Exploring the relationship between public opinion and personal attitudes and behavior toward lesbians and gay men: social conformity revisited

This study investigated the relationship between social conformity, gender-role egalitarianism, and personal levels of heterosexism, or prejudice based on same-sex orientation. Mock public opinion polls of a positive or negative nature regarding same-sex orientation were used to study attitudinal and behavioral change of participants and attitude-behavior consistency. The study sample included 194 undergraduate students from a Midwestern university. A correlation existed between participants' traditional gender role beliefs and heterosexism. Participants who viewed the positive public opinion poll demonstrated behavioral support for a lesbian and gay organization, as did participants with positive attitudes toward lesbians and gay men. Findings are analyzed within a social prejudice framework.     

A multi-objective coordinate-exchange two-phase local search algorithm for multi-stratum experiments

A multi-stratum design is a useful tool for industrial experimentation, where factors that have levels which are harder to set than others, due to time or cost constraints, are frequently included. The number of different levels of hardness to set defines the number of strata that should be used. The simplest case is the split-plot design, which includes two strata and two sets of factors defined by their level of hardness-to-set. In this paper, we propose a novel computational algorithm which can be used to construct optimal multi-stratum designs for any number of strata and up to six optimality criteria simultaneously. Our algorithm allows the study of the entire Pareto front of the optimization problem and the selection of the designs representing the desired trade-off between the competing objectives. We apply our algorithm to several real case scenarios and we show that the efficiencies of the designs obtained present experimenters with several good options according to their objectives.     

The Baby Elmo Program: Improving teen father-child interactions within juvenile justice facilities

The aim of the Baby Elmo Program is to establish a low-cost, sustainable parenting and structured visitation program for non-custodial incarcerated teen parents. The program is taught and supervised by probation staff in juvenile detention facilities and unlike traditional programs, this intervention is not based on increasing the teen's abstract parenting knowledge, but rather in building a relationship between the teen and his child. The sessions target the interactional quality of the relationship by introducing relationship, communication, and socio-emotional enhancing techniques. Because the intervention is conducted in the context of parent-child visits, it fosters hands-on learning and increases the opportunity for contact between these young parents and their children, a benefit in itself. Twenty father-infant dyads, with infants ranging in age from 6 to 36 months, participated in the present preliminary evaluation of the program. Individual growth curve analyses showed significant gains in five of six measures of emotional responsiveness with the age of infant as a significant covariate. These results indicate improvements in positive high quality interactions and communication during sessions between infants and their incarcerated parents and this increase in the interactional quality of the relationship increases the likelihood that the incarcerated teen and child will form and maintain a positive relationship with one another.     

A Method for Ascertaining and Controlling Representation Bias in Field Trials for Airborne Plant Pathogens

The basic premise of running a field trial is that the estimates of treatment effects obtained are representative of how the different treatments will perform in the field. The disparities between the treatment effects observed experimentally, and those that would be observed were the treatments applied to the field, we term 'representation bias.' When looking at field trials testing the efficacies of treatment sprays on plant pathogens, representation bias can be caused by positive and negative inter-plot interference. The potential for such effects will be greatest when looking at pathogens that are dispersed by wind. In this paper, a computer simulation that simulates plant disease dispersal under such conditions is described. This program is used to quantify the amount of representation bias occurring in various experimental situations. Through this, the relationships between field design parameters and representation bias are explored, and the importance of plot dimension and spacing, as well as treatment to plot allocation, emphasized.     

Money management and views of civil partnership in same‐sex couples: results from a UK survey of non‐heterosexuals

Recent legislation in the UK has extended many of the legal and financial rights and responsibilities of heterosexual marriage to same‐sex couples who register their partnerships. Prior to the Civil Partnership Act (2004) however, little was known about financial arrangements in same‐sex couples, nor the extent to which these mirrored those of married or cohabiting heterosexuals. This paper reports the findings from the first large‐scale survey in the UK to investigate finances and civil partnership beliefs in a convenience sample of non‐heterosexuals: 510 individuals, of whom 386 were currently in a same‐sex relationship, participated in the survey. Our findings showed less merging of finances (such as in pooling, allowance, and whole wage systems) than is typical in heterosexual married couples. The results of a series of multinomial logistic regression analyses showed that rating CP as more important, and having both names on the mortgage, significantly reduced the odds of independent (ie, separate) management of finances. Participants were almost unanimous in their endorsement of CP as a form of legal recognition, with a large majority saying that they would also consider it for themselves.