the detection of outlying series. We examine the performance of standard normal outlier tests applied to the means, or to simple functions of the means, of AR(1) series, not necessarily of equal lengths. Although unequal lengths of series implies that the means have unequal variances, that are only known approximately, it is shown that nominal significance levels hold good under most circumstances. Thus a standard outlier test can usefully be applied, avoiding the complication of estimating the time series' parameters. The test's power is affected by unequal lengths, being higher when the slippage occurs in one of the longer series     

Inference for the measurement of poverty in the presence of a stochastic weighting variable

Empirical applications of poverty measurement often have to deal with a stochastic weighting variable such as household size. Within the framework of a bivariate distribution function defined over income and weight, I derive the limiting distributions of the decomposable poverty measures and of the ordinates of stochastic dominance curves. The poverty line is allowed to depend on the income distribution. It is shown how the results can be used to test hypotheses concerning changes in poverty. The inference procedures are briefly illustrated using Belgian data. An erratum to this article can be found at