DOMINANT GROUP ETHNIC IDENTITY IN THE UNITED STATES:

This article explores several issues pertaining to the nature of dominant group ethnicity in the United States. Dominant group ethnic identity tends to be less visible and less salient as a result of dominant status. This "hidden' ethnicity has resulted in the systematic un-derdevelopment of the study of race and ethnic relations with regard to the analysis of the role of dominant group ethnicity. In addition, the taken-for-granted nature of dominant group identity has facilitated attempts by the dominant group to maintain its dominant position in the system of ethnic stratification. Finally, this article examines the process through which dominant group ethnicity has evolved and assesses the consequences of these changes for race and ethnic relations in the United States.     

Understanding socially inhibited behaviors in managers

The authors' purpose in this study is to define and highlight socially inhibited behaviors among managers, explore the implications of these behaviors for the workplace, identify ways to assist inordinately shy managers, and help staff to understand and relate more effectively when subjected to an inhibited manager. The authors search for the origins of shyness, surveying the various perspectives in personality theory and within the concept of situational causality.     

Mary Parker Follett: epilogue to or return of a social work management pioneer?

The authors present an overview of the major concepts and contributions of Mary Parker Follett to the development of social work management theory, past and present. The case is made for Follett to be afforded a more visible role in the profession's understanding and teaching of modern management theory and practice. The authors show how Follett's work served as an important bridge between changing eras in management thought, specifically as related to scientific management and the subsequent human relations models. Even after six decades, Follett's work, in its timelessness and timeliness, remains contemporary, for it is rooted in her keen ability to grasp the complexities inherent in the human services enterprise, and thus it continues to inform one's understanding and behavior within the organizational context.     

Why don’t we care more about carelessness? Understanding the causes and consequences of careless participants

ABSTRACT

Although careless respondents have wreaked havoc on research for decades, the prevalence and implications of these participants has likely increased due to many new methodological techniques currently in use. Across three studies, we examined the prevalence of careless responding in participants, several means of predicting careless respondents, and the implications of careless respondents on data quality and recruitment attempts. At the same time, we sought to examine the geographic differences of careless responding and provide psychometric evidence for using embedded questions to detect these participants. In Study 1, we found over 1/3^rd of participants showed some evidence of careless responding and that careless respondents exhibited certain personality and demographic characteristics. In particular, carelessness seemed more prevalent in Asian samples than in North American samples. In Study 2, we found nearly 1/4^th of participants showed evidence of careless responding and that conclusions based on data including versus excluding these participants differed in significant yet unpredictable ways. Finally, in Study 3, we found that nearly 2/3^rd of participants who signed up for the study did not meet advertised study requirements for participation and including these participants changed the structure of the data obtained.     

Heteronormative Labour: Conflicting Accountability Structures among Men in Nursing

Drawing on interview and diary data from 40 men in nursing in the US, the current study advances our theoretical understanding of how heteronormativity and masculinity intersect to shape men's performance of carework. Men in nursing are constrained by their accountability to stereotypes that they are gay and/or hypersexual, challenging their work in the feminized profession of nursing. As heteronormativity is embedded in the institution of health care, men nurses of all sexualities must perform additional labour on the job to reconcile their conflicting accountability to heteronormative stereotypes and occupational standards of care. We conceptualize this additional labour as heteronormative labour — work performed in order to strategically manage heteronormative expectations and realized through discursive, cognitive and emotional strategies. The experiences of men in caring professions remain rich for advancing theory on the relationship between sexuality and gender generally and in the workplace.     

Causality in Contemporary American Sociology: An Empirical Assessment and Critique

Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that (1) “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making causal claims, (2) research methods affect but do not determine causal usage, and (3) the use of explicit causal language and the concept of “mechanisms” to make causal claims is limited. Instead, we find that metaphors and metaphoric reasoning are fundamental for causal claims‐making in the discipline. On this basis, we define three dominant causal types used in sociology today, which we label the Probabilistic, Initiating and Conditioning types. We theorize this outcome as demonstrating the primary role that cognitive models play in providing inference‐rich metaphors that allow sociologists to map causal relationships on to empirical processes.     

Rural Disadvantage and Malaria in Less‐Developed Nations: A Cross‐National Investigation of a Neglected Disease

Although often forgotten among people in affluent nations, malaria represents a leading global health concern in poor, rural countries. Malaria is traditionally thought of as a rural disease, given the close proximity of rural households to mosquito disease vectors. However, more insight is needed to investigate the larger social, economic, and environmental conditions that perhaps interact with rurality to explain why some nations continue to have high levels of prevalence of this preventable and eradicable parasitic infection. We employ structural equation modeling to efficiently test for both direct and indirect effects of rurality. The results demonstrate that rurality works in important indirect ways; although rurality has indirect links to malaria through export agriculture, health spending, and sociohealth resources, careful decomposition of the indirect effects illustrates that the indirect effects through heath spending and sociohealth resources are most important. Overall, the findings suggest that rural vulnerabilities to malaria are not inherent and can be largely addressed by increasing public health provisions among rural populations.     

Drawing the Line: The Development of a Comprehensive Assessment of Infidelity Judgments

Infidelity is a leading cause of relationship discord and dissolution, and couples generally report expectations to maintain monogamy. However, a majority of men and women report engaging in some form of infidelity at least once in their lives. Research assessing judgments of the behaviors that constitute infidelity is lacking. The three studies reported here advanced the literature by developing and validating the Definitions of Infidelity Questionnaire (DIQ), a comprehensive measure examining infidelity judgments. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses indicated four factors to the scale: sexual/explicit behaviors, technology/online behaviors, emotional/affectionate behaviors, and solitary behaviors. Investigation of the psychometric properties demonstrated the DIQ to be reliable and valid. Participants agreed that sexual/explicit behaviors comprised infidelity to the largest extent, whereas other types of behaviors (technology/online behaviors, emotional/affectionate behaviors, and solitary behaviors) were judged as comprising infidelity to a lesser extent. Men reported more permissive judgments than did women. This study provides insights regarding operationalizing infidelity and identifying areas of ambiguity and consensus. Implications of the findings for educators and practitioners working with individuals in intimate relationships are discussed.     

On the Optimal Use of Suboptimal Forecasts of Explanatory Variables

Ashley (1983) gave a simple condition for determining when a forecast of an explanatory variable (X_t ) is sufficiently inaccurate that direct replacement of X_t by the forecast yields worse forecasts of the dependent variable than does respecification of the equation to omit X_t . Many available macroeconomic forecasts were shown to be of limited usefulness in direct replacement. Direct replacement, however, is not optimal if the forecast's distribution is known. Here optimal linear forms in commercial forecasts of several macroeconomic variables are obtained by using estimates of their distributions. Although they are an improvement on the raw forecasts (direct replacement), these optimal forms are still too inaccurate to be useful in replacing the actual explanatory variables in forecasting models. The results strongly indicate that optimal forms involving several commercial forecasts will not be very useful either. Thus Ashley's (1983) sufficient condition retains its value in gauging the usefulness of a forecast of an explanatory variable in a forecasting model, even though it focuses on direct replacement.