GENDER, RELIGIOSITY, AND REACTIONS TO STRAIN AMONG AFRICAN AMERICANS

Drawing on Broidy and Agnew's (1997 ) extension of general strain theory to explain gender differences in deviance and crime, we tested hypotheses explaining why women are more distressed than men, but less likely to commit deviance in reaction to strain. Applying structural equation modeling to analyze data from a national survey of African Americans, we find that African-American women are more distressed than men, but less likely to engage in interpersonal aggression, because they are better protected by religiosity's distress buffering as well as deviance-reducing effects, and more likely to experience self-directed distress (depression and anxiety) in response to strain, which is less likely to lead to other-directed deviance, like interpersonal aggression, than other-directed distress (anger).     

Bayesian accrual modeling and prediction in multicenter clinical trials with varying center activation times

Investigators who manage multicenter clinical trials need to pay careful attention to patterns of subject accrual, and the prediction of activation time for pending centers is potentially crucial for subject accrual prediction. We propose a Bayesian hierarchical model to predict subject accrual for multicenter clinical trials in which center activation times vary. We define center activation time as the time at which a center can begin enrolling patients in the trial. The difference in activation times between centers is assumed to follow an exponential distribution, and the model of subject accrual integrates prior information for the study with actual enrollment progress. We apply our proposed Bayesian multicenter accrual model to two multicenter clinical studies. The first is the PAIN‐CONTRoLS study, a multicenter clinical trial with a goal of activating 40 centers and enrolling 400 patients within 104 weeks. The second is the HOBIT trial, a multicenter clinical trial with a goal of activating 14 centers and enrolling 200 subjects within 36 months. In summary, the Bayesian multicenter accrual model provides a prediction of subject accrual while accounting for both center‐ and individual patient‐level variation.     

Decreasing the Recent Immigrant Earnings Gap: The Impact of Canadian Credential Attainment

It is well documented that newly arrived immigrants face a significant earnings gap relative to native‐born workers. One way for new immigrants to improve their relative labour market position upon arrival in a host country is to improve their educational credentials. According to signalling theory, a host‐country credential should provide employers with a proxy for true productivity on the job, leading to higher earnings. Using data from a Canadian longitudinal survey, we employ longitudinal growth‐curve techniques to estimate the effect of receiving a Canadian educational credential on the income growth of racial‐minority recent immigrants compared to native‐born Canadians. The results indicate that the earnings gap between recent immigrants and native‐born Canadians is significantly reduced with the attainment of a Canadian educational credential.     

Perceived Parental Relationships and Health‐Risk Behaviors in College‐Attending Emerging Adults

The present study investigated the association of perceived parenting with health‐risk behaviors in an ethnically diverse sample of 1,728 college‐attending emerging adults. Participants completed retrospective measures of perceived maternal and paternal nurturance, connection, psychological control, and disrespect and reported their frequency of binge drinking, illicit drug use, unsafe sexual behavior, and impaired driving. Multivariate Poisson regression analyses indicated that perceived paternal acceptance was associated inversely with 6 of the 12 health‐risk behaviors measured, whereas perceived mothering was related only to 2 of these health‐risk behaviors. These patterns were consistent across gender, ethnicity, and family structure.     

A Cross-National Analysis of Militarization and Well-Being Relationships in Developing Countries

We focus upon linkages between militarization and development in Third-World countries. The theoretical and empirical literature variously ascribes positive or negative developmental consequences to militarization. Part of this ambiguity results from an empirical focus solely on the impacts of national defense spending on growth in the gross national product. We expand our analysis to includethreecomponents of militarization (military regimes, participation in the military, and the importation of military hardware), as influences onthreeforms of national development (economic growth, accumulation of human capital, and growth in political rights). An important part of our analysis is the use of regression techniques that address the untoward consequences of a variety of regression problems, that are for the most part untreated in conventional analyses. We find with these techniques that militarization significantly impacts development in readily interpretable ways.     

Fitting E(max) models to clinical trial dose-response data

We consider fitting Emax models to the primary endpoint for a parallel group dose–response clinical trial. Such models can be difficult to fit using Maximum Likelihood if the data give little information about the maximum possible response. Consequently, we consider alternative models that can be derived as limiting cases, which can usually be fitted. Furthermore we propose two model selection procedures for choosing between the different models. These model selection procedures are compared with two model selection procedures which have previously been used. In a simulation study we find that the model selection procedure that performs best depends on the underlying true situation. One of the new model selection procedures gives what may be regarded as the most robust of the procedures.     

In Living Memory: The Demographic Dynamics of Event Recollection in a Stable Population*

We model a stable population that has experienced an important historical event and the declining proportion, as time passes, of the population that remembers that event. The proportion is determined by the demographic characteristics of the population, including its age distribution, the natural rate of growth, the underlying birth rate, the life table probabilities to which the population is subject, and the effects of immigration and emigration under alternative assumptions about the nature of the event. (We distinguish between “local” and “universal” events.) It is determined also by the choice of an age of awareness of children at the time the event occurred. We preface development of the model by noting examples of major events of the kind we have in mind and, after development, explore the model's sensitivity to different parameter specifications by experimental simulation. The output of each experiment is a sequence of “remembering” proportions at successive decade intervals and the corresponding mean ages of the “rememberers” in relation to the overall mean age of the population.