Continuity,stability, and concordance of socioemotional functioning in mothers and their sibling children

This within‐family longitudinal study accomplishes a novel multivariate assessment of socioemotional parenting cognitions and practices in mothers and their sibling children's socioemotional behaviors. Mothers participated with their 20‐month‐old firstborns and again, an average of 3 years later, with their 20‐month‐old secondborns (55 families, 165 participants). Continuity and stability in maternal cognitions and practices between the two times, and similarities, differences, and correspondences in siblings’ behaviors, are assessed and compared. Maternal socioemotional parenting cognitions were continuous in mean level and stable in individual differences across siblings; maternal socioemotional practices were continuous in mean level but unstable in individual differences. Firstborns were more sociable and emotionally available to mothers than secondborns; first‐ and secondborns’ socioemotional behaviors were largely unrelated. This study contributes to understanding socioemotional domains of parenting and child development, birth order effects, and the shared and non‐shared contexts of siblings’ environments within the family.     

Confidence Sets for Cointegrating Coefficients Based on Stationarity Tests

Standard methods for inference in cointegrating systems require all the variables to have exact unit roots and are not at all robust even to slight violations of this condition. In this article, I consider an alternative approach to inference in a cointegrating system. This involves testing the hypothesis that a cointegrating vector takes on a specified value by testing for the stationarity of the associated residual. Confidence sets for the cointegrating vector can be constructed by exploiting the equivalence between tests and confidence sets. This method has the advantage that it remains valid even if the regressors have roots that are not exactly equal to unity.     

Returning to sexual stigma: post‐trafficking lives

This article is concerned with returning to sexual stigma in two key respects. First, it prompts a return to the conceptual understanding of sexual stigma and makes an important contribution to critiques of the individualized frameworks that have dominated much of the literature on stigma to date, through a critical analysis of sexual stigma as a collective process at different scales and locations. Second, using empirical data from a qualitative study of post‐trafficking experiences of women in Nepal as a case study to develop theoretical understandings of the production of stigma, it explores modalities of sexualized stigma encountered on return from trafficking situations. Within the trafficking literature there has been very little attention to what happens after trafficking. This article addresses this gap in focusing on lives post‐trafficking and, in addition, contributes to the limited research on trafficking in Nepal.     

To Cue or Not to Cue: Toddlers’ Use of Beacons and Associative Cues in Object‐displacement Tasks

Two experiments examined 24‐ and 30‐month‐olds' use of different forms of landmark information in an object‐displacement task involving a car rolling down a ramp whose trajectory was occluded by a screen containing doors. A pompom attached to the car, visible through a transparent window running across the screen, served as a cue for the car's location and functioned either as a beacon cue, directly guiding search to a given location, or an associative cue, indirectly marking target location. Interestingly, one way in which the cue information was modified from a beacon to an associative cue was in terms of the structure of the search apparatus, and not necessarily the cue information itself. Consistent with previous literature, 24‐month‐olds' search was significantly influenced by the shift from beacon to associative cue information, whereas 30‐month‐olds, although affected by the shift from one to the other, were less affected by this variation. These findings suggest that the cue drives attention to specific locations in space, with search behavior being more accurate when the cue directly marks the hiding location (i.e., beacon) than when the cue indirectly marks it (i.e., associative cue).     

Language Maintenance versus Language of Instruction: Spanish Reading Development among Latino and Latina Bilingual Learners

Latino/a children who attend schools in the United States must learn English well for schooling success. However, bilingualism is associated with achievement in both cognition and general literacy, which are core components of academic development. We examined the growth of Spanish reading comprehension among 101 Spanish-English bilingual Latino/a children in second through fifth grade in three urban U.S. districts. The students received literacy instruction in one of three groups: English-only, Spanish-only, and bilingual. Language of instruction had a significant effect on Spanish reading, but students who received Spanish language instruction were losing Spanish literacy skills relative to the norming sample for the reading assessment. English reading and Spanish vocabulary were predictive of Spanish reading, but socioeconomic variables were not. Heritage language loss is described as paradoxical because Spanish and English reading skills are intertwined and biliteracy is associated with better economic opportunities for Latino/as in the U.S. job market.     

STATISTICAL INFERENCE OF TRANSMISSION FIDELITY OF DNA METHYLATION PATTERNS OVER SOMATIC CELL DIVISIONS IN MAMMALS

We develop Bayesian inference methods for a recently-emerging type of epigenetic data to study the transmission fidelity of DNA methylation patterns over cell divisions. The data consist of parent-daughter double-stranded DNA methylation patterns with each pattern coming from a single cell and represented as an unordered pair of binary strings. The data are technically difficult and time-consuming to collect, putting a premium on an efficient inference method. Our aim is to estimate rates for the maintenance and de novo methylation events that gave rise to the observed patterns, while accounting for measurement error. We model data at multiple sites jointly, thus using whole-strand information, and considerably reduce confounding between parameters. We also adopt a hierarchical structure that allows for variation in rates across sites without an explosion in the effective number of parameters. Our context-specific priors capture the expected stationarity, or near-stationarity, of the stochastic process that generated the data analyzed here. This expected stationarity is shown to greatly increase the precision of the estimation. Applying our model to a data set collected at the human FMR1 locus, we find that measurement errors, generally ignored in similar studies, occur at a non-trivial rate (inappropriate bisulfite conversion error: 1.6% with 80% CI: 0.9-2.3%). Accounting for these errors has a substantial impact on estimates of key biological parameters. The estimated average failure of maintenance rate and daughter de novo rate decline from 0.04 to 0.024 and from 0.14 to 0.07, respectively, when errors are accounted for. Our results also provide evidence that de novo events may occur on both parent and daughter strands: the median parent and daughter de novo rates are 0.08 (80% CI: 0.04-0.13) and 0.07 (80% CI: 0.04-0.11), respectively.     

Nonparametric density estimation from censored data

Nonparametric estimation of the probability density function f° of a lifetime distribution based on arbitrarily right-censor-ed observations from f° has been studied extensively in recent years. In this paper the density estimators from censored data that have been obtained to date are outlined. Histogram, kernel-type, maximum likelihood, series-type, and Bayesian nonparametric estimators are included. Since estimation of the hazard rate function can be considered as giving a density estimate, all known results concerning nonparametric hazard rate estimation from censored samples are also briefly mentioned.