Rape on Campus: Community Education and Services for Victims

Abstract

Rape is an issue which must be addressed by college health workers. It is prevalent on college campuses in overt and subtle forms, and requires interventions on several levels. This paper describes community and professional education and training, victim counseling and advocacy, police liaison, and medical services, all of which are provided within a context of ongoing collaboration among agencies involved.     

Common factors influence bee foraging in urban and wildland landscapes

Bees are important flower-visiting insects that display differential occurrences at food resources throughout urban and wildland landscapes. This study examined the visitation rates and foraging patterns of eight taxonomic groups of bees that are common to California poppies, Eschscholzia californica, in both landscape types. Bee occurrence was documented in relation to floral resource characteristics (patch area, poppy coverage, and poppy density), local landscape characteristics (distance to the wildland-urban interface, distance to riparian areas, distance to green space, and land use), and regional landscape context (urban versus wildland). Similar abundance and richness measures were recorded at both urban and wildland poppy patches, but community composition varied in each landscape. Bumble bees were more abundant at poppies in the wildland whereas species in the family Halictidae (sweat bees) were more abundant at poppies within the urban landscape. Resource patch size and density consistently correlated with increased bee presence for all bee types foraging in the wildland. Individual patterns of occurrence in the urban landscape were somewhat divergent; the foraging dynamics of larger bodied-bees (Bombus vosnesenskii and Megachile species) correlated significantly with resource patch size and density, whereas smaller-bodied bees (family Halictidae and Andrena species) were influenced by landscape characteristics such as distance to the wildland-urban interface and distance to riparian areas. In summary, the surrounding landscape had an influence on community composition, but the magnitude of the floral resource present at a site and factors relating to foraging energetics were dominant drivers of local occurrence. These results suggest that management strategies that provide dense and abundant floral resources should be successful in attracting bees, irrespective of their location within the urban matrix.     

The efficacy of tables versus graphs in disrupting dark networks: An experimental study

An agent tasked with disrupting a dark (covert and illegal) network must first be presented with information about the organization's structure. This paper uses a behavioral experiment to test in a stylized dark network disruption setting whether an agent makes a better disruption choice when the information is displayed in a table or a graph format. We find that subjects make decisions more quickly when presented with graphs, but that subjects perform weakly better with tables. An important lesson is that the display should explicitly distinguish non-existent links from potential links of unknown status.     

Pilot Study on Childhood Sexual Abuse,Diurnal Cortisol Secretion,and Weight Loss in Bariatric Surgery Patients

Childhood sexual abuse increases risk for adult obesity. A potential contributing factor is altered cortisol secretion. In this pilot study, relationships among childhood sexual abuse, diurnal salivary cortisol secretion, and weight loss were explored in 17 bariatric surgery patients. Measurement points were before surgery (baseline) and 3 and 6 months after surgery. Childhood sexual abuse was measured by the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. The results showed moderate but nonsignificant positive correlations between the childhood sexual abuse subscale score and baseline morning cortisol, evening cortisol, and daily mean cortisol. An unexpected positive correlation was noted between the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire total score and weight loss at six months. Diurnal cortisol secretion did not change over time after surgery nor correlate significantly with weight loss at six months.     

Analysis of recurrent events with non-negligible event duration,with application to assessing hospital utilization

In an attempt to provide tools for assessing hospital utilization, this paper extends well-known models for recurrent events to address non-negligible event duration and presents a procedure for estimating the model parameters. The model extension is natural and easy to understand. Asymptotic properties of the associated inferences are derived adapting the well-developed methods based on the counting process formulation. Several specifications of the proposed modeling are illustrated with the hospitalization records of childhood cancer survivors from a health care insurance system that motivated this research. The usefulness and robustness of the proposed approach is demonstrated numerically via simulation.     

The Forms and Structure of International Voluntary Service

International voluntary service (IVS) has a significant and growing presence worldwide. IVS is a policy and program tool used for international development aid, humanitarian relief, and promotion of international understanding. In the last century, forms of IVS have proliferated, while research on scope, effectiveness, and impacts has lagged behind. We propose a typology that addresses duration, nature of service, and degree of “internationality.” Further, we identify IVS networks and support organizations that bolster the capacity of IVS sending and hosting organizations, and in this process create large and little recognized international institutions of cooperation. Building on the typology, we suggest program, policy, and research implications to advance knowledge of the role of IVS, its role in global civil society, and impacts it may have on human conditions and cross-cultural understanding.

Heterosexual Women’s and Men’s Labeling of Anal Behaviors as Having “Had Sex”

This study explored labeling of penile–anal intercourse (PAI), manual–anal (MA), and oral–anal (OA) behaviors as having “had sex” among heterosexual men and women with such experience residing in the United States (n = 3,218). Adult men and women completed an online questionnaire assessing sexual behaviors and whether each counted as having had sex. With the exception of anal intercourse, there was high variation in whether a behavior was labeled having had sex. There was not consensus on which anal sexual behaviors constituted having had sex, with attitudes varying across age, gender, and behavioral experience. Those who were older, male, and had the specific behavioral experience were more likely to label it as having had sex. Behaviorally specific assessments of the various anal behaviors as part of the sexual repertoire is critical to more accurate evaluation of sexual histories and assessment of risks to sexual health.     

Parental Involvement Promotes Rural African American Youths’ Self‐Pride and Sexual Self‐Concepts

This study, an evaluation of the Strong African American Families Program, was designed to determine whether intervention‐induced changes in targeted parenting behaviors were associated with young adolescents’ development of racial pride, self‐esteem, and sexual identity. Participants were 332 African American mothers and their 11‐year‐old children in 9 rural Georgia counties. Families were randomly assigned to a control group or an intervention group. Unlike those in the control families, mothers in the intervention group reported increases in targeted parenting behaviors, which promoted self‐esteem, positive racial identity, and positive sexual self‐concepts among their children. These findings expand the study of African American youths’ identity development by including broader domains of identity and parenting processes other than racial socialization.     

Reducing Overconfidence in the Interval Judgments of Experts

Elicitation of expert opinion is important for risk analysis when only limited data are available. Expert opinion is often elicited in the form of subjective confidence intervals; however, these are prone to substantial overconfidence. We investigated the influence of elicitation question format, in particular the number of steps in the elicitation procedure. In a 3‐point elicitation procedure, an expert is asked for a lower limit, upper limit, and best guess, the two limits creating an interval of some assigned confidence level (e.g., 80%). In our 4‐step interval elicitation procedure, experts were also asked for a realistic lower limit, upper limit, and best guess, but no confidence level was assigned; the fourth step was to rate their anticipated confidence in the interval produced. In our three studies, experts made interval predictions of rates of infectious diseases (Study 1, n = 21 and Study 2, n = 24: epidemiologists and public health experts), or marine invertebrate populations (Study 3, n = 34: ecologists and biologists). We combined the results from our studies using meta‐analysis, which found average overconfidence of 11.9%, 95% CI [3.5, 20.3] (a hit rate of 68.1% for 80% intervals)—a substantial decrease in overconfidence compared with previous studies. Studies 2 and 3 suggest that the 4‐step procedure is more likely to reduce overconfidence than the 3‐point procedure (Cohen's d = 0.61, [0.04, 1.18]).