Agenda-building in the corporate sphere: Analyzing influence in the 2008 Yahoo!-Icahn proxy contest

This study further extends agenda-building theory into the corporate sphere. This investigation tested for agenda-building relationships between the issues emphasized in corporate candidate-controlled information subsidies and financial news media coverage during the 2008 Yahoo! Inc.-Carl Icahn proxy contest for control of Yahoo!’s board of directors. Solid support was found for issue agenda-building associations. Cross-lagged correlation analyses revealed that both Yahoo!’s and Icahn's information subsidies enjoyed some success in shaping media coverage during the proxy fight. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Hoarding Cases Involving Older Adults: The Transition From a Private Matter to the Public Sector

Hoarding interventions with older adults require significant resources from multiple public agencies, yet recidivism occurs frequently. To improve services through better coordination, some communities have formed multiagency hoarding teams (MAHT), which include aging services. MAHTs requested this mixed methods study to understand the progression of cases through the public sector. Quantitative data collected on 52 cases involving adults ages 60+ identified steps in this process. Qualitative data collected from MAHT members were the basis for case studies illustrating the progression of cases through the public sector. Findings have implications for social workers involved in local service coordination, training, and policy.     

The political mobilization of corporate directors: socio‐economic correlates of affiliation to European pressure groups

Business has played a central role in the debate over Britain's place in the European Union. This paper examines the socio‐economic characteristics of directors of Britain's largest corporations who affiliated either to Business for Sterling or Britain in Europe. It reports associations between directors' social backgrounds and their probabilities of affiliation. Elite university education, club membership, wealth and multiple directorships were all associated with higher propensities to affiliate. The associations are consistent with the idea that directors' social resources allow them to overcome collective action problems as well as supplying them with the motivations to affiliate. They also indicated that directors form a privileged group in that they have a number of very powerful actors who can take unilateral political actions.     

Sexual Abuse by Men Who Work with Children

There is a dearth of knowledge about those who sexually abuse children while working in organizations. Here, we adopt a case study approach to examine this problem. We focus on eight adult males who had been imprisoned for abusing a total of 35 children while working in educational and voluntary settings. We provide a detailed account of abusers' characteristics, their strategies, how victims were selected, how trust was secured, and how victims' silence was ensured. Finally, we reflect on the extent to which our work might contribute toward the prevention of this form of abuse.     

Reports of childhood sexual abuse by adolescents and young adults: Stability over time

The consistency of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) reporting was explored in this study. Two‐hundred seventeen adolescents and young adults (ages 14–24) enrolled in urban health care clinics completed self‐report questionnaires assessing CSA and other problem behaviors at enrollment and at 7 months. Results indicated that the stability of CSA self‐report at two time points was poor (58% consistent nonreporters of CSA, 20% consistent reporters, 22% inconsistent reporters). Consistent and inconsistent reporters were differentiated on risk measures. Adolescents who endorsed more items from the CSA scale were five times more likely to be consistent reporters. In sum, adolescent CSA reporting was quite inconsistent over time. Using multi‐item scales and assessing CSA at two time points enhances accuracy of reporting.     

Who Plays What? Participation Profiles in Chance Versus Skill-based Gambling

To determine whether gambling participation falls into skill and chance-based categories and, if so, to determine the socio-demographic characteristics associated with these different categories. A cross-sectional analysis of all respondents to the 2005 Northern Territory Gambling Prevalence Survey who gambled in the 12 months prior to the survey. Factor analysis was employed to determine whether a chance versus skill-based dichotomy described the structure of gambling participation. Gambler preference groups were constructed using the median of rotated factor scores. Multinomial logit regression was then used to determine independent associations between explanatory variables and categories of gambler preferences. The skill and chance-based dichotomy did describe player preferences for the sample of adult gamblers in the Northern Territory, Australia. Gender, age, household income, household structure and the geographic location (access to gambling opportunities) of respondents were all associated with different degrees of participation in skill and chance based gambling activities. Notably, respondents 35 years and over were significantly over-represented in the low-skill/high-chance participation group, and under-represented in the high-skill/low-chance group. It is clear that the term gambling is a confounding rubric that hides differences both in the type of activity and the socio-demographic profiles of participants. An examination of the latter raises important questions about the role of chance in later life, as well as the role of self-determination in gambling for other groups, particularly younger men.     

Discourse, upstream public engagement and the governance of human life extension research

Important scientific, ethical and sociological debates are emerging over the trans-humanist goal to achieve therapeutic treatments to ‘cure’ the debilitation of age-related illness and extend the healthy life span of individuals through “interventive biogerontological research”. The scientific and moral discourses surrounding this contentious scientific field are mapped out, followed by a normative argument favouring ‘strong’ deliberative democratic control of human life extension research. This proposal incorporates insights from constructive and participatory technology assessment, upstream public engagement and back-casting analysis; to outline a programme of participatory approaches to encourage two-way dialogue between scientific and citizen perspectives, and foster the long-term deliberative democratic governance of this developing field.     

The Game of Contacts: Estimating the Social Visibility of Groups

Estimating the sizes of hard-to-count populations is a challenging and important problem that occurs frequently in social science, public health, and public policy. This problem is particularly pressing in HIV/AIDS research because estimates of the sizes of the most at-risk populations-illicit drug users, men who have sex with men, and sex workers-are needed for designing, evaluating, and funding programs to curb the spread of the disease. A promising new approach in this area is the network scale-up method, which uses information about the personal networks of respondents to make population size estimates. However, if the target population has low social visibility, as is likely to be the case in HIV/AIDS research, scale-up estimates will be too low. In this paper we develop a game-like activity that we call the game of contacts in order to estimate the social visibility of groups, and report results from a study of heavy drug users in Curitiba, Brazil (n = 294). The game produced estimates of social visibility that were consistent with qualitative expectations but of surprising magnitude. Further, a number of checks suggest that the data are high-quality. While motivated by the specific problem of population size estimation, our method could be used by researchers more broadly and adds to long-standing efforts to combine the richness of social network analysis with the power and scale of sample surveys.