Isolation Within Isolation: A Solitary Century of African-American Vernacular English

The nature of language diversity in small, isolated communities is considered by examining a unique sociolingustic situation in which a one African-American family has resided for over 130 years on a small island community located off the Southeastern coast of the United States. The Anglo-American community maintained a distinctive dialect due to their isolation from the mainland United States, while the sole African-American family maintained a variety heavily influenced by African-American Vernacular English. Although some assimilation to the surrounding Anglo-American variety has taken place, a number of salient African-American Vernacular English features are still used by the single African-American resident of the island. At the same time, the most marked items of the Anglo-American Outer Banks variety have not been assimilated, thus demonstrating the symbolic exclusion of the African-American speaker from the Anglo community despite her life-long residency.     

Children's abilities and strategies in managing the facial display of affect

To examine children's ability to control their affective expression facially, 68 second- and fourth-grade boys and girls were unobtrusively videotaped while discussing six self-chosen activities about which they felt positively, neutrally, or negatively. Children then performed three facial management tasks: (a)inhibition (showing no emotion instead of a felt emotion); (b)simulation (showing an emotion when not feeling anything); and (c)masking (showing an emotion that is different than what is felt). Twelve raters judged the edited tapes of the children's performance for affect positivity and deceptiveness. Repeated measures ANOVAs indicated, in contrast to previous research, that children were highly competent in managing facial displays. To understand children's techniques for managing affective displays, two raters categorized the primary cognitive strategies children used. Results showed that fourth graders used more complex strategies more often than second graders. These results highlight children's skill and strategies in affect management.Funding for this project was provided by a NICHHD grant (#HD22367) to the first author. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Nancy A. Ballard and Michael G. Rakouskas in data collection and preparation. We also thank the children whose participation and cooperation made this research possible.     

The applicability of social control theory in understanding adolescent alcohol use

Utilizing panel data on 345 high school students, this study investigates the efficacy of social control theory in accounting for adolescent orientations toward alcohol use. The findings suggest that the differing informal control mechanisms under consideration place varying constraining influences upon adolescent alcohol use, and upon problems which arise in the lives of adolescents as a consequence of their drinking, throughout the three high, school years. Similarly, alcohol use and its attendant problems are generally found to be associated with a decrease in the strength of adolescents’ bonds to conventionality, though these influences differ in degree from year to year as well.     

The Links between Migration,Poverty and Health: Evidence from Khayelitsha and Mitchell’s Plain

In the mid-1950s, the City of Cape Town was part of a wider area demarcated as a Coloured Labour Preference Area. The free movement of African people into the city was strictly controlled and the residential areas were segregated along racial lines. In terms of Apartheid’s grand design, an area designated Mitchell’s Plain was demarcated for occupation by Coloured people in 1973 while another designated Khayelitsha was allocated for African people in 1984. The two areas were incorporated in one magisterial district, Mitchell’s Plain, in the mid-1980s. A sample survey of the area was conducted in late November and early December 2000 with a focus on labour market issues. Its aim was to capture occupants of households aged 18 or older. The survey data has been interrogated to describe the connections between migration, poverty and health in a city where recent rapid urbanisation is changing the demographic profile significantly. As a consequence, the need to provide adequate infrastructure, decent housing and employment poses a daunting challenge ten years after the new democracy has been ushered in.This paper is an abridged version of a Centre for Social Science Research working paper No. 73 published in August 2004.     

Development of an Interspecies Nested Dose‐Response Model for Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis

Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) causes chronic inflammation of the intestines in humans, ruminants, and other species. It is the causative agent of Johne's disease in cattle, and has been implicated as the causative agent of Crohn's disease in humans. To date, no quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) for MAP utilizing a dose‐response function exists. The objective of this study is to develop a nested dose‐response model for infection from oral exposure to MAP utilizing data from the peer‐reviewed literature. Four studies amenable to dose‐response modeling were identified in the literature search and optimized to the one‐parameter exponential or two‐parameter beta‐Poisson dose‐response models. A nesting analysis was performed on all permutations of the candidate data sets to determine the acceptability of pooling data sets across host species. Three of four data sets exhibited goodness of fit to at least one model. All three data sets exhibited good fit to the beta‐Poisson model, and one data set exhibited goodness of fit, and best fit, to the exponential model. Two data sets were successfully nested using the beta‐Poisson model with parameters α = 0.0978 and N₅₀ = 2.70 × 10² CFU. These data sets were derived from sheep and red deer host species, indicating successful interspecies nesting, and demonstrate the highly infective nature of MAP. The nested dose‐response model described should be used for future QMRA research regarding oral exposure to MAP.     

Direct and Indirect Measures of Learning Outcomes in an MSW Program: What Do We Actually Measure?

Abstract

Rankings of professional schools are often flawed and always controversial. This was certainly the case when, for the first time, U.S. News & World Report published a list based on “reputation” of the “best” schools of social work. This article compares the results of that study with the findings of eight other attempts to rank social work schools over the last 20 years. The similarities and differences among those studies are discussed in terms of what we may learn from them.     

Patterns of gay and lesbian partnering in the larger metropolitan areas of the United States

This paper had two objectives. First, we developed for each large metropolitan area of the United States with a population of 500,000 or more in 1990 four indexes of gay partnering and four indexes of lesbian partnering. We compared and related these indexes and their variable measurements with one another. Second, using what we argue is the statistically and demographically preferred set of gay and lesbian partnering rates, we proposed and tested an assortment of ecological hypotheses relating characteristics of the metropolitan areas with the gay and lesbian partnering rates. Rates of gay and lesbian partnering, we show, are more influenced by such metropolitan characteristics as physical climate and the crime rate than by a religious characteristic such as the number of Southern Baptist adherents. Among the conclusions of the paper is our claim that there needs to be greater consideration of the methodological issues related to the use of government data for the development of rates of gay and lesbian partnering.