Condom use self‐efficacy among U.S.‐ and foreign‐born Latinos in Texas

The objective of this study was to assess the influence of condom use self‐efficacy on the reported condom use of Latinos. We conducted a rapid needs assessment study among U.S. and foreign‐born Latinos living in Houston, TX, to identify behavioral and psychosocial factors that influence their risk for HIV. Bilingual Latino interviewers conducted confidential face‐to‐face interviews with individuals living in apartment complexes or residential areas primarily populated by Latinos. A total of 152 participants completed the survey. Regression results indicate that education and gender influenced condom use self‐efficacy, which in turn influenced condom use in the last sexual encounter and with the primary sexual partner. However, gender and relationship risk were stronger predictors of condom use. Study results indicate that there are differences in condom use self‐efficacy and sexual risk behaviors between Latino men and women that need further exploration.     

‘The silence is roaring’: sterilization,reproductive rights and women with intellectual disabilities

This paper reviews the history of sterilization of women with intellectual disabilities, and considers its relevance to current practice regarding reproductive choice and futures. The paper provides an overview of published research on historical practices, focusing on the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and the Nordic countries. Most of this research draws upon written records, centring on eugenics debates. However, emerging oral history testimonies gathered by the authors suggest that sterilization procedures were also conducted in the community, the result of private negotiations between parents and medical practitioners. The article presents these accounts and calls for an end to a ‘roaring silence’ on this issue. More empirical studies are needed to recover the experiences of women who have been sterilized and to explore how decisions about reproductive choice and capacity were made in the past and continue to be made today.     

Method and Measurement in Sociology,fifty years on

In this article, we revisit Aaron Cicourel’s classic text Method and Measurement in Sociology. We consider the legacy and influence of the book in the context of the continued and urgent significance of such properly methodological inquiry. We examine, in particular, the ways in which Cicourel’s concern with decisions of measurement – as a situated, contingent and unavoidably practical accomplishment – makes a critical contribution to the understanding of measurement within sociology and serves as continued inspiration for the sociology of contemporary measurement practices in the context of proliferating regimes of institutional performance measurement and league tables, risk assessment and audit. We recommend a critical engagement with this text in the sociological examination of social inquiry – avoiding both overly subjective interpretations of social phenomena and the arbitrary application of crude categories to complex forms of organisation – and in sociology’s continued warrant to critically engage with the practices in and through which social reality is (re)produced.     

The role of the minimum clinically important difference and its impact on designing a trial

The minimum clinically important difference (MCID) between treatments is recognized as a key concept in the design and interpretation of results from a clinical trial. Yet even assuming such a difference can be derived, it is not necessarily clear how it should be used. In this paper, we consider three possible roles for the MCID. They are: (1) using the MCID to determine the required sample size so that the trial has a pre-specified statistical power to conclude a significant treatment effect when the treatment effect is equal to the MCID; (2) requiring with high probability, the observed treatment effect in a trial, in addition to being statistically significant, to be at least as large as the MCID; (3) demonstrating via hypothesis testing that the effect of the new treatment is at least as large as the MCID. We will examine the implications of the three different possible roles of the MCID on sample size, expectations of a new treatment, and the chance for a successful trial. We also give our opinion on how the MCID should generally be used in the design and interpretation of results from a clinical trial.     

Top incomes and the gender divide

In the recent research on top incomes, there has been little discussion of gender. A great deal is known about gender differentials in earnings, but how far does this carry over to total incomes? This paper investigates the gender divide at the top of the income distribution using tax record data for eight countries with individual taxation. It shows that women are strongly under-represented at the top of the distribution. Although the presence of women at the top has increased over time, the rise becomes smaller at the very top. The income gradient by gender has become more marked. The paper also shows that income composition differs by gender and exhibits significant changes over time, underlining the fact that it is not sufficient to look only at earned income.     

Top incomes in the UK over the 20th century

Summary.  Recent changes in the distribution of income need to be placed in historical context. The paper provides new evidence about the evolution of top incomes in the UK over the 20th century. Making use of published tabulations of the income tax statistics, and of microdata for recent years, we construct estimates of the shares of top income groups, giving for the first time an annual time series for gross incomes that spans more than 90 years. The paper pays particular attention to the problems of data construction and of the interpretation of tax-based evidence. The resulting statistics have evident limitations but throw light on periods, such as that between the First and Second World Wars, for which there is little other empirical material. The results bring out clearly how the major equalization of the first three-quarters of the century in the UK has been reversed, taking the shares of the top income groups back to levels of inequality found 50 years ago. A similar U-shaped pattern is found for the USA, but the post-war experience of France is different from that in the UK.     

Computing least trimmed squares regression with the forward search

Least trimmed squares (LTS) provides a parametric family of high breakdown estimators in regression with better asymptotic properties than least median of squares (LMS) estimators. We adapt the forward search algorithm of Atkinson (1994) to LTS and provide methods for determining the amount of data to be trimmed. We examine the efficiency of different trimming proportions by simulation and demonstrate the increasing efficiency of parameter estimation as larger proportions of data are fitted using the LTS criterion. Some standard data examples are analysed. One shows that LTS provides more stable solutions than LMS.