Intended and initial settlement patterns of recent immigrants to the U.S., 1985–1990: A comparison of PUMS and INS public use files

At the time of entry into the U.S., immigrants are required to identify their ’intended’ destination to INS officials. They are not, however, required to remain in that location. If immigrant settlement patterns represent an evolutionary, dynamic system, it is likely that immigrants will adjust their location in the period shortly after arrival in the U.S. in response to various factors, leading to an ‘initial’ settlement system. Of interest in the following paper are the scale, direction and magnitude of adjustments made to the immigrant settlement system in the period shortly after arrival. The analysis utilizes the 1990 5 percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) and the 1985–90 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Public Use Tapes in order to explore the intended and initial (observed) settlement patterns of recent (1985–90) immigrants and to comment upon the applicability of these terms. Results indicate that the two settlement patterns are highly similar, despite apparently high levels of movement among recent arrivals. The analysis also touches upon the ‘come to stay’ question raised by Ellis and Wright (1998a), suggesting that the interpretation of the question is dependent upon immigrant status rather than when immigrants first arrived in the U.S. This research was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (97-08436). The author is solely responsible for the content of this research.     

When was secularization? Dating the decline of the British churches and locating its cause1

Dating the decline of Christianity in Britain has a vital bearing on its explanation. Recent work by social historians has challenged the sociological view that secularization is due to long‐term diffuse social processes by asserting that the churches remained stable and popular until the late 1950s and that the causes of decline lie in the social and cultural changes associated with the 1960s. We challenge this interpretation of the evidence. We also note that much of the decline of the churches is explained not by adult defection but by a failure to keep children in the faith. Given the importance of parental homogamy for the successful transmission of religious identity, the causes of decline in one generation may well lie in the experiences of the previous generation. We focus on the disruptive effects of the 1939–45 war on family formation and use survey data to argue for a staged model of decline that is compatible with the conventional gradual view of secularization.     

Between argument and coercion: Social coordination in rural environmental governance

Increasingly, partnerships and other cooperative forms of governance are common-place in addressing problems of environmental management in rural landscapes. These forms of governance are multi-dimensional in the policy instruments employed; the make-up of actors; and, the types of rationalities that actors use to debate the problem and proposed solutions. This paper pursues the question of how different modes of social action, represented in argumentative claims of participants, influence social coordination in these governance arenas. An empirical study is presented of agri-environmental governance in Australia where actors debate planning and policy initiatives to reduce diffuse water quality impacts from farms on the adjacent Great Barrier Reef. Forester’s conceptualisation of practical social action which locates communicative action in the ‘real world’ of interest-based planning contexts, is used as an analytical frame to identify: (i) the type of claims made by governments, farmer groups and other actors in argumentation; (ii) the claims association with communicative, strategic and instrumental modes of action; and, (iii) their consequence for social coordination in formation and maintenance of inclusive, legitimate and viable forms of governing. The study finds that the interconnected character of claims made by actors, and the ready switching between modes of action observed, point to a situated and dynamic expression of rationality within these contested and prolonged debates on how to legitimately and effectively govern rural environments.     

The impact of organizational culture and leadership performance on PR professionals’ job satisfaction: Testing the joint mediating effects of engagement and trust

The study examines the impact of critical organizational factors (organizational culture and excellent leader performance) on public relations professionals’ overall job satisfaction by focusing on testing the joint mediating effects work engagement and trust could generate. A national online survey of 838 public relations professionals working in a variety of organizations was used as the empirical data to test the relationships in a proposed conceptual model. Results confirmed the strong impact organizational culture and leader performance could have on public relations professionals’ work engagement, trust, and job satisfaction. More importantly, results revealed the significant joint mediating effects of engagement and trust on professionals’ job satisfaction, when supportive organizational culture and excellent leader performance were achieved. The study concludes with research and practical implications.     

Status and Cultural Defense: The Case of the New Christian Right

Abstract

Miller (1985) has claimed that a properly designed research project shows no support for the cultural defense or “politics of lifestyles concern” explanation for the rise of the New Christian Right. This short article argues that Miller's data have little or no bearing on the issues he claims to explore.     

Symbolic cumulant calculations for frequency domain time series

With time series data, there is often the issue of finding accurate approximations for the variance of such quantities as the sample autocovariance function or spectral estimate. Smith and Field (J. Time. Ser. Anal 14: 381–395, 1993) proposed a variance estimate motivated by resampling in the frequency domain. In this paper we present some results on the cumulants of this and other frequency domain estimates obtained via symbolic computation. The statistics of interest are linear combinations of products of discrete Fourier transforms. We describe an operator which calculates the joint cumulants of such statistics, and use the operator to deepen our understanding of the behaviour of the resampling based variance estimate. The operator acts as a filter for a general purpose operator described in Andrews and Stafford (J.R. Statist. Soc. B55, 613–627).     

Simple,exact inference for 2 × 2 tables

Exact inference for odds-ratio tests and confidence intervals relies on sophisticated algorithms, typically found only in the specialize software. This tends to discourage the use of exact methods in the analyses of 2 × 2 tables. We show that by first devolving each corresponding hypergeometric random variable into independent Bernoulli variates, simple and efficient algorithms emerge that are easily programmed in the commonly available software.     

Data envelopment analysis 1978–2010: A citation-based literature survey

This study surveys the data envelopment analysis (DEA) literature by applying a citation-based approach. The main goals are to find a set of papers playing the central role in DEA development and to discover the latest active DEA subareas. A directional network is constructed based on citation relationships among academic papers. After assigning an importance index to each link in the citation network, main DEA development paths emerge. We examine various types of main paths, including local main path, global main path, and multiple main paths. The analysis result suggests, as expected, that Charnes et al. (1978) [Charnes A, Cooper WW, Rhodes E. Measuring the efficiency of decision making units. European Journal of Operational Research 1978; 2(6): 429–444] is the most influential DEA paper. The five most active DEA subareas in recent years are identified; among them the “two-stage contextual factor evaluation framework” is relatively more active. Aside from the main path analysis, we summarize basic statistics on DEA journals and researchers. A growth curve analysis hints that the DEA literature’s size will eventually grow to at least double the size of the existing literature.