Exploring Epistemologies: The Debate Continues

ABSTRACT

Stigma is a significant barrier to recovery and full community inclusion for people with mental illnesses. Social work educators can play critical roles in addressing this stigma, yet little is known about their attitudes. Social work educators were surveyed about their general attitudes about people with mental illnesses, attitudes about practice with people with mental illnesses, and attitudes about students with mental illnesses. On average, educators’ general and practice attitudes were not negative. However, respondents did view a student with a mental illness differently from a “typical social work student.” Findings suggest that we, as social work educators, must raise our awareness and address our own attitudes to support students and uphold our social work values.     

The Effects of Price Aggregation Bias in Systems of Demand Equations

This article illustrates the importance of maintaining consistent levels of aggregation between prices and quantities when estimating consumer demand functions. The impact of violating this condition is quantified by using summary performance measures and estimates of demand elasticity biases. Results derived from an application of 1972–1973 Consumer Expenditure Survey data and supported with a quasi-Monte Carlo experiment consistently indicate that the point estimates of demand elasticities are significantly biased. Thus the study indicates the importance of developing and maintaining price indexes disaggregated to the same level as the expenditure data in consumer expenditure and budget surveys.     

Selection buasubg parameters in adaptive ridge regression estimators

Strawderman's family of regression estimators is considered. The choice of the scalars wbich characterize the biasing parameter is studied by obtaining the bias vector and the mean squared error matrix.